Solar Return · year chart · Solar Arc · directions
How the Solar Return works
Once a year the Sun returns to its natal degree, near your birthday. Asteria casts a chart for that exact moment and layers it over your natal wheel.
The return Ascendant is how you meet the year: the face, the body-tone, the way the chapter greets you. The return Sun's house is where vitality and focus pool for twelve months. The return Moon is the emotional current underneath those two.
The house-overlay table shows which natal houses this year's return planets activate. The return-to-natal aspects name which birth stories the year reopens, tightest first.
Solar Return is the weather of the year. Solar Arc (the other tab on this hub) is the architecture of turning-points. They share a word and almost nothing else.
The year's chart
August 23 to September 22. Mutable earth. Ruled by Mercury. It sets the tone the year is met through.
The hidden. The unconscious. The retreat. The dissolution. The behind-the-scenes life. This is where the year's vitality and focus concentrate.
The emotional current of the year: what will need tending and where the feeling-life is drawn.
House overlay
Where each return planet falls in your natal houses: the areas of life this year's chart switches on.
| Return planet | Lands in natal |
|---|---|
| Sun | 8th house |
| Moon | 11th house |
| Mercury | 7th house |
| Venus | 9th house |
| Mars | 6th house |
| Jupiter | 7th house |
| Saturn | 3rd house |
| Uranus | 5th house |
| Neptune | 3rd house |
| Pluto | 1st house |
Return-to-natal aspects
Every aspect the return chart makes back to your birth chart, tightest first.
| Natal | Aspect | Return | Orb |
|---|---|---|---|
| Natal Sun | conjunction | Return Sun | 0.00° |
| Natal Pluto | trine | Return Uranus | 0.28° |
| Natal Saturn | square | Return Saturn | 0.35° |
| Natal Pluto | square | Return Mars | 0.60° |
| Natal Sun | square | Return Moon | 1.17° |
| Natal Pluto | opposition | Return Neptune | 1.29° |
| Natal Moon | square | Return Mars | 1.30° |
| Natal Neptune | opposition | Return Uranus | 1.35° |
| Natal Venus | sextile | Return Uranus | 1.41° |
| Natal Pluto | trine | Return Pluto | 1.48° |
| Natal Saturn | square | Return Venus | 1.60° |
| Natal Moon | trine | Return Uranus | 1.62° |
| Natal Mercury | square | Return Moon | 2.13° |
| Natal Uranus | sextile | Return Sun | 2.53° |
| Natal Neptune | trine | Return Neptune | 2.91° |
| Natal Venus | trine | Return Neptune | 2.97° |
| Natal Neptune | sextile | Return Pluto | 3.10° |
| Natal Venus | opposition | Return Pluto | 3.16° |
| Natal Moon | opposition | Return Neptune | 3.19° |
| Natal Mercury | conjunction | Return Sun | 3.29° |
| Natal Moon | trine | Return Pluto | 3.38° |
| Natal Venus | conjunction | Return Jupiter | 4.28° |
| Natal Neptune | trine | Return Jupiter | 4.34° |
| Natal Mercury | square | Return Uranus | 4.97° |
| Natal Moon | conjunction | Return Venus | 5.88° |