Grand Sextile in Astrology: Six Bodies and Fifteen Legs to Check

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A grand sextile is six bodies spaced roughly 60° apart all the way round the chart. Each body is sextile its two neighbours, trine the two bodies one step further away and opposite the body across the circle. That makes fifteen pairs, and every one of them has to be in orb. On the wheel the lines draw a six-pointed star inside a hexagon. This page shows a fully checked example, explains which bodies can and cannot take part, and reports what a long computed search turned up. The general checking method is on how to find aspect patterns.

Ground rules for the check: possible corners are the Sun, Moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, Pluto and Chiron. Every one of the fifteen legs is measured against the flat orbs of the free birth chart: 6° for the sextiles and 8° for the trines and oppositions, the edge itself counting, with no bonus for the luminaries. Leaving out the Lunar Nodes, the angles and Lilith is how these examples are scoped, not a statement about what can form a figure. The wheel shows separate lines only and does not recognise or name a grand sextile, so the legs below were worked out from the planet table; where glyphs are pushed aside, the ticks on the inner ring show the real positions.

Fifteen legs

Number the six bodies 1 to 6 in order round the circle. The figure needs:

The names vary. "Grand sextile" is the plain one; "Star of David" and "Seal of Solomon" are also used, and not always for the same thing. Astrotheme's guide to composed aspects, for instance, uses "Seal of Solomon" for two interlaced grand trines and says the sextiles between the points are not required. Under that looser definition, the six trines alone would be enough. On this page all fifteen legs are required, and that source is cited only to show the difference in definitions.

Because it uses every 60° step, a grand sextile contains every smaller figure built on those steps. The example below holds two grand trines, three mystic rectangles, six kites, six cradles and six minor grand trines. Counted as combinations, that is a long list; read as a chart, it is one figure.

Who can take part: the Sun, Mercury and Venus

Mercury never gets more than about 28° from the Sun, and Venus about 47° (the guide to Sun, Mercury and Venus aspect limits has the figures). Every other corner of a grand sextile is at least 54° from any given corner. So if the Sun is one corner, neither Mercury nor Venus can be another.

That is not the same as saying the three can fill only one corner between them. Leave the Sun out, and Mercury and Venus can sit on opposite sides of it, one ahead and one behind, up to about 74° apart. That is enough for a sextile, so Mercury and Venus can hold two neighbouring corners, as long as the Sun is not in the figure. They can never be two steps apart, because that would need a trine of at least 112°.

The second example below is a real case of exactly that.

A worked example

Theo is a fictional person. His chart is the calculator's output for London on 8 November 2003 at 15:00 (GMT). The six corners, in order round the circle:

All fifteen hold, and all are in sign: the corners alternate between earth signs (Taurus, Virgo, Capricorn) and water signs (Cancer, Scorpio, Pisces). The earth triangle (Moon, Jupiter, Chiron) and the water triangle (Saturn, Sun, Mars) are the two grand trines.

When it holds

The Moon makes five of the fifteen legs, and it moves about half a degree an hour, so the figure depends on Theo's birth time. Checking every whole minute of 8 and 9 November 2003, London time, with the calculator:

• It starts at 07:32 on 8 November, when the Moon-Sun separation reaches 172.00°, the edge of the opposition window. At 07:31 it is 171.99° and the figure is incomplete.
• It ends after 01:59 on 9 November. At 02:00 the Mars-Moon separation is 66.01°, just past the sextile window.

A Theo born at 07:00 on the same date would have fourteen of the fifteen legs and no grand sextile. Without a birth time, the free chart uses local noon only as an internal reference and draws no Moon lines at all, so a figure that needs the Moon cannot be shown or assumed. The noon positions happen to fall inside the window here, but that is not evidence for any particular birth.

Reading the six together

Astrologers usually read a grand sextile through its parts. The two grand trines suggest two kinds of ease, here a practical earth triangle and a feeling water triangle, and the three oppositions give that ease something to work against: Moon and Sun, Saturn and Chiron, Jupiter and Mars. A common view is that the figure combines a lot of support with built-in tension, so that the oppositions keep the trines from becoming a comfortable standstill. For Theo, one possible reading would focus on the Moon-Sun opposition, the axis that also sets the figure's time window, as the place where needs and identity are balanced, with the trines and sextiles offering many routes between them. That is one way to read it, offered as a possibility rather than a prediction, and the figure says nothing about talent, luck or outcome.

A second example: Mercury and Venus as neighbours

Mira, also fictional, was born in London on 6 February 1945 at 20:00. The calculator's time zone data puts London on summer time, one hour ahead of GMT, through that wartime winter. Her six corners are Venus (4°27' Aries), Uranus (9°08' Gemini, R), Pluto (8°54' Leo, R), Neptune (6°10' Libra, R), the Moon (3°07' Sagittarius) and Mercury (2°09' Aquarius). The Sun, at 17°39' Aquarius, is not part of it: it sits between Mercury, 15.49° behind it, and Venus, 46.81° ahead.

The other eleven legs also hold. Chiron at 3°00' Libra, 3.18° from Neptune, can stand in Neptune's corner, so there are two body combinations. The figure held from 16:10 on 6 February, when the Moon-Uranus opposition reached 172°, to 07:04 on 7 February, after which the Mercury-Moon sextile dropped to 53.99°. Mercury and Venus fill two neighbouring corners, which is why a rule like "the Sun, Mercury and Venus can fill at most one corner" does not hold once the Sun is left out.

What a search of 140 years found

To find these examples, rather than assume either way, the free chart's own routines (code version 512fc104) were used on every date from 1 January 1920 to 31 December 2059. The body set was the Sun, Moon, Mercury through Pluto and Chiron, without the Nodes. Each date was first screened at 12:00 London time with tolerances wide enough for a full day of planetary motion and for every position the Moon could reach that day. The 114 dates that passed the screen were then recalculated at every whole minute from 00:00 to 23:59 London time, and all fifteen legs were tested with the flat orbs.

• 26 different sets of six bodies passed all fifteen legs, on 24 dates falling into 15 separate periods between 1937 and 2058.
• Every one of them included the Moon, so every one depends on the time of birth.
• No combination without the Moon passed. The closest, at 11:27 on 17 July 1958, used Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn and Chiron and missed two legs by 0.03° and 0.04°.

These results describe one search with one place, one body set and one-minute resolution. They are not evidence that a grand sextile without the Moon cannot happen, and they are not a statement about how many people have one. A different body set, for example one including the Nodes or the angles, would give different results; so would a wider orb policy. What the search does show is that the figure exists under the site's own strict, flat orbs, and that the Moon's position, and therefore the birth time, decided every case found.

The Nodes, the angles and the wheel

Theo's North Node is at 20°31' Taurus, about 9° from his Moon, and does not take part. The opposition between the two Nodes is never counted as a leg, because it is built into their definition, so a "grand sextile" that used both Nodes as opposite corners would not count here. The angles are left out too: the wheel draws no aspect lines to them, and they need a reliable birth time.

On Theo's wheel the six corner glyphs sit close to their ticks (Chiron's is moved about 2°), but Mercury, Venus and Pluto, which are not in the figure, crowd together between the Sun and Chiron and are each pushed about 15° sideways. Trace the star from the ticks. The table's minutes are truncated from positions rounded to 0.01°, so the 07:31 and 02:00 boundaries above are as fine as the calculator's own output allows, and a margin of a few hundredths of a degree, like the 1958 near miss, cannot be read from the table.

To check your own chart, generate your free birth chart and start from the oppositions: a grand sextile needs three that do not share a body. Questions about a specific figure can go to Ask the Astrologist.

Related articles

• Sun Opposite Moon
• Saturn Opposite Chiron
• Mars Opposite Jupiter
• Aspect Patterns in Astrology