Yalda 2024

Yalda Night is the ancient Persian feast of the winter solstice, the longest and darkest night of the year, when families across Iran and greater Iran gather to outlast the dark together. Cast for sunset over Tehran on that longest night, its chart is a beautiful mirror of what it is. The Sun sits in Sagittarius, the Jupiter-ruled sign of the sage and the seeker, in the sixth house of daily ritual and service: for Yalda is exactly this, a night of shared wisdom made habit, of reading Hafez aloud and reciting the Shahnameh until well past midnight, an old festival kept alive since the Achaemenid calendar of Darius I.

Its Moon in Virgo in the third house is the soul of the gathering: emotion carried through words, stories and the immediate circle of kin and neighbours, nourishment offered through the meticulous laying of the korsi with pomegranates, watermelon, nuts and dried fruit whose crimson honours the coming dawn. And the Cancer Ascendant is the perfect mask for this most maternal of nights: the crab's protective shell drawn around the family, the matriarch's table holding everyone safe until the sun is reborn. Recognised by UNESCO in 2022, Yalda endures as light kept through the dark.