Your lunar returns

What a lunar return is

The Moon goes once round the zodiac in about twenty-seven days and seven hours, measured against the equinox, so it comes back to any given degree thirteen times a year, sometimes fourteen. The gap is not quite the same each time: the Moon’s orbit is an ellipse and the Moon runs faster near the Earth, so one return can come several hours earlier or later than the average would say. A lunar return is the chart for the moment it arrives, and practitioners use it the way a solar return is used for a year, as a picture of the month ahead of it.

How it is worked out on this page

The Moon’s birth degree comes from the same chart as everywhere else on the site. From the chosen date the page takes the Moon’s position every six hours, and where it passes that degree it halves the interval until it is down to a second. Each chart is cast for that minute at the place you give, which is why the rising sign and the houses change with the place while the planets do not. Times are given by the clock of that place when its time zone is known. Without a birth time the Moon’s own degree is uncertain by up to six degrees either way, and the returns move with it by up to half a day.

Using the page, step by step

The page starts from the birth details already saved on this device; without them it asks for them and works nothing out. Choose the date to start from, which is today unless you change it, and the place the charts are cast for. The strip then lists the next thirteen returns, each with its date, its time and the glyph of the sign rising at that moment. Choose one and its chart opens below, drawn with the same wheel as the birth chart, with three readings under it: the rising sign, the house the Moon falls in, and any planet within five degrees of one of the four angles.

How it is read

The sign rising at the return, the house the Moon falls in and any planet close to one of the four angles are the parts the practice looks at first, as a description of what a month is about. That is the tradition, described here in its own words. The page does not say what any month will bring, and predicts nothing.

A worked example

Say the Moon was at 8° Cancer at birth. Every return in the strip is a moment when the Moon is back at 8° Cancer, so in every return chart the Moon holds the same degree. What changes is everything around it. The Sun has moved on about 27° since the last return and the other planets by their own amounts, and because the Earth turns once a day, a return that arrives in the evening puts a different sign on the horizon from one that arrives in the morning. If one month’s chart has Libra rising, the Moon at 8° Cancer sits near the top of it, close to the midheaven; if the next has Aries rising, the same Moon sits near the bottom. The practice reads a Moon near the midheaven as a month turned towards public and working life, and one near the lowest point as a month turned towards home.

Common confusions

A lunar return is not the new moon. The new moon is the Moon meeting the Sun, about every twenty-nine and a half days and at the same instant for everyone; a lunar return is the Moon meeting its own birth degree, about every twenty-seven days, and it falls on a different day for each person. The phases are on the Moon page and in the Moon calendar. The yearly counterpart, the chart for the Sun’s return to its birth degree, is the solar return, and the slow planets’ returns over a life are under returns.

Practitioners also differ over where to cast a return: at the birthplace, or wherever the person is at the time. The planets’ signs and degrees are the same either way; only the rising sign and the houses change, which is why the place can be chosen above.