Chart patterns
Grand sextile
A hexagon, and the rarest thing a chart can do
- Planets involved
- 6
- Built from
- soft aspects
- Focal point
- None
What it is
Six planets spaced 60 degrees apart all the way around the wheel. Every pair among them is a sextile, a trine or an opposition, which comes to six sextiles, six trines and three oppositions, and the figure drawn inside the circle is a hexagram.
It contains two grand trines, three mystic rectangles and six kites. That is not a coincidence, it is what a regular hexagon is made of, and it is the reason the site reports the whole shape rather than its fifteen constituent parts.
It is also called the Star of David pattern, which is a modern name rather than a traditional one.
How it reads
The tradition has less to say about this than about any other pattern here, for the plain reason that almost nobody has one and the material could not accumulate. What exists reads it as the grand trine argument taken to its limit: nothing in the chart is under strain, and there is correspondingly little forcing anything.
Where the pattern is described in detail it is usually with the same caution attached to the grand trine, that a completely self-supporting configuration supplies no reason to develop. The three oppositions are the part that stops it being entirely closed.
Anything more specific than that is invention. This entry is short because the tradition is.
There is no apex. It is the most symmetrical figure a chart can make, and no point in it is privileged.
How common it actually is
The only pattern here that earns the word rare. In 73,049 charts, one for every day from 1900 to 2100, it occurred exactly once. Everything else on this page is at least five hundred times more frequent, which is why the site uses the word about this one and about nothing else.
What to watch for
Claims of significance in proportion to rarity. A configuration being unusual is a fact about frequency and not about the person, and this pattern attracts more overreach than the other seven combined.
Do you have a grand sextile?
The birth chart tool checks for this and the other seven, and names the planets involved. Whether you have one depends on your birth date, time and place, and on the orbs used: this site detects grand sextiles on the ten planets, without the angles.
The other patterns
- T-squareTwo planets opposite each other, both square a third
- Grand trineThree planets each 120 degrees from the other two
- Grand crossTwo oppositions at right angles: four planets, four squares
- YodTwo planets sextile, both quincunx a third
- KiteA grand trine with a fourth planet opposite one of its points
- Mystic rectangleTwo oppositions joined by two trines and two sextiles
- StelliumThree or more planets in one sign