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
November 22 to December 21. Mutable fire. Ruled by Jupiter. 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 | 9th house |
| Moon | 9th house |
| Mercury | 9th house |
| Venus | 7th house |
| Mars | 6th house |
| Jupiter | 6th house |
| Saturn | 1st house |
| Uranus | 3rd house |
| Neptune | 1st house |
| Pluto | 11th 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 Mars | sextile | Return Mars | 0.15° |
| Natal Mars | square | Return Pluto | 0.51° |
| Natal Saturn | sextile | Return Jupiter | 0.60° |
| Natal Venus | sextile | Return Mars | 0.79° |
| Natal Neptune | sextile | Return Saturn | 0.91° |
| Natal Moon | sextile | Return Moon | 1.28° |
| Natal Venus | square | Return Pluto | 1.45° |
| Natal Pluto | conjunction | Return Sun | 1.51° |
| Natal Uranus | opposition | Return Jupiter | 1.59° |
| Natal Mars | conjunction | Return Venus | 1.77° |
| Natal Moon | conjunction | Return Pluto | 1.87° |
| Natal Mercury | trine | Return Jupiter | 1.98° |
| Natal Jupiter | trine | Return Sun | 2.20° |
| Natal Moon | sextile | Return Saturn | 2.36° |
| Natal Moon | trine | Return Uranus | 2.40° |
| Natal Mercury | square | Return Neptune | 2.66° |
| Natal Venus | conjunction | Return Venus | 2.71° |
| Natal Moon | sextile | Return Mercury | 3.11° |
| Natal Moon | square | Return Venus | 3.12° |
| Natal Mercury | sextile | Return Venus | 3.49° |
| Natal Moon | sextile | Return Neptune | 3.96° |
| Natal Neptune | conjunction | Return Pluto | 5.13° |