← Encyclopedia of Astrology · lesson 207/235
Solar return
What it is
Once a year the Sun comes back to the exact degree and minute it held at birth. A solar return is a complete new chart cast for that moment — its own Ascendant, Midheaven, houses and planets — and it is read as a picture of the year that runs from that return to the next. Older writers call it the solar revolution, or the revolution of the years of a nativity.
Because the calendar year and the Sun's year do not line up perfectly, the return can fall on the birthday itself or a day either side, and at a different clock time each year. That is why the chart is cast from the Sun's position, not from the date.
How it is worked out
The method is simple to state: find the instant the Sun's longitude equals its natal longitude, then cast a chart for that instant at a place. Two choices divide astrologers.
- Which place. Some cast the return for the birthplace every year. Many, following Morin and later Volguine, cast it for where the person actually is at the moment of the return — a relocated return. Because the angles and house cusps change with the place, the two charts can look quite different. Some people even travel for their birthday to choose their return; whether that changes anything is debated.
- Which zodiac. Most Western astrologers use the tropical zodiac. A minority "precess" the return, adding the small shift of the equinoxes since birth so that the Sun returns to the same place among the stars; this moves the moment by roughly a day for every seventy years of life. Users of the sidereal zodiac take that view as standard.
How it is read
A solar return is read as a one-year overlay on the birth chart, not as a new personality. The usual order of attention:
- The house the Sun falls in within the return chart — read as the area of life the year leans toward: the tenth house for work and standing, the fourth for home and family, the seventh for partnership.
- The return's Ascendant and its ruler — the tone of the year and the planet that carries it.
- Planets on the angles of the return, and close aspects to the return Sun — the themes that stand out.
- The return against the natal chart — which natal planets and houses the return's angles and planets touch, showing which of the person's own themes the year switches on.
Traditional practice, from Abu Ma'shar onward, read the solar return together with the annual profection and its Lord of the Year, so that the return described how the year looks and the profection which part of the chart was in charge. Modern practice often pairs it instead with transits and secondary progressions.
Like every forecasting chart, a solar return is read as inclination and emphasis — the weather of a year, not a script of events.
In the tradition
Persian and Arabic astrologers developed the return of the nativity into a full technique, and it passed into Latin and Renaissance practice; Morin devoted a whole book of his Astrologia Gallica to it. Twentieth-century writers such as Volguine revived it, and it is now one of the most widely used forecasting methods. The same idea applied to the Moon gives the lunar return, and applied to a slow planet's own cycle, the Saturn return.
In a reading here
A solar return can be requested as a reading for a chosen year, and it can be cast for where the person will actually be at the time rather than the birthplace; the reading then says plainly that it is a relocated return. The return chart is drawn with the same wheel as a birth chart.