Sect

The fuller picture

A chart has a sect and so does every planet. The chart is diurnal when the Sun stands above the horizon and nocturnal when it stands below. The Sun, Jupiter and Saturn are the day planets; the Moon, Venus and Mars are the night planets; Mercury has no fixed allegiance and takes his from his posture relative to the Sun, counting as diurnal when he rises before the Sun and nocturnal when he sets after it. A planet that agrees with the chart's sect is better placed than one that does not, and it is the first of the three conditions that make up hayz.

The larger job sect does is inside essential dignity, where it is not a bonus at all but a switch. Rulership of an element is split between a day ruler and a night ruler, so the same degree has one triplicity owner by day and a different one by night. That has a consequence people are regularly surprised by: a planet that rules the element of its own sign by night earns nothing at all for it in a chart cast by day. One worked example turns on exactly that — a Moon in Virgo called peregrine in a day chart although she rules the earth triplicity by night. The third, participating ruler counts in either sect, which is why the same table has three names in a row and only two of them move.

Sect also decides the order of significators in one method rather than their strength, and that is a different kind of dependency. When a question offers two or three named options, the practice we follow reads them from the triplicity rulers of the relevant house cusp, taken in sect order — the ruling triplicity lord of the chart's own sect signifies the first option, the out-of-sect ruler the second, the participating ruler the third. Two purpose-built figures make the point with the earth signs, and the invariant is stated outright: Mars is always the third option over an earth sign, whatever the sect, because he is always the participating ruler there. Get the sect backwards in that method and you have not weakened an answer, you have swapped which company or which job the answer is about.

Two things sect is not. It is not the planetary day and hour, which are computed from the clock and the day of the week and are a separate pair of witnesses on the chart. And it is not hayz. Sect is one of the three questions hayz asks, so a planet can agree with the chart's sect and still not be in hayz, and the two are easy to conflate because they are reported side by side.

One implementation detail worth knowing, because it is a simplification rather than a calculation. iHorary decides the chart's sect from longitudes alone — the Sun is taken as above the horizon when it stands more than a hundred and eighty degrees past the Ascendant in zodiacal order. That is the standard approximation, and it means a Sun that has only just risen and still sits near the Ascendant reads as a night chart.