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 | 12th house |
| Moon | 1st house |
| Mercury | 1st house |
| Venus | 2nd house |
| Mars | 10th house |
| Jupiter | 11th house |
| Saturn | 7th house |
| Uranus | 9th house |
| Neptune | 7th house |
| Pluto | 4th 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 Mercury | trine | Return Pluto | 0.23° |
| Natal Mercury | opposition | Return Neptune | 0.27° |
| Natal Mars | square | Return Mars | 0.28° |
| Natal Jupiter | conjunction | Return Moon | 0.45° |
| Natal Sun | sextile | Return Mars | 0.56° |
| Natal Uranus | square | Return Moon | 1.18° |
| Natal Mercury | conjunction | Return Mercury | 1.26° |
| Natal Neptune | square | Return Moon | 1.33° |
| Natal Jupiter | sextile | Return Jupiter | 1.36° |
| Natal Moon | trine | Return Saturn | 1.98° |
| Natal Neptune | trine | Return Sun | 2.06° |
| Natal Pluto | trine | Return Mars | 2.13° |
| Natal Uranus | trine | Return Sun | 2.20° |
| Natal Mercury | trine | Return Uranus | 2.61° |
| Natal Neptune | opposition | Return Mars | 2.62° |
| Natal Pluto | sextile | Return Sun | 2.69° |
| Natal Uranus | opposition | Return Mars | 2.76° |
| Natal Venus | sextile | Return Moon | 2.81° |
| Natal Jupiter | square | Return Mars | 3.49° |
| Natal Mars | conjunction | Return Moon | 3.67° |
| Natal Venus | conjunction | Return Jupiter | 3.71° |
| Natal Jupiter | opposition | Return Saturn | 4.68° |
| Natal Moon | conjunction | Return Jupiter | 5.29° |