Astrology can be an indispensable tool for evaluating and changing our relationship to emotions and personality traits we would rather exile than integrate into our selves. The Hellenistic doctrine of sect specifically can be the basis for a clear approach to doing this work, so this post will be dedicated to explaining the concept of sect, elaborating on the political metaphor that helps explain it, and detailing how you can go about evaluating sect in your chart in order to give voice to your “inner dissidents” and cultivate connection between all parts of yourself.
The concept of sect is vital to Hellenistic astrology, one of the first considerations when looking at a person’s chart and seeing what is unique about it.
It’s very simple: if you were born during the day, you belong to the solar sect; if you were born during the night, you belong to the lunar sect.
I love the way the word sect expresses a sort of religious dedication to that luminary. In Ancient Astrology Vol. 1, Demetra George says that “sect doctrines reflect the system of alliances and enmities…the shifting balance of power as to which side holds the position of privilege and dominance.”
To find out which sect you belong to, look at your natal chart and determine whether the sun is above or below the line of the horizon.
If your sun is above the line of the AC/DC, you were born in the day and are part of the solar sect; if your sun is below the AC/DC, you were born at night and are part of the lunar sect. Each of the planets also belongs to one “team” and depending on how they fall in your chart, they either connect to and cooperate with their “sect light” (the sun or the moon) and their other sect mates, or they don’t and their relationship to their sect is more complicated.
So what are the core differences between the two sects? The ancient authors don’t exactly give personality delineations, but Demetra provides such a clear way of looking at it:
“From a modern perspective one could propose that diurnal individuals belong to the solar sect school of thought, where the Sun represents the mind and soul, the light of consciousness, an objective state of awareness, the use of reason, and an inclination to bring things to light and illuminate them. Nocturnal individuals belong to the lunar school of thought where the moon represents the body, the depth of intuitive perception arising from the physical senses, a subjective state of awareness, the use of instinct, and understanding by digging deep into the underlying causes.”
Perhaps you can see some of the logic for the two sects in thinking about which planets belong to each, and how they express the qualities of that sect:
Solar: Sun, Jupiter, Saturn
Lunar: Moon, Venus, Mars
Variable: Mercury changes sect (and gender!) depending on whether it rises before (solar) or after (lunar) the sun.
Do you think you privilege one of these ways of being more than the other?
Does this match the sect you belong to or contradict it?
Dismantling Your “Inner Police State”
Demetra goes on to compare sect to opposing political parties vying for influence:
“Imagine the government of a country that has two political parties. If one party is in charge, those officials have greater authority and license to advocate for their platform… planets that belong to the sect of the chart function in a similar manner to the legislators who hold a majority in the legislature and thus have a mandate to rule and implement their policies.” (82)
If your mind was a government, what kind of political system do you think it would have?
Years ago, in an eye-opening conversation with my meditation teacher Arinna Weisman, she reframed my relationship to my “negative” emotions in a way that totally transformed my desire to disown or suppress them. Each of our emotions are like a collective of people trying to be heard, seen, and represented in our minds and in our experience of the world. By trying to eliminate my anxiety and depression, she said, I was creating an “inner police state” in order to avoid giving these emotions an audience. Trying to forcefully control our emotions requires we create a totalitarian environment within ourselves, policing every thought and eliminating dissent, much like the repression exerted on dissidents under authoritarian governments. The results are similar: we live in a tense state of unrest and our overall happiness and safety begin to degrade. If we want to live in an internal democracy rather than an inner police state, we have to learn how to be present with even our most painful emotions, to give them audience and actually listen to them, even care for them, rather than disowning them and locking them in the dungeon of our unconscious.
Demetra’s opposition party metaphor perfectly expresses the relationship between diurnal and nocturnal sects, and reminds us that we are not struggling with an outside other, but seeking to synthesize the diverse aspects of our selves. If one party is in the majority, they will only stoke resentment and enmity by completely disregarding their constituents who fall outside the dominant ideology. A core principle of democracy is that opposition and antagonism exist to prevent a majoritarian dictatorship. Similarly, rather than repress or disown the “difficult” out of sect planets, it’s better to think of them as provocative advocates for a way of thinking and being that you’ve neglected in yourself.
George’s interpretive suggestions make it clear that the two sects are interdependent and any attempt to relegate one to permanent outsider status would leave us fragmented and split, either cold rationalists divorced from our bodies or emotionally reactive solipsists.
I belong to the day sect and much of my life I’ve privileged reason and logic over other ways of knowing to the degree that I held a mechanistic material view of the world. However, as time has passed and I’ve experienced challenges and traumas, the importance of understanding how to access my intuition and refer to my own body for guidance has completely transformed my philosophy and my everyday life. My relationship to astrology illustrates this tension well: while it has honed my intuitive capacities and left me awestruck by the animism of the cosmos, I still gravitate towards more solar ways of approaching the discipline (for example I practice Hellenistic astrology, one of the more scholarly and methodical schools of astrology).
Though our sect may dominate the way we are and the way we live, domination is not something to embrace but mitigate. I don’t want to have a mind overpowered by reason to the degree that my emotions are stilted or strangled anymore than I want a country ruled by one political party for the duration of my lifetime (or two parties for that matter). How then can this metaphor help us better facilitate dialogue between our divergent selves and help to bring them into a harmonious relationship?
While the dominant party may control the levers of power, the opposition has other tools to influence outcomes, things like noncooperation with the dominant party’s political projects, sabotaging legislation with backhanded amendments to kill otherwise popular bills, lobbying the citizenry to shift public opinion in their favor, and many, many other tactics. On the personal level, when you refuse to acknowledge the desires of your out-of-sect planets (when you attempt to repress or resist elements of yourself that you find confusing, unpleasant, embarrassing, or difficult) their dissent will become progressively louder until it is impossible to ignore.
Imagine how each of the tactics I just mentioned might play out in your life; for example, the opposition planets rallying the public to stand up against the in-sect leadership could come in the form of your own behaviors alerting friends or members of your larger community to have an intervention and insist on changes to your behavior should you want to maintain those relationships. The way your acting may seem natural to you and feel good, but without the balance of input from the other sect, others may not feel the same way.
Imagine a day sect person with a powerful Jupiter who rejects any nocturnal tendencies towards intuition and instinct; she may have all the positive significations of diurnal Jupiter (charismatic! enthusiastic! compelling!) but without the ability to relate emotionally to others and be receptive, she becomes a prosthelytizing zealot. Hell, it may bring out the best Jupiter significations for helping her realize her intentions— but if her intentions are to control others and bend them to her will, she would ultimately be better off listening to some of her internal advocates from the nocturnal sect.
All of this is to say that it’s more nuanced than planets in sect are good, planets out of sect are bad. Instead I would argue that the two are actually co-determined; if we have a healthier and more receptive attitude towards the parts of ourselves that seem to be working against our interests, we can deter the worst outcomes of these planets that arise from repression and denial. When one political party controls all of the levers of power for the life of that country, it’s a one-party dictatorship and the opposition has no means of being heard other than acts of mass disruption, violence, or even revolution.
If you’d like to do a deep dive into evaluating the connection and cohesion between the two sects of your chart, and think about your tendency to uplift or suppress your inner shadow government, the best way is in a full reading. If you’re feeling out of balance, caught in compulsive or habitual cycles, or dominated by one or the other of these approaches to life, it can be so helpful to learn from this particular dynamic in your natal chart.