Lunar Return Chart: Your Month Ahead

The Moon laps the zodiac in about 27.3 days, faster than anything else in the chart. Each time it reaches the degree it held at your birth, a new lunar return begins, and astrologers treat that as the start of a fresh emotional cycle.

The calculator finds the next such moment and draws the chart for it, shown in the wheel above.

Look first at the house the return Moon lands in. That is where your feelings will be busiest this month: home, work, money, a relationship. Then check the return Ascendant for the general tone.

The return Sun, Venus and Mars fill in the rest: where your energy goes, what you want, and where things get scratchy.

With a return every 27.3 days or so, you get thirteen in most years. That is why each one is read as a short forecast.

The date slips about three days earlier each calendar month, so the calculator works out the next one to the minute from today’s date.

The solar return comes once a year, around your birthday, and sets the theme for twelve months. The lunar return is the monthly version and sets the mood for four weeks.

Read the solar return for the year and the lunar returns for the months inside it.

A lunar return works best when you read it twice and write your observations down instead of trusting memory. At the start of the month, note two things: which house the Moon falls in and what the Ascendant of the return chart is. Then look again four weeks later and see what the month actually turned out to be about. After three or four cycles you will know whether this tool describes anything for you, which is a more honest standard than any interpretation offered in advance.

Since the cycle is a little shorter than a calendar month, return dates walk backward through the calendar, and now and then a month gets two.

Read alongside the solar return, it fills in a gap. The solar return describes the year; the lunar return describes how each month within that year is colored. When the two point at the same house, that month is usually where the year's theme actually becomes visible.

A lunar return is cast for a place as well as a moment, and the choice of place changes the houses and the Ascendant while leaving every planetary position identical. That makes it the one decision that materially changes the reading, and there is no universal agreement about it.

The two common conventions are the birthplace and the place you are actually living when the return occurs. The argument for the birthplace is consistency: the chart stays comparable year to year. The argument for the current location is that the houses describe your circumstances, and your circumstances are where you are. Sigastra computes from the details you enter, so you can cast it both ways and compare.

Some people plan a weekend away just to get a nicer return Ascendant. It is a popular trick, but there is little in the tradition to back it up; the chart for where you actually are is the one that describes your month.

There is one more limit worth being explicit about, because it decides whether this tool is worth your time at all. A lunar return chart is cast to the exact minute the Moon reaches its natal degree, and that moment depends on the natal degree being right, which depends on your birth time. The Moon covers about thirteen degrees a day, so an hour of uncertainty moves your natal Moon by roughly half a degree and moves the return moment by about an hour. For the sign and house of the return Moon the error rarely matters; for the return Ascendant, which shifts a full degree every four minutes, it is not.