The yearly horoscope

The yearly horoscope — technically the solar return or the return of the Sun — is the chart for the moment at which the Sun comes back exactly to the position it held at birth. This happens once a year, near the birthday, but seldom on it.

What is calculated

The moment is an astronomical quantity and can be fixed to the minute. That presupposes an accurate time of birth: the Sun takes about 24 minutes to cover a single minute of arc, and an inaccurate birth time shifts the houses of the solar return by as much.

The place matters. The solar return is cast for the place where one is at the moment of the return — not necessarily for the place of birth. Tradition argues over this, and the argument itself is instructive: both sides agree that the place changes the result.

How it is read

The decisive rule is the one most often passed over: a solar return is never read on its own. It is a variation on the natal chart, not a chart in its own right.

In practice that means:

A brilliant solar return can deliver nothing that the natal chart does not lay down.
A difficult solar return weighs on what the natal chart has laid down — it invents no new themes.
What says most is where the two touch: a planet of the solar return on a sensitive point of the natal chart.

One then reads the ascendant of the solar return and its ruler, the houses into which the natal planets fall, and the angular placements. Whatever stands on an angle in a solar return acts — even without dignity.

Together with the other techniques

A year is traditionally read from several techniques at once: profection, which assigns the year a ruler, directions, the firdaria — and the solar return. The rule here is that nothing is reported which only a single technique shows.

That is demanding, and it rules out most of what appears as a forecast for the year.

What it is not

Not a calendar of events. A solar return describes the colouring of a year 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.

And it holds for one person. The yearly horoscope for a star sign, as it appears in newspapers, is something else entirely — it knows neither the time of birth nor the place, and cannot do what is described here.