**The Sect Guidebook is Here**
The vision, objections and how to buy <3
Sect Musings
This is what I mean by Sun cult hurting even the day: our ideas of success becomes subsumed under being good subjects under fascism: the men finding dignity in their boorish cruelty and in their back-breaking underpaying jobs while women act as docile vessels, stripped of agency to perform the emotional labor the man needs but considers beneath him.
That’s not what the day is actually about: in an ideal world, everyone gets to shine their unique light and follow the path that is distinct to them. There are a plurality of beliefs and practices but they’re all climbing the same mountain. That is the essence of the day sect: finding our divine purpose and building a corner of the world in its image.
If day charts were allowed to truly live as their sect intended, each could be the hero of their own story. Able to find the god in anything, the diurnals excel at acting on their unique vision in a way that impacts the world around them. In the light of the day, we are closer to our ideal, eternal selves and the deities that shape our souls.
The nigh sect, always underneath and interdependent with the day, is as equally potent. It is in the dark that our animal bodies live with their hungers, lusts, dreams and nightmares. Just as the Moon finds her light as a reflection of the Sun, the nocturnal is contingent upon its ever-shifting context. So much of our lives — our dreams, our unconscious, our intuition, our creativity, our fears, our core memories, our traumas, can only be found with night vision.
When what is personal and contingent, what cannot be made into a rule, is undervalued, we miss out on a key gift of the night sect: satisfaction. A potent lesson I learn again and again is how the goal isn’t what shifts the feeling. The things we seem to remember most about a certain pivotal milestone in our lives is the details; even our deathbed is haunted with love not given, pleasures not indulged, moments left unsavored. The day provides the structure and vision to achieve these major successes but without tending to the night part of us, we don’t enjoy the process and we don’t enjoy the victory. What sort of win is that?
But, on the other side, being a day chart without a clear vision can lead to inertia, conformity and dullness. Without a sense of purpose animating us, we let life happen to us, at the mercy of forces outside of our control. We live a life of quiet desperation, content to color within the lines and quell the inner voice spurring us on to our larger, divine destiny. We remember Carl Jung telling us that nothing has a stronger psychological influence on children than the unlived life of the parents. We become ruled by the actions we did not take, the lives we did not live, not because we couldn’t, but because we didn’t even try.
…
At the monastery, we would chant the same hymns every morning at a vigorous pace and were discouraged from losing our place to ponder the meaning of the lines.
But, after a while, you began to learn the words by heart and, at random times, a line would come floating out of nowhere and repeat itself for awhile. This feels like a nocturnal form of knowing, one that requires a graceful sort of hide and seek— the difference between trying to force a dream to your consciousness and simply walking with it a ways. It’s always the open mind that lets the dream free.
One of those first lines came from one of my personal favorites, The Precious Mirror Samadhi.
It arose in the kitchen, of course, with whole racks filled with metals bowls stacked neatly into each other:
A silver bowl filled with snow, a heron hidden in the moon. Taken as similar, they are not the same； not distinguished, their places are known.
The nature of experience is at times fuzzy, hard to distinguish, especially between spirit and matter, relative and absolute. But, at the same time, there are divisions, subtle separations to find. The eternal dance of vision and dream, day and night.
It has been obscured, mostly due to it being lost to the tradition for hundreds of years before being rediscovered only decades ago. But beyond what ancient texts tell us, who has not experienced the difference in experience and consciousness between night and day? How day brings clarity, action, public display while the night breeds intimacy, altered states, shrouds of mystery.
To be able to dance with both, in your own way, is divine.
Sect helps us bring together both sides, the mysterious and the clear, the numinous and the mundane, into a coherent whole: our weird, beautiful lives.
Addressing Objections
There are plenty of reasons to not know why you would even need a guidebook on sect.
Isn’t astrology mainly about the planets, the signs and the houses?
Does it even work?
It seems too simple. Is there really any depth to it?
Again and again I come back to how much of our lived experience is dictated by the day and night. We decide when we go to school, go on dates, award prizes, make our art, go to work, call our friends, take long drives, depending on if it’s light or dark out. Doing the exact same thing at noon versus 2am would yield a wildly different experience.
It’s the same for sect.
Signs are divided into diurnal and nocturnal, same with the houses.
Planets behave completely differently depending on if you have a day or night chart.
Our very path through this life is shaped by sect.
Your whole understanding of your chart and yourself will change once you begin to incorporate sect.
If you’re worried about it being too simplistic, then you haven’t seen how deeply it can go.
I wrote this guidebook in part because I was not satisfied by the information on sect that already existed. It was a good foundation, but didn’t get into the contours of the diurnal and nocturnal path, explore planets in and out of sect, or help me delineate a chart using sect.
I wanted to provide you with all the information on sect that I wish I had, from historical surveys, chart delineations and real-world examples.
If you’re worried this concept is too technical, worry not: sect is as simple as night and day.
In that vein, I have included multiple essays for the poets and non-astrologically literate. The “Poetic Walk with the Light and Dark” I explore the symbolic meaning of the night and day. In “The Quality of Sect,” I explore the unique paths of the day and night and how that impacts our becoming. If you want to learn more about your planets according to sect, I help with that too. I made this guidebook with all levels of astrological knowledge in mind.
This guide contains multitudes, like you.
**The Sect Guidebook is Here**
In this guidebook, I aim to impart all of my research on sect in its many forms: there are historical analyses, step-by-step techniques, lyrical essays, and delineations of planets in and out of sect.
I wanted to provide a compendium that would answer any and all of your questions on sect, whether you approach this technically, experientially, poetically, purposefully.
Over 131 pages, The Sect Guidebook explores:
Sect Basics: A Technical, Historical Primer
The Day and Night: a Poetic Walk with the Light and Dark
Alliances and Factions: The Nature of “Sect”
How does a Day Chart Feel?: The Felt Quality of Sect
Sect in Practice: How to Use Sect to Delineate a Natal Chart
The Nature of the Day: How Planets Function in a Diurnal Nativity
Mercury: The Planet Between Sects
The Nature of the Night: How Planets Function in a Nocturnal Nativity
Sect Techniques: Exploring Firdaria and Triplicities
Mixed Sect: Sunrise and Sunset Births, plus being ruled by a planet Out of Sect
Though you can use this guidebook as a technical manual, you can also use this technique to understand ourselves.
By studying sect, we can understand our path not just to success but to satisfaction and our version of the good life.
Written on the gates of the Temple of the Oracle of Delphi is the phrase “know thyself”.
The first step doing anything in life, especially connecting to the divine, involves understanding your unique blueprint. Sect, in my experience, is the foundation to knowing thyself.
We are not here to reduce your life to one strain but bring in its multiplicities. Once you begin to understand your sect, you can use it to navigate a whole host of situations and understand how to approach the tasks of your life with gravity and grace.
In my years of studying astrology and consulting professionally, I have seen firsthand how sect dramatically impacts our experience. I have seen how much more satisfaction and confidence people gain when they learn to work with their unique relationship to light and dark.
Though there are texts to which I am indebted in writing this guidebook, particularly the work of Robert Schmidt, I found myself wanting more information on this topic than was available. That’s why you’ll find information in this book you can’t find anywhere else.
I have used my rigorous study of traditional texts, my years as a poet and consulting experience together to give you a multifaceted view on sect that balances the bright meaning of the day with the mysterious lyricism of the night.
Here’s a taste of what this path through sect can provide you:
Chloe’s work with sect adds depth and richness to chart interpretation, revealing how our most immediate connection to the sky—the Sun and the Moon—can guide us toward greater awareness and ease in our daily lives.
Understanding myself as a “night chart person” has profoundly shifted my ability to adjust the course when I came to the feeling that my life was misaligned. Working with Chloe to explore my lunar nature, as well as how different planets are resourced within my natal chart has sparked a deep curiosity about the solar patterns in how I’ve always tried to work and relate with others. This wondering has allowed me to ask myself what in my life requires deconstructing, and what it is that I want to build. And this is where the magic of Chloe’s work shines brightest—in the dreaming and the construction of a more authentic, embodied, and devotional framework for living.
If you're looking to deepen your study of astrology, and/or to discover greater compassion and hidden strength, exploring sect will undoubtedly illuminate new paths forward. It’s a journey well worth taking.
C. Lancaster
Want a taste of what Sect can offer? I will be hosting a free Masterclass in **twenty minutes** to help you understand how pivotal this technique is.
You can sign up below, and no worries if you miss the live class: the replay will be available for all.
Until next week my loves,
Chloe