Anchoring of the thread The anchoring of the thread was the event in which the Great Houses created history with themselves at the centre and accidentally unleashed the Yssgaroth . ( PROSE : " The Book of the War " ) The Seventh Doctor described this as Rassilon ' s decision to make the universe rational . ( PROSE : " So Vile a Sin " ) Motivation . Before the anchoring of the thread , the universe was unstructured and chaotic . ( PROSE : " The Book of the War " ) There were no laws of physics , only infinite possibility . ( PROSE : " Christmas on a Rational Planet " ) However , the Great Houses predicted that , as new cultures emerged and began to impose their own understandings and versions of meaning onto the continuum , a definite framework would emerge . Since these other species could be completely different to the Houses , their assembled history might be inhospitable to the Houses ' civilization ; indeed , some members of the Houses had already glimpsed unclassifiable events in the formative future . The earliest time technologies were developed and used to avert such events . ( PROSE : " The Book of the War " ) The time before the laying of the thread was the Dvapara Yuga . During this time , human ity had divine powers : for instance , Arjuna had one thousand arms and was ardently skilled at compressing time , while Nakula and Sahadeva led armies of imaginary hybrid animals made of broken time . ( PROSE : " Dharmayuddha " ) The Anchoring . To permanently fix this issue , Rassilon decided to make the universe rational . ( PROSE : " So Vile a Sin " ) To achieve this , the Houses created a causal structure for the future , called the Spiral Politic . The machinery needed to build it was bigger than anything else ever built on the Homeworld . Exploratory proto - timeship s attached themselves to strategic points in the future to anchor in place the structure of history being imposed from the Homeworld . At the ceremonial locking - in of the mechanisms , elite representatives of the six ruling Houses bonded their Houses at the centre of the machine , stitching the Houses ' biologies into the universe at a fundamental level . ( PROSE : " The Book of the War " ) The Eye of Harmony played an important role as the " hitching post of chronology " . ( AUDIO : " Neverland " ) According to some obscure legends , the Great Houses preserved a small sliver of irrational reality , the 2nd Second , so that they could reverse the anchoring if it did not go as planned . ( PROSE : " Weapons Grade Snake Oil " ) The gods ' plan for ending the Dvapara Yuga and beginning the Kaliyuga involved a war between the Pandava s and the Kaurava s ; specifically , it required Krishna to be killed by an archer . King Jarasandha foresaw this and tried to ensure Krishna would die of old age , but the gods intervened and history was successfully rewritten . ( PROSE : " Dharmayuddha " ) After the anchoring , the Homeworld was set apart from the rest of the universe as an observer and definer of the Spiral Politic . The Houses ' protocols , such as linearity , became laws of physics itself . ( PROSE : " The Book of the War " ) The universe ' s infinite possibility was limited , the Watchmaker s instead defining what was rational . This caused whole civilisations to disappear , ( PROSE : " Christmas on a Rational Planet " ) as Rassilon now had the power to choose what species developed ; he exercised this in his imprisonment of the Divergence , who he saw as a possible rival to the Time Lords . ( AUDIO : " Zagreus " ) The imposition of the Web of Time also drove the children of Pythia to powerlessness . ( PROSE : " " , " The Pit " , " Christmas on a Rational Planet " ) However , in doing this , the Watchmakers surrendered the creative and changeable parts of their souls , which collected into a cloud in Gallifrey ' s atmosphere before being banished into the Time Vortex by the first King of the Majestic Clockwork . ( PROSE : " Christmas on a Rational Planet " ) At the same time , ( PROSE : " The Book of the War " ) the Time Lords lost their fertility , prompting the creation of the Loom s and the Great House s of Gallifrey to stabilize the population . ( PROSE : " " ) As a result , the Homeworld began ten million years of total cultural stasis . ( PROSE : " Unnatural History " , " The Book of the War " ) In exchange , they were indestructible , with their meta - structure of history preventing the creation of rival biological forms . ( PROSE : " The Book of the War " ) Immediate effects . In the wake of the anchoring , multiple parties fled the Homeworld in the First Diaspora . These included the Eremite s ( PROSE : " The Book of the War " ) and the children of Pythia . ( PROSE : " Christmas on a Rational Planet " ) Many notable Great House s from before the anchoring , like Catherion and Ixion , went into a slow decay that would last millions of years . On the day of the anchoring , the Yssgaroth escaped into the universe , destroying the site of the machinery and creating the caldera . ( PROSE : " The Book of the War " ) This began the Eternal War . ( PROSE : " The Pit " )