13 Yearly Lunar Returns
In the Mystically in Season system, your lunar year starts when your lunar return happens during the season the Sun is in your native lunar sign, giving the lunar return chart a new moon phase.
Your lunar return chart can show you a lot about the mood permeating your life, the things you are reflecting on, memories that are arising, and a general sense of responsiveness/reactiveness flowing out of you.
If the solar return journey holds keys to how your awareness is developing, and the Earth return journey is about an experiential journey you take over your Earth year, the lunar return journey encompasses 13 returns in a Sun/Earth year and contains all phases in reverse motion, from new back to new, over a year. While you may share the same Sun/Earth journey pattern as those of your same sign axis, what makes the lunar return journeys interesting is that they give your Sun/Earth journey a distinct emotional shade unique to you. You do not share the same moon sign, hence the same starting point of your 13 lunar journeys, as others in your Sun-Earth sign axis.
While the Sun-Earth journeys hold a Coming-of-Age quality to them, pushing our awareness and somatic knowings to develop, the 13 Moons journey is like going into our archives to process a memoir each year through the lens of our lunar sign, with the new moon lunar return holding a key to the theme of the year’s memoir. This helps us to reflect back on life at a time when we are more mature than we were during the theme/things we are reflecting on. It gives us a chance to process life with more empathy and find new understanding and depth in our experiences.
The Lunar Directions
In its normal transit, the moon moves in a counterclockwise direction around the zodiac and away from the Sun. Its phases move from new to waxing, to full, to waning, and back to new.
In our sequential lunar return charts (a chart for when the transiting moon returns to the exact degree of your natal moon), the phase of the moon will reverse, taking us into reflection and memory.
While it doesn’t move back a sign, the Sun will typically be one sign forward each lunar return, pushing the moon in the return chart a phase in reverse of where it last was, further in reverse of the Sun in a clockwise direction.
REverse Phases
Example: If you have a Gemini moon, at your lunar return during Gemini Season, your lunar return chart will give you a new moon quality to memory and mood. At your next lunar return, the Sun will have moved forward a sign, pushing your lunar phase in reverse in the next lunar return chart, bringing a different quality of reflection. On top of the phase moving in reverse, the sun sign of the new return will also hold the quality of light being reflected by the moon, tinging your mood and memories with an additional flavor.
Because the moon returns to the same degree about every 27.3 days, we typically have 13 lunar returns in a year, with one solar season (which shifts from year to year) containing two lunar returns.
Braiding Sun-Earth-Moon Journeys
While this may all feel confounding to hold at once — Sun, Earth, and Lunar journeys happening simultaneously — there is a great literary example of how this can all weave together, eloquently. Not a memoir on its own (moon), a journey of aspiration on its own (Sun), or an experiential journey on its own (Earth), but all three beautifully layered together. And honestly, the example I’m pulling from should be a new standard story structure, as its weaving of reflection into a forward-moving arc is what we need more of in our time. It’s something that helps us to digest our past and find more understanding as we progress.
In An Odyssey, A Father, a Son, and An Epic, Daniel Mendelsohn writes about a class he is teaching at a university on The Odyssey (being a professor, aspiring to illuminate and form young minds - the Sun journey’s growth of awareness). The hitch is that his aging and impossibly critical father asks to audit the class for one semester. Getting him to and from class is a journey of its own, as is his witnessing of how the young students bond with his father more easily than he ever has. It naturally brings a lot of reflection and digestion as he sees his father in a new light (a memoir element woven in - processing the past from a more mature place with the Lunar Journey). This course also inspires Daniel to take his father on a cruise hosted by the university that retraces the steps of The Odyssey. This holds its own experiential journey (the Earth Journey) that continues to push at his memories and reflections. The three layers (class, the cruise, and memory) weave through each other masterfully with both forward new experiences and awareness and backward memories that bring deepened qualities of understanding.
While we may not all find such succinctly layered themes between our three luminary yearly journeys, this piece of literature is a great model for how you can try to hold the braiding of journeys. With a little help from Mystically in Season (and maybe a chart reading or two from me over the year), you can start to see the narrative threads that are weaving together. Minimally, you can always return to this website at any moment to help orient where you might be in any of the layered luminary stories unfolding in your life - a little check-in to place your experiences into a bigger frame that helps provide perspective.
Find Your Moon sign below
If you don’t know your moon sign, there are plenty of free natal chart generators with a quick online search. Using the 13 Moons Journey requires a little bit of keeping up with the moon. You don’t need to have a lunar return chart to get the most out of it (although I can help you with that if you want to dive deeper - see chart reading option - coming soon), but you will need to keep track of when the transiting moon has moved through your natal moon sign, during a season, to keep track of when your journey changes phases.
