Returns

What a return is

Every planet goes round the zodiac at its own pace, and every so often comes back to the degree it held at the minute of a birth. For the Moon that happens monthly and for the Sun it is the birthday. For the slow planets it is rare enough to count in a life: Jupiter about every twelve years, Saturn about every twenty-nine and a half, Uranus once, at eighty-four, if at all. Halfway round, the planet stands opposite its place at the birth, and that is marked too.

Why a date can come three times

Seen from the Earth, a slow planet spends months of every year apparently going backwards. If it turns round near your degree it passes over it, goes back across it and passes it a third time, and that return is three dates rather than one. The drawing shows those as a bar and the list gives all of them. Averages are only averages: a Saturn return can fall anywhere from about twenty-seven to thirty, depending on where Saturn was in its uneven orbit when you were born.

How your dates are found

With birth details saved on this device, the page takes each body’s position at the birth and follows it forward for ninety years, checking its place every few days, three for Jupiter, five for Saturn and ten for Uranus, and closing in on each crossing of the birth degree, or of the point opposite, until it has the minute. Crossings less than about thirteen months apart count as one return with several passes. The nodes are the mean nodes, which move backwards at a steady rate and so cross each point once. None of these bodies moves far in a day, so a missing birth time hardly changes the dates. Without any birth details the drawing shows the typical ages instead.

A worked example

Someone born at noon, universal time, on 1 January 1990 had Saturn at 15°39′ Capricorn. Saturn reached that degree on 7 February 2019, crossed back over it while retrograde on 31 July 2019 and passed it for the last time on 4 November 2019, all at twenty-nine, so the list shows one Saturn return with three dates and the drawing shows it as a bar. Their Jupiter, at 5°08′ Cancer, came back in a single pass each time: in August 2001, July 2013 and July 2025, at eleven, twenty-three and thirty-five. Their second Saturn return, again in three passes, falls in 2048, at fifty-eight.

Returns and the other cycles

The exact crossings are only part of how the word is used. Many astrologers speak of a Saturn return as the whole two and a half years or so Saturn spends in its birth sign, so a date here can look early or late against a looser description. The Moon’s and the Sun’s returns come too often to draw on a lifeline and have pages of their own, the lunar return and the solar return. Every exact contact the planets make with a chart over three months is listed under transits, and what each planet stands for is under the planets. Only returns and oppositions are marked here, not the squares between them.

What people make of them

The Saturn return, the first one especially, is the best known: astrology treats the late twenties as a time of taking stock of what has been built and what was only borrowed. Jupiter returns are read as fresh starts on a twelve-year rhythm, and the Uranus opposition falls in the early forties, which astrologers link with what is now called a midlife reckoning. These are ways people have organised looking back and looking ahead. None of them is a forecast, and this page does not say what any of these years will hold.

Everything is worked out on this device from the birth details entered on the front page. Nothing is sent anywhere.