Hexagram 24, Return

This is the hexagram of the turning point. The dark has gone as far as it goes and the first light is back, small and low and certain.

The figure

Thunder sits in the lower place and Earth sits above it. Thunder is the eldest son, arousing and movement, the first stir of energy. Earth is the mother, receptive and yielding, the ground that covers and holds.

Together the picture is thunder inside the earth. Nothing has broken the surface yet. Deep down something has moved for the first time, and the ground above it is still. One solid line sits at the bottom with five broken lines above it. The light has come back in at the lowest place and has the whole figure to rise through.

The tradition reads this as the winter solstice, the shortest day, when the Sun stops going away and begins its slow return. Nothing looks different on that day. It is still cold. And the turn has happened all the same.

Return is paired with Hexagram 23, Splitting Apart. There the one solid line was at the top, about to fall. Here it has come back in at the bottom.

When it comes up in a reading

When Return comes up for a question I tell people the worst of it is over, and then I tell them not to do anything dramatic about that. The light is back and it is very small. The counsel of this hexagram is rest. The tradition pictures the solstice as a day when the roads were closed and nobody travelled, so the new energy could gather without being spent. Something in you is coming back to life, and the way to help it is to leave it alone.

The second thing I say is that the return happens on its own if you let it. You do not have to force the spring or prove to anyone that you are recovered. People come out of a dark stretch and try to make up the lost time at once, and they go straight back under. Go gently and let the light grow at its own pace.

The third thing is about friends. The old picture has companions arriving on the day of the turn, and I read that as permission to let people back in. Return is when the door opens again, a little, for the people who are good for you.

So I would ask: where has the turn already happened in your life, quietly, without anyone noticing? Find it. Then protect it for a while before you tell the world.

As a birth hexagram

If this is your birth hexagram, or if it keeps coming back to you in casts, you renew. After loss, after emptiness, after being worn down to nothing, you come back. Plenty of people survive. You return to the work, to the people, to the freshness of things, and you do it again and again across a life.

You understand cycles because you have lived them. You know in your bones that endings come before beginnings. You can feel when it is time to rest and when it is time to come out again, and when you let that rhythm run you do well.

Your life tends to have chapters of return in it. After illness, after grief, after a career was taken apart and rebuilt. Each return makes a version of you that is new and still continuous with the one before. And because you have done it, people who are struggling to begin again find their way to you.

The gift is real renewal. A lot of people imitate coming back. You do the actual thing. You also hold the faith, for yourself and for others, that the light does return, and in the dark stretch that faith is worth more than advice.

The shadow is rushing it. Coming back before the dark has finished its work gives you a thin new beginning that does not hold. The other shadow is a life of returns that never stays anywhere. If every renewal is followed too quickly by another collapse, something is stopping you from settling long enough to build, and that is worth a look.

At maturity, the person who carries Return has been through many cycles and has learned to trust them. The later years of a life like this are often the richest, the last return having folded everything that came before into one steady presence.

If a line moves

When a line moves in Return, the bottom two lines speak to the beginning of the matter, the first turn back after a small straying, made early and without fuss. The middle lines are its heart, the repeated turning and the choice to walk your own road back. The top lines are its end, where the return is complete or where the turn was missed and has to come round again. The changed line gives the second hexagram, the direction the situation is heading, and the How to Cast a Hexagram page shows you how to find it.

Across the traditions

The Eight Trigrams page describes Thunder and Earth and the family the eight belong to. The Chinese Astrology section covers yin and yang, the two forces every line is built from, and The Chinese Calendar and the New Year page explains the calendar that the solstice sits inside. In my own tarot work I set Return beside The Sun, the light coming back over the wall, though that is my association and no older than me.

What is quietly coming back to life in you, and are you giving it the rest it needs to grow?

If you would like this read against your own chart, my readings are here.