I often enter bookshops and the other day I read a few pages of the book by Ginny Chiara Viola, "Il nuovo oroscopo personale 2020" ("The new personal horoscope 2020"). Ginny dedicates one page to the solar return and if I can remember well she says she's suspicious of astrologers who attach too much importance to this astrological technique. She also admits she is receiving many inquiries about what this solar return is and how it works, surely a sign of the increasing demand of information on the side of the public.
Let's begin from the basics, what is a solar return? My teacher Ciro Discepolo defines it like this in his "Nuova Guida all'Astrologia" ("New Guide to Astrology") (Edizioni Ricerca '90, Napoli, 2014) book. "It's the horoscope that is built for the moment of the birthday, that is to say, it's the photography of the sky at the moment in which the Sun passes through its exact natal longitude". When we talk about Solar Return (SR, hereinafter) we are therefore making reference to a horoscope, to a real birth chart of the examined person, as if the person itself were "re-born" at each one of their birthday.
Let's then try to understand the function of this special horoscope. As Discepolo also puts it in the already mentioned book: "This horoscope is really useful for giving specific indications that go from birthday to birthday". The astrological houses of this "special birth chart" or "SR chart", occupied by the different planets, are particularly suitable for the interpretation on the side of the astrologer, who will deal with unveiling the symbology that the traditional astrological knowledge has been transmitting to us.
In another work of his wide bibliography, Ciro Discepolo even advocates the fact that the moment of the annual return of the Sun at its exact position, expressed in grades, minutes and seconds, that it occupied at the moment of the birth of a person, shall be considered a paramount event in "determining" (and I'm now using this term with a lot of prudence) the circumstances that have to do with the person itself from one birthday to the next one; and he advocated that this event is so much crucial as to make the so-called "transits" (the transitions of the various planets forming some aspects with the various points of one's birth chart) irrelevant.
The reason why the SR is so important is explained in an evocative way in this video (Transcription* for non-Italian speakers is provided hereby under the article).
The school of master Ciro Discepolo is that of the "Active Astrology", a school that teaches to use the astrological knowledge in a practical, pragmatic way, as a concrete help for the person who is calling an astrologer.
Thanks to the so-called "Targeted Solar Return", that is to say, targeted to a certain place of the Planet Earth that can be different from one's natal birth place, we are capable of determining and recognizing in advance the circumstances that will affect the person year by year according to a set of well-defined rules.
Personally this is the sixth year I've been relocating myself on my birthday (November 3rd, 1985, hour: 10.25 AM, natal birth place: Bologna, Italy) and I also consider this technique excellent from the predictive point of view.
We'll have an opportunity to talk about this again in the future and for now may you all have some very nice Holidays! 2020 is coming, a rather complicated year from the astrological point of view, therefore the protection of a good targeted solar return is preferrable now more than ever, and most of all for the incoming years.
See you soon, Guido
*"Taken from the Rai Educational 'GAP' TV programme of April 16th, 2004 named 'Teenagers and Astrology' in which Ciro Discepolo, journalist, astrologer and writer was the sole host.
Interviewer: As an astrologer you have been dealing for long with 'solar returns' and precisely, with the 'targeted solar returns', in other words, you advocate that if a person spends the day of their birthday under a sky which is more favourable to them with respect to the sky under which they are currently living, this is going to bring extremely positive consequences, incredibly - you are not using this term by chance - positive. Can you explain to us what this is all about?
Ciro Discepolo: Astrology theorises that when a person is born, an imprinting (let's say 'imprinting', although this term is worth a much wider explanation) is given, and this imprinting distinguishes the person, which is related to the instant and place in which the person is born and which forms a relationship with the celestial bodies of our solar system. Now, this imprinting is not the only one we receive as we are born but imprintings are cyclic, as biorhytms have demonstrated. There is the circadian biorhythm of around one day because it takes one day to the Earth to turn around on itself. There is a 29 days rhythm, because it takes 29 days to the Moon to revolve around the Earth and you women have the most blatant demonstration of that. But the most important cycle, in my opinion, is that of the Earth to which it takes one year to revolve around the Sun. Do we want any evidence? Animals always migrate in the same period, animals always get in heat in the same period, animals always emerge from hibernation in the same period, trees will always bear fruit in the same period; therefore, the cherry-tree on May 15th, whether the weather is fine or bad, is giving cherries. And we too, as in a sine curve (I don't know if you can see that), have a cycle of 365 days and so we are born here (the astrologer indicates the starting point of the sine curve) and in 365 days one cycle comes to an end and another one begins. In that precise instant - which is a special moment - if we find ourselves not under the sky of Rome but under that of Paris or New York, we are going to receive a different imprinting that - for those who believe in astrology - will provide us with a year which will be different from that we would have lived under the sky of our home place.".