Solunars by Aldebaran Sidereal Academy

I prepared the following summary for lectures in the late 1970s, about the same time I wrote Interpreting Solar Returns. It gives concise keys to the differentiated natures of a transiting vs. natal planet foreground in a solunar return. This summary also provides the basic "inside vs. outside" ideas for understanding how transit interpretations are derived. [2023 note: Now, years later, they have been gradually rewritten considerably.]

I might revise these a tiny bit now, but the core ideas are solid. These were written to be equally true whether a planet is foreground in a Solar Return or a Lunar Return. However, there is a distinction: A planet conjunct an angle of a Solar Return also has a quality of being conjunct Sun: interpretations in Interpreting Solar Returns were written with this in mind. Similarly, a planet conjunct an angle of a Lunar Return also has a quality of being conjunct Moon (which is how I would have written the different "angular planet" interpretations if I'd written the planned companion volume, Interpreting Lunar Returns). This principle is true for any type of planetary return; thus, the meanings below are essentially what they would be in planetary return chart except, e.g., a planet angular in a Mars Return would additionally act as if conjunct Mars.

Eshelman summary (all planets): https://www.solunars.com/viewtopic.php? ... 099#p22089
Moon foreground or background: https://www.solunars.com/viewtopic.php? ... 099#p22090
Sun foreground or background: https://www.solunars.com/viewtopic.php? ... 099#p22091
Mercury foreground or background: https://www.solunars.com/viewtopic.php? ... 099#p22092
Venus foreground or background: https://www.solunars.com/viewtopic.php? ... 099#p22093
Mars foreground or background: https://www.solunars.com/viewtopic.php? ... 099#p22094
Jupiter foreground or background: https://www.solunars.com/viewtopic.php? ... 099#p22095
Saturn foreground or background: https://www.solunars.com/viewtopic.php? ... 099#p22096
Uranus foreground or background: https://www.solunars.com/viewtopic.php? ... 099#p22097
Neptune foreground or background: https://www.solunars.com/viewtopic.php? ... 099#p22098
Pluto foreground or background: https://www.solunars.com/viewtopic.php? ... 099#p22099

r. MOON: Strongly responsive to astrological and environmental stimuli. Adapting to shifting social and psychological conditions. Receptive, impressionable, vulnerable, sensitive, nesting. Indiscriminate reactions (care-free, juvenile).

t. MOON: Surrounded by emotional excitement, rapidly changing or unstable conditions, shifting social and psychological circumstances. Responsive, adaptive (vulnerable, reactive) to environment. Appetites easily aroused. Popular attention.

r. SUN: Pride, authority, desire for recognition. Enhanced need to be a distinctive, distinguished someone or at the center of things. Vitality, assertiveness, purpose.

t. SUN: Receiving special attention, honor, achievement, recognition, distinction. Being in the spotlight or at the center of things. (Possible encounters with "authorities.")

r. MERCURY: Gaining and sharing information. Curiosity, learning, discussion. Data storage, analysis, and retrieval. Commercial, busy.

t. MERCURY: Circumstances engage one's need to gain and share information, to understand and demonstrate relationships between facts. Self-expression (others want to hear one). Transportation and communication themes, busy-ness, business.

r. VENUS: Enhanced need to love and be loved, to experience pleasure, affection, sex, and play. Deep feelings roused. Beauty and harmony are important. (Separation or rejection when afflicted.)

t. VENUS: Events engage one's affection needs (affective received, loving and being loved). Invitation to pleasure, social connection, sex, play. Surroundings pleasant, harmonious, soft.

r. MARS: Strength and combat needs lead: Aggressive, competitive, physical, assertive, irritating, combative, willful, sexually adamant, shows of strength. Physical hurt (ill, inflamed, injured).

t. MARS: Others are aggressive, competing, challenging, attacking (sexual bounty). Opposition, defense, shows of strength, struggles for dominance or control. Atmosphere heated, irritating, confronting. Injuries, accidents, inflammation, physical discomfort.

r. JUPITER: Self-esteem, happiness, confidence, feeling lucky. Desires improvement, achievement, success, and growing (flourishing) by feeding on experience, learning, and other bounty. Kind, tolerant, generous (extravagant).

t. JUPITER: Flourishing (advantage, achievement, success, recognition) due to good fortune and opportunities. Esteem, respect, honor, elevation, material gain. Feeding on experience, opportunity, and life's bounty.

r. SATURN: Enhanced material and self-preservation needs: to acquire, construct, order, conserve, retain, survive (selfish, tenacious, cautious, security minded, territorial). Emphasis on one's own demands and requirements. Old dark emotions reign (doubt, feeling inadequate, skeletons rattling in old closets). Poor health, loss of strength, depression.

t. SATURN: Circumstances call one to struggle, labor, and survive: Life takes, demands, or withholds (shortages). Restriction, delay, frustration, loss. Others are critical, unsympathetic, ungenerous.

r. URANUS: Needs freedom and renewal: Desire for emancipation, novelty, excitement, surprise, discovery. Rebellious, independent, risking, enthusiastic (feels stifled, shakes off inhibitions).

t. URANUS: Freedom, surprise, renewal. Life allows or compels change, novelty, liberation, surprise, amazement, discovery, new directions. Travel, adventure, refreshment (responding to new things and experiences).

r. NEPTUNE: Need to be absorbed (merged) in or by something. Sensitive, vulnerable, exposed (exaggerated responses, embarrassment, anxiety, frustration, doubt). Imagination (confusion, uncertainty): holds fast to personal reality.

t. NEPTUNE: Absorbed or enveloped (more unconsciousness, altered reality). Sensitivity: magnified emotions and responses. Temptation, seduction (impressionable, undiscerning, "taken in"). Efforts and purposes are diluted, frustrated. Drama, music, fantasy, mysticism.

r. PLUTO: Separation, isolation, withdrawing from the herd or connection. Introspection, reassessment (crossroads). Stronger need to live without others' intrusion, demands, pressures, or domination. Culminations, conclusions (forced decisions).

t. PLUTO: Life revolts against expectation: Dramatic interruptions, alterations, climax, crossroads (crisis, shock). Separating, isolating, or singling out from the herd. High impact events (facing stark, no-nonsense reality). Realization (unevadable reality vacates prior ideas).

Statistics
Foreground: High for women for childbirth.

Eshelman
Transiting fore: Surrounded by emotional excitement, rapidly changing or unstable conditions, shifting social and psychological circumstances. Responsive, adaptive (vulnerable, reactive) to environment. Appetites easily aroused. Popular attention.
Natal fore: Strongly responsive to all astrological and environmental stimuli. Adapting to shifting social and psychological conditions. Receptive, impressionable, vulnerable, sensitive, nesting. Indiscriminate reactions (care-free, juvenile).
Background: A relatively calm, stable period. One's emotional antennae are retracted, so the feeling tone of the outside world doesn't intrude on everyday life. One's overall emotional involvement with people and circumstances in the environment is minimal. - Little effort is wasted on distractions. Personal affairs can be given primary attention because one is not likely to be wrapped up in the frantic scatter of surrounding circumstances.

Bradley
Fore: Peculiarly susceptible to a naïve emotional reaction to every vagrant feeling one experiences. This is an unstable position, from one point of view, as one often appears to vacillate from one end of the emotional spectrum to the other, making up the mind one day and changing it the next. Life becomes a stage upon which the scenes and acts change with kaleidoscopic confusion, thereby not allowing repose and privacy for reflection and careful judgment. One is brought intimately close to every passing situation – too close, in fact, to get proper perspective. Doing things without forethought, with a child-like spontaneity of acceptance, which may lead to indulgence of the appetites, dissipation being the result. Eager to become "one of the gang," one throws oneself into the spirit of things without questioning the advisability of taking another drink, staying up later, or accepting that invitation.
Middle: Preferred location for Moon: There is not that direct exposure to outside entanglements of the foreground, nor that passive weakness of the background. Attention is mostly drawn by ramifications of a local nature.
Back: Passiveness and exhaustion. Vitality seems depleted. Viewpoint is decidedly lax and narrow, as though it required effort to be vivacious. However, this lessens the danger of wasting effort in worthwhile ventures, for one is faced with intensely personal, private matters and does not have time or means to become caught up helplessly in the tide of external activities. Detrimental to health: resistance to disease is very weak and recuperative powers are at low ebb; therefore, malefic aspects work for further debilitation. The more favorable aspects to a background Moon are trivial in importance unless the planets concerned are foreground.

Fagan
Fore:
Back:

Fagan & Firebrace
Fore: Another, emotionally inclined, may seek one's company. In political maps, this is favorable for statesmen seeking election.

Statistics
Foreground: High for men for childbirth (observation only, no formal study done).

Eshelman
Transiting fore: Receiving special attention, honor, achievement, recognition, distinction. Being in the spotlight or at the center of things. (Possible encounters with "authorities.")
Natal fore: Pride, authority, desire for recognition. Enhanced need to be a distinctive, distinguished someone or at the center of things. Vitality, assertiveness, purpose.
Background: More assimilative and preparatory than expressive times. One may withdraw from active participation in long-term objectives, being drawn hither and yon by more transient preoccupations. Less propels one toward creative life-unfolding, so special attention or recognition is less likely. Vitality is lower: if with health-depleting aspects, a key indicator of sickness and waning strength as a result of diminished spirits.

Bradley
Fore: [Derived from comparisons in a later section.] Egocentricity is vested in the crowd. Strong drive for being seen and heard. A great upsurge in vitality animates him to heroism or to a heel-striking, arm-swinging gait, catching to the eyes of passersby.
Middle: The native’s egocentricity is lodged midway between the crowd and total seclusion. He evinces no overwhelming drive for being seen and heard, but rather has a compulsion to be felt and handled. No great upsurge in vitality animates him to heroism or a heel-striking, arm-swinging gait, catching to the eyes of passersby. His sentimental nature is prone to be confined to the more naïve end-aims of life, such as comfort, sex, and diversion, taken in average-sized doses.
Back: Unimportant in many ways, the main exception being adverse effects on health. Retirement of the self away from big objectives in life; the native contents himself with passive entanglements in the skein of endless trivialities. It is difficult to be at all productive or energetic. A desire to be served and left alone.

Fagan
Fore: Guarantees a vigorous constitution. bubbling over with vitality and easily capable of resisting disease.
Back: Lowered vitality, lack of animal heat, and generally an enfeebled constitution.

Fagan & Firebrace
Fore: Attracts attention. One becomes self-reliant and sure of oneself, may take the chair or act in a similar capacity/ Understanding is clear-sighted. One is at one's best. Good position for healers.

Statistics
(None.)

Eshelman
Transiting fore: Circumstances engage one's need to gain and share information, to understand and demonstrate relationships between facts. Self-expression (others want to hear one). Transportation and communication themes, busy-ness, business.
Natal fore: Gaining and sharing information. Curiosity, learning, discussion. Data storage, analysis, and retrieval. Commercial, busy.
Background: It seems nobody is listening to you. Self-expression seems blocked for lack of a ready ear. Little overt activity.

Bradley
Fore: The communication and adaptive abilities are of front-and-center importance. Events and trends consonant with Mercury's function take place. Talking, writing, and reading, in all forms but especially for business purposes. The tongue is glib, the face unusually expressive, and the mind trigger-quick. The period is characterized by talkativeness, interviewing, gleaning information, rapid flow of ideas, business dealing, traveling.
Middle: Of little consequence.
Back: Feels one is being ignored by the passing world: People do not come to one with business or for information. One is not called upon to express ideas or voice opinions.

Fagan
Fore:
Back:

Fagan & Firebrace
Fore: One often finds oneself a passenger by land, sea, or air. One may receive an important communication.

Statistics
Foreground: High for women for childbirth. Low for serious accidents (transit).

Eshelman
Transiting fore: Events engage one's affection needs (affective received, loving and being loved). Invitation to pleasure, social connection, sex, play. Surroundings pleasant, harmonious, soft.
Natal fore: Enhanced need to love and be loved, to experience pleasure, affection, sex, and play. Deep feelings roused. Beauty and harmony are important. (Separation or rejection when afflicted.)
Background: Having fun and being entertained are low priorities. Social involvement is minimal. Any new romances are likely to remain casual.

Bradley
Fore: Incites romantic interests, erotic experiences, social pleasantries, fine artistry, and gift-bearing as a token of affection. One finds oneself pleasantly thrown in with gay groups of people with whom one becomes popular. One has reason to be happy and optimistic, if for no other reason than that one is looking one's best and feels unhampered in conversational chit-chat.
Back: Inhibits one's personality style. One avoids social mingling through a disinterest in such things. Romance simply does not seem one's lot in life at the moment, so one prefers to be a home-body and is not meticulous about apperance.

Fagan
Fore: Love-affairs, marriage, and the pursuit of pleasure generally.
Back: Cupid’s face is averted.

Fagan & Firebrace
Transiting fore: A pleasant time generally. Another person sees one for the first time or after a long separation and is charmed and expresses good will and affection. One becomes the recipient of favors, invitations, and tokens of esteem.
Natal fore: One's affections are liable to be stirred into action.

Statistics
Foreground: Low for women for childbirth (transit & natal). High for serious accidents (transit).
Background: High for women for childbirth (transit & natal). Low for serious accidents (transit).

Eshelman
Transiting fore: Others are aggressive, competing, challenging, attacking (sexual bounty). Opposition, defense, shows of strength, struggles for dominance or control. Atmosphere heated, irritating, confronting. Injuries, accidents, inflammation, physical discomfort.
Natal fore: Strength and combat needs lead: Aggressive, competitive, physical, assertive, irritating, combative, willful, sexually adamant, shows of strength. Physical hurt (ill, inflamed, injured).
Background: Life's irritants take a backseat. Circumstances don't feel threatening. Life is more relaxed and at ease, with a basic trust in the safety of one's world. Relatively passive, inactive. One is generally more cooperative, willing to listen.

Bradley
Fore: No hiatus is in store, for this planet always endows an excess of energy that is spent in rigorous work, aggressiveness, and outbursts of temper. Always adverse for the health (predisposes toward pimples and boils, and such fulminating painful maladies as appendicitis and hemorrhoids, cuts, nosebleeds). The fire of life seems fanned to burn more brightly, consuming too much of the vital reserve. Peril of injury through provoked fights, as one is careless of speech and attitude that too often are unpleasant and boisterous. Deep-seated yen toward cruelty and bullying. Taking risks.
Back: Docility, restraint of the temper. Letting things ride, being only too glad to shirk work. Neither makes nor accepts challenges where the mettle of character of ability is at stake. Reticence, not risk-taking.

Fagan
Fore: Anger, slander, accusations, scandal and even violence.
Back: Mars is rendered “hors de combat.”

Fagan & Firebrace
Transiting fore: Presages some physical hurt, injury, fever, or indisposition, the severity of which depends on the speed of Mars and its aspects. The common cold often appears.
Natal fore: One is prepared to attack, annoy, tease, be generally aggressive to others, or use force.

Statistics
Foreground: High for women for childbirth. High for weddings (natal & transiting). Low for serious accidents (transit).

Eshelman
Transiting fore: Feeding on experience, opportunity, and life's bounty. Flourishing (advantage, achievement, success, recognition) due to good fortune and opportunities. Esteem, respect, honor, elevation, material gain.
Natal fore: Self-esteem, happiness, confidence, feeling lucky. Desires improvement, achievement, success, and growing (flourishing) by feeding on experience, learning, and other bounty. Kind, tolerant, generous (extravagant).
Background: The silver spoon slips from the lips. Opportunities seem scarce. Less confidence of advantage, more sensitive to problems and roadblocks. Major gains made more through individual effort than luck.

Bradley
Fore: One is the happy receiver of money, elevations in rank, titles, and prizes, and enjoys general prosperity. Jupiter is the planetary herald of fame and fortune; through its prominence, all honors, all fulfillments of ambition, and all pecuniary rewards are forthcoming. Life's luck factor, denoting the success of any effort, even the happy end of an erotic quest. Often foreground for illness, referring to one's medical care and the attention one receives while bed ridden. Sometimes present in pre-demise charts, referring to medication, public sympathy, and posthumous eulogies.
Back: One must be satisfied with one's present lot in life and what one already has. Ignored by honors and donors.

Fagan
Fore: A time of plenty and prosperity, with financial success generally.
Back: A lean time generally with a falling-off of income, or at least with no increases.

Fagan & Firebrace
Transiting fore: The best of all possible transits. Gives rise to such emotions as joy, elation, and happiness. If it occurs on the day of an election, one will win (even with other terrible aspects). Brings prizes and money rewards.
Natal fore: One is at one's best (provided Jupiter is not afflicted). Excellent opportunity to interview superiors to seek promotion. One causes the best of impressins because one feels at one's best.

Statistics
Foreground: Neutral for women for childbirth. High for serious accidents (transit).
Background: Low for serious accidents (transit).

Eshelman
Transiting fore: Circumstances call one to struggle, labor, and survive: Life takes, demands, or withholds (shortages). Restriction, delay, frustration, loss (perhaps worsened health). Others are critical, unsympathetic, ungenerous.
Natal fore: Enhanced material and self-preservation needs: to acquire, construct, order, conserve, retain, survive (selfish, tenacious, cautious, security minded, territorial). Emphasis on one's own demands and requirements. Old dark emotions reign (doubt, feeling inadequate, skeletons rattling in old closets). Poor health, loss of strength, depression.
Background: Demands do not press heavily. External expectations can be ignored more easily. Without the feeling of being held back or restricted, one can get out from underneath a pressing load more easily. One can relax as the critical, punitive elements of the environment are held at bay.

Bradley
Fore: One's whole well-being is in the balance. Health suffers through Saturn's devitalizing, contracting influence: definite predisposition to Saturn ailments. Curtails one's social interests and activities, for it places one at a distinct disadvantage, subject to adverse criticism by others. Harbinger of financial setbacks and losses.
Back: Saturn's effectiveness for inharmony is reduced effectively to nil. Not restrained by pressing responsibilities which ordinarily prevent one's being able to strike out freely and boldly into the world seeking fortune.

Fagan
Fore: Disappointment, sorrow, loss of liberty, impoverishment, delays, and bitterness.
Back: Saturn loses its power to turn laughter into tears.

Fagan & Firebrace
Transiting fore: The worst omen for success. Failure in all things. Ill will, even hatred, of others, which inhibits success. Unpopularity. Causes endless waiting, delays, inferior quality, and disappointments.
Natal fore: Most unpleasant. One feels alone, empty, insufficient, inadequate, neglected, miserable, uncared for and unloving, suffering from chronic ailments.

Statistics
Foreground: High for women for childbirth.

Eshelman
Transiting fore: Freedom, surprise, renewal. Life allows or compels change, novelty, liberation, surprise, amazement, discovery, new directions. Travel, adventure, refreshment (responding to new things and experiences).
Natal fore: Needs freedom and renewal: Desire for emancipation, novelty, excitement, surprise, discovery. Rebellious, independent, risking, enthusiastic (feels stifled, shakes off inhibitions).
Background: Little takes one by surprise. Life seems quieter: novelty, excitement and discovery are noticeably absent. One is far more willing to routinely accept familiar patterns, attitudes and ways of doing things.

Bradley
Fore: Life is resplendent with unusual, stimulating developments. Sudden change in the environment, new and fascinating experiences which lead to expansion of the outlook and field of interests, a colorful existence in general. Threatens the status quo, so seemingly drastic and upsetting things happen.
Back: A casual, quiet, routine period in which little of great moment is in the offing.

Fagan
Fore: All that is popular, colorful, fresh, new, youthful, unexplored, original, enterprising, and romantic. Pre-eminently, it excites by the thrill of discovery and the zest for adventure.
Back: A more or less humdrum and colorless existence.

Fagan & Firebrace
Transiting fore: The unexpected and often exciting happens. Meeting strangers (aspects determine whether it is a positive or negative experience). Sometimes accidents. In short, the new intrudes on one.
Natal fore: Exhilarating. One stretches one's legs to set off in search of fresh fields and new pastures. Getting away from the routine. Affords the chance to do something different and perhaps get a thrill or shock. One searches for the new.

Statistics
Foreground: Low for women for childbirth (transit & natal).
Background: High for women for childbirth (transit & natal).

Eshelman
Transiting fore: Absorbed or enveloped (more unconsciousness, altered reality). Sensitivity: magnified emotions and responses. Temptation, seduction (impressionable, undiscerning, "taken in"). Efforts and purposes are diluted, frustrated. Drama, music, fantasy, mysticism.
Natal fore: Need to be absorbed (merged) in or by something. Sensitive, vulnerable, exposed (exaggerated responses, embarrassment, anxiety, frustration, doubt, convalescence). Imagination (confusion, uncertainty): holds fast to personal reality.
Background: Rationality prevails. One goes through life with more assurance. Highly immune to being emotionally led, caught up, or seduced, one is not likely to form dependent relationships.

Bradley
Fore: Feeling the victim of a merciless fate. Tends towards feelings of despair, hopelessness, and unkind cuts by others. It seems that nothing one tries to do works out to one's full satisfaction. Defeats, withdrawals, resignations.
Back: One is insured against the malicious designs of rivals and enemies, feels competent and able to stand up for one's own rights and interests.

Fagan
Fore: Negative, psychopathic and masochistic. Attacks of the jitters as when one is about to face a surgical operation or is arrested, placed on trial, forced to submit to castigation, or to enter the execution chamber. One is conscious of being defeated, belittled, mocked, ridiculed and generally made to feel a fool or helplessly in the power of another or the victim of a fatal disease. Persecution complexes, removals from office, reduction in rank, dismissals, defeatism and resignation. Being deemed incompetent, irresponsible, or otherwise undesirable; steps are taken to have one removed.
Back:

Fagan & Firebrace
Transiting fore: An intense, if somewhat suppressed, state of emotional excitement, a state of worry and flurry. States of anesthesia are characteristic. Possibly being victimized or robbed or becoming inebriated. Seduction. Positive achievement in the realm of art.
Natal fore: If unafflicted, one feels like taking French leave to escape responsibilities and bury oneself in pet distractions. One may succumb to a favorite temptation.

Statistics
Common in Lunar Return foreground for conception.

Eshelman
Transiting fore: Life revolts against expectation: Dramatic interruptions, alterations, climax, crossroads (crisis, shock). Separating, isolating, or singling out from the herd. High impact events (facing stark, no-nonsense reality). Realization (unevadable reality vacates prior ideas).
Natal fore: Separation, isolation, withdrawing from the herd or connection. Introspection, reassessment (crossroads). Stronger need to live without others' intrusion, demands, pressures, or domination. Culminations, conclusions (forced decisions).
Background: One is willing to take the world as it is offered. One feels comfortable living the relatively naive existence of absorption in the patterns of modern civil-ization.

Bradley
Fore: A lively period. Pluto establishes precedents, dramatically bringing to end eras in the life, and just as dramatically drawing back the curtain on the new. Effects are swift, sensation-creating, and record-breaking. "Firsts" in life: one usually plays the leading role in the drama that transpires. One tends toward slothfulness, taking the easy way out, shirking obligations, not playing by the rules or holding up one's own end of the bargain. Also present for freak accidents, miracles, inexplicable phenomena, and seemingly fateful happenings.
Back:

Fagan
Fore: Nervous tension, alert expectancy. Invariably a time of eventfulness, such as become milestones in one's life. Always demands action, often dramatic and swift, never idleness or unemployment. Precipitates those crises in life that force one’s hand. Sometimes the strain may be too great and then danger of mental breakdown is imminent. Life tends to saddle one with directing affairs; but otherwise rather anti-social and a disdainer of the law and too preoccupied with one's own interests to have sympathy for the idle and the stupid.
Back:

Fagan & Firebrace
Transiting fore: A shock; indeed often a very nasty jolt. Acts without warning, effects can be very intense but often more psychological than physical. Such nerve-shattering and unexpected events as th sudden death of the parents, police raids, being questioned by police, being robbed or beaten up. Exposes secrets. One can be caught red-handed. Effects are much more unexpected and nerve-jangling than those of Uranus. The end of the beginning or the beginning of the end: It ushers definite stages of life.
Natal fore: Unless simultaneously transited, this may pass unnoticed.

For the first time since, oh, the 1980s, I've significantly rewritten these fundamental notes on natal and transiting planets foreground:
https://www.solunars.com/viewtopic.php? ... 089#p22089

The rewrite brings them more into conformity with Needs language (both natal and transit), and generally makes them more accurate. It's a serious update.

IMO, one of the more important parts of Sidereal Astrology!

SteveS wrote: Wed Dec 14, 2022 6:09 am IMO, one of the more important parts of Sidereal Astrology!

All discussion of prediction methods will be in Volume II of my big three-part work. I won't be writing this for one to two years. In the meantime, though, I want to keep a few things like the above in line with where the only natal and foundation writing is going.

I understand Jim.