← Encyclopedia of Astrology · lesson 208/235
Lunar return
What it is
The Moon circles the zodiac in about 27 days and 8 hours. Each time it comes back to the exact degree it held at birth, an astrologer can cast a chart for that moment: a lunar return. It works like a solar return on a faster clock — a new chart with its own Ascendant, houses and planets — read for the month that runs until the next return. There are thirteen of them in most years.
A lunar return is not the same thing as a New Moon. A New Moon is the Sun and Moon meeting, the same moment for everyone; a lunar return is the Moon coming home to your Moon, a moment that belongs to one chart.
How it is worked out
Find the instant the Moon's longitude equals its natal longitude, then cast the chart for that instant and a place. The same two choices that divide solar-return practice apply here:
- Place. Some use the birthplace; many cast the return for where the person is at the time. Because the Moon moves fast, the return's Ascendant moves fast too — the whole house frame of the month depends on getting the moment and the place right.
- Zodiac. Most use the tropical zodiac. Some cast a precessed or sidereal return, so that the Moon returns to the same place among the fixed stars; the difference grows slowly with age.
How it is read
The lunar return is read for a short span and a personal, emotional register — the Moon's own territory of mood, need, home and the body's rhythms.
- The house the Moon falls in within the return chart is read as where the month's attention and feelings tend to gather.
- The return's Ascendant and any planets on its angles set the month's tone.
- Aspects to the return Moon show what supports or unsettles it.
- The return against the birth chart shows which natal themes the month touches.
Because each return covers only a few weeks, astrologers usually treat it as a fine-grained layer under the longer techniques: the solar return or annual profection for the year, transits and progressions for the larger movements, and the lunar return for the texture of the month. Volguine noted that the monthly charts often echo the themes already shown by the slower methods, which is the usual way they are used — as confirmation and timing within a year, not as a separate oracle.
Read as inclination, a lunar return describes a month's emotional weather, not what will happen in it.
In the tradition
Monthly revolutions appear in medieval and Renaissance practice as a subdivision of the annual revolution, but the lunar return as a stand-alone chart is largely a twentieth-century development, popular because it gives quick, checkable feedback month by month. The broader idea — a planet's return to its natal place marking a fresh turn of its cycle — is the same one behind the Saturn return.
In a reading here
A lunar return can be requested as a reading near a chosen date: the return nearest that date is found and cast, and, like a solar return, it may be cast for where the person will actually be rather than for the birthplace.