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
October 23 to November 21. Fixed water. Ruled by Pluto. Co-ruled traditionally by Mars. It sets the tone the year is met through.
Daily work. The body's care. Service. The craft of the ordinary day. 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 | 9th house |
| Moon | 5th house |
| Mercury | 8th house |
| Venus | 9th house |
| Mars | 8th house |
| Jupiter | 10th house |
| Saturn | 7th house |
| Uranus | 9th house |
| Neptune | 7th house |
| Pluto | 5th 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 Neptune | square | Return Saturn | 0.04° |
| Natal Pluto | opposition | Return Mercury | 1.07° |
| Natal Pluto | square | Return Moon | 1.19° |
| Natal Mars | sextile | Return Mars | 1.25° |
| Natal Moon | trine | Return Venus | 1.41° |
| Natal Saturn | square | Return Neptune | 1.57° |
| Natal Sun | sextile | Return Jupiter | 1.60° |
| Natal Mercury | trine | Return Pluto | 1.63° |
| Natal Moon | square | Return Sun | 1.83° |
| Natal Jupiter | conjunction | Return Mercury | 2.04° |
| Natal Neptune | trine | Return Mercury | 2.06° |
| Natal Mercury | trine | Return Moon | 2.65° |
| Natal Mars | square | Return Sun | 2.81° |
| Natal Mercury | sextile | Return Saturn | 2.90° |
| Natal Uranus | square | Return Neptune | 2.93° |
| Natal Mars | trine | Return Venus | 3.23° |
| Natal Mercury | sextile | Return Neptune | 3.63° |
| Natal Jupiter | square | Return Moon | 4.31° |
| Natal Jupiter | conjunction | Return Sun | 4.41° |
| Natal Moon | square | Return Mercury | 4.62° |