A past return

Your Solar Return

The annual renewal of vitality, purpose, and direction.

Exact on August 13, 2017.

At age 81.0.

The cycle it opened ran about 12 months, from August 13, 2017 until the next Solar Return on August 14, 2018.

This return marked a doorway into a new relationship with your own resources, not just money, but what you value, what you own, what you believe you’re worth. The returning Sun settling into your 2nd house meant the year ahead would ask you to examine and often rebuild this foundation.

The Rising of this return chart was Cancer, which set a protective, inward tone for the whole cycle. You were learning to guard what mattered to you, to ask what you truly needed before giving outward. The return Moon in Taurus, sitting in your 11th house of friendships and long-term hopes, suggested this wasn’t solitary work, your emotional weather that year was shaped by people around you, and by what kind of future you wanted to build with them. There was steadiness in that Taurus Moon, but also a quiet stubbornness about what you would and wouldn’t accept from your circles.

What gave this period real weight was the wider sky. Transiting Pluto was in exact harmony with both your natal Midheaven and Imum Coeli, your entire axis of home and public standing was undergoing profound, invisible transformation. At the same time, Saturn was pressing directly on itself while supporting your Sun. This was a Saturn Return or near-return energy: a reckoning with structure, limits, and what you’d actually built. The message was clear: grow up about your resources. Make real choices. Stop drifting.

This was likely a time of necessary tightening, of saying no to what didn’t serve you, of learning that self-respect and self-preservation weren’t selfish. The lessons from that year probably still anchor how you move through value and belonging now.

About The Solar Return

Your Solar Return marks the moment the transiting Sun returns to its exact natal position, your astrological birthday. Astrologers cast a fresh chart for that moment, relocated to wherever you'll spend the year ahead, to read the themes of the coming twelve months. Each Solar Return chart functions as a year-in-miniature forecast: a new rising sign, new planetary placements, new aspects, different territory than the year before. Once a year, every year.

The Return Chart, At A Glance

This is the chart of the return itself: the whole sky at the moment your Sun came back to the spot it held at birth. It describes the cycle that opens, not you as a person, and the birth chart underneath it does not change. That cycle runs from August 13, 2017 to August 14, 2018, about 12 months.

Cast for the return moment, relocated to El Paso.

Rising: Capricorn Sets the tone of the whole cycle: how this stretch of time tends to go about things. In any chart, Rising is your outward manner and first impression; the mask and lens through which you meet the world; Capricorn is disciplined, responsible, ambitious; the 1st house is self, appearance, first impressions.
The returning Sun: 8th house intimacy, transformation, shared resources The part of life this whole cycle works through, where Sun does its work for the next round. In any chart, Sun is core identity, will, vitality, the drive to express your essence; Leo is confident, generous, creative.
Moon: Taurus · 5th house The emotional weather of the cycle: what it will tend to feel like from the inside. In any chart, Moon is emotional needs, instinctual responses, habits, your feeling of safety; Taurus is reliable, patient, practical; the 5th house is creativity, romance, children.
Midheaven: Libra What the cycle pushes forward in public: the part other people will see. In any chart, Midheaven is your public reputation, career calling, and the face you show to authority and the world at large; Libra is diplomatic, charming, fair-minded; the 10th house is career, reputation, authority.
On the angles: Jupiter on the Midheaven The loudest placements in the chart: a body sitting on one of its four corners shapes the cycle more than its position alone would suggest.

How this sits with your own chart. A return chart is laid over a birth chart, never swapped for it. Your Sun is still in Leo, exactly where it was at birth, and that is what makes this a return at all. What is new is the frame around it: cast for this moment, that same Sun falls in the 8th house (intimacy, transformation, shared resources), so that is the part of life this cycle asks about. Everything in your birth chart stays as it is; this chart only says what the cycle ahead does with it.

The Wider Sky Then

The slow, life-shaping transits active at this return, the backdrop the reading reads against.

transiting Pluto ℞ trine your natal Midheaven · 0.0° Pluto strips a thing back to what it really is, in easy flow, so it helps more than it demands, landing on your Midheaven. Midheaven is your public reputation, career calling, and the face you show to authority and the world at large and sits in your 10th house, Career, Reputation, Authority. Pluto, the one making the contact, is power, purification, shadow work, deep cycles of ending and renewal.
transiting Pluto ℞ sextile your natal Imum Coeli · 0.0° Pluto strips a thing back to what it really is, offering an opening, if it gets taken, landing on your Imum Coeli. Imum Coeli is your private foundation, ancestral roots, and the innermost sense of where you belong and sits in your 4th house, Home, Family, Roots. Pluto, the one making the contact, is power, purification, shadow work, deep cycles of ending and renewal.
transiting Saturn ℞ trine your natal Sun · 0.1° Saturn tightens, tests, and asks what is built to last, in easy flow, so it helps more than it demands, landing on your Sun. Sun is core identity, will, vitality, the drive to express your essence and sits in your 9th house, Philosophy, Higher Education, Travel. Saturn, the one making the contact, is structure, discipline, boundaries, lessons that mature over time.
transiting Saturn ℞ square your natal Saturn · 0.1° Saturn tightens, tests, and asks what is built to last, at friction, the kind that forces a change rather than inviting one, landing on your Saturn. Saturn is structure, discipline, boundaries, lessons that mature over time and sits in your 4th house, Home, Family, Roots. Saturn, the one making the contact, is structure, discipline, boundaries, lessons that mature over time.