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 | 10th house |
| Mercury | 8th house |
| Venus | 9th house |
| Mars | 7th house |
| Jupiter | 8th 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 Venus | conjunction | Return Mercury | 0.03° |
| Natal Mars | sextile | Return Sun | 0.84° |
| Natal Venus | square | Return Moon | 1.15° |
| Natal Mercury | sextile | Return Moon | 1.47° |
| Natal Saturn | sextile | Return Jupiter | 1.85° |
| Natal Pluto | trine | Return Pluto | 2.57° |
| Natal Pluto | sextile | Return Neptune | 2.76° |
| Natal Saturn | trine | Return Venus | 2.96° |
| Natal Venus | trine | Return Saturn | 3.23° |
| Natal Neptune | square | Return Mercury | 3.60° |
| Natal Saturn | conjunction | Return Uranus | 3.64° |
| Natal Pluto | conjunction | Return Uranus | 4.29° |
| Natal Neptune | opposition | Return Moon | 4.72° |
| Natal Pluto | square | Return Sun | 4.92° |
| Natal Moon | trine | Return Moon | 4.97° |