Planetary returns

A return is the moment when a planet again reaches the exact longitude it held at birth. The chart for that moment describes the cycle that begins with it.

The cycles

The Moon — about every 27.3 days. The shortest cycle, and one seldom interpreted on its own in practice.
The Sun — yearly, close to the birthday. The solar return, and the most important return of all.
Mercury and Venus — roughly yearly, tied to the Sun.
Mars — about every two years.
Jupiter — about every twelve years. A cycle that coincides with the turn from one stage of life to the next.
Saturn — about every 29.5 years.

The Saturn return

It is the best known of them, and for an understandable reason: it falls around the ages of 29 and 58, two phases in which, in most lives, something is decided in any case.

Tradition reads Saturn as what limits, endures and carries. Its return is read accordingly as a time in which what holds becomes visible — ties, professions, plans. Not as a catastrophe, but as a test of what will bear weight.

Two reservations go with this. First, a return is not an event but a period of months. Second, its character depends on the condition of Saturn in the birth chart: a dignified Saturn in its own sect brings a very different return from a Saturn in fall.

How a return is interpreted

Always against the birth chart, never on its own. The questions are:

Which house of the birth chart does the returning planet touch?
The houses it rules there — those are the areas of life in question.
What stands on the angles in the chart of the return? Whatever stands there takes effect.
Do the other techniques agree — profection, directions, firdaria?

The last of these is the real rule: what only a single technique shows is not reported.

What a return is not

Not an appointment diary. It describes the colouring of a stretch of time and the areas in which something is moving. No date can be derived from it — and where one is named, it does not come from this technique.