The Sect Guidebook

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131pp
PDF

April 2025

One of the best things about being an astrologer is getting to help people find and follow their own path. But despite the diversity of lives and futures I’ve encountered in my work, consultations often seem to boil down to one question:

Will I be safe if I do it my way?

Self trust is hard, especially in a world that tells us to distrust our desires and dreams.

Welcome to Sun Cult.

Sun Cult is the phrase my friends and I conjured a few years ago to name the prevailing ideology of the Western world. We used it to identify the totalizing, oppressive culture that reduces our idea of what a good life can be to one, rigid ideal.

There are many ways we encounter Sun Cult: both externally through the patriarchy, white supremacy, transphobia, classicism and other forms of oppressive hierarchies; and internally through the perfectionist parts of us that wants to throw away our imperfections, doubts, ambiguities, mistakes.

As the psychoanalyst Adam Phillips puts it, “We police ourselves with our purposes…Believing in the future can be a great deadener” especially when it’s at the expense of our actual lived experience

I also use Sun Cult to understand sect, a fundamental astrological technique that tells us that much is decided on the division between night and day. Though we are born either to the night or day, we must use both the light and dark parts of ourselves to live our best lives.

So, if we know the conventional script only serves to make us pliant subjects rather than actually serving us, what are we to do?

The first thing is to identify and follow our own ideals, which Phillips says “should feel like affinities, not impositions”. Your natal chart, specifically understanding it through sect, can help you find the balance between outer achievement and private joys in your picture of the good life. By understanding sect, you understand your personal will and vision in relationship to your unconscious desires and interdependence. You get to have both, exactly your way.

In this guidebook, I aim to impart all of my wisdom 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 it to help 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.

The first step is to examine the sect of your chart. Are you journeying by the light of the day or under the cover of the night? The answer to this will tell you what methods, activities and places you will find your greatest satisfaction.

Next, we look at our in sect planets (Mars, the Moon and Venus for the night and Sun, Jupiter and Saturn for the night). They tell us our unique formula to walking our path and what areas of life will bring it in.

We then look to our out of sect planets to hear the secret story complementing and complicating the main narrative. They must adapt to a foreign terrain and use the tools of the opposite sect to achieve their aims.

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. 

That’s why this guidebook, gives you all the tools and information about sect you’ve been looking for but couldn’t find. I give you not just a step-by-step guide to delineating sect in your chart, I provide essays on the felt experience and path of sect, twilight + dawn charts, mixed sect conditions and even understanding how your life develops over time according to sect.

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 are some testimonials on the power of my sect work: 

Chloe’s work on sect has made me revisit this foundational astrological principle in such greater depth and it has been nothing short of mind blowing. I see sect in everything now — within astrology, but also in conversations with friends and everyday moments. Her insights are unmissable!

• Kira Ryberg

i’ve literally learned so much about how to craft a nocturnal life from discussing sect with chloe in depth instead of trying to cram my very nocturnal chart into the diurnal box! it’s such a deceptively simple division that can often be overlooked she’s studied it in such depth

• Shuly Rose

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
  

Learn how the day and the night shape your lives with depths never seen before. 

**Buy Here**

Want a taste? Check out my free sect lecture: