Waning Sextile

Definition

A 60° aspect formed after two bodies have passed their opposition and the faster body is closing back toward conjunction with the slower. In the modern humanistic phase-aspect tradition, the waning sextile is distinguished from the waxing sextile (which forms before the opposition) by its position in the cyclic sequence: the waning phase carries the cycle's consolidating, distributing, or releasing character rather than the waxing phase's building character. The 60° angle itself is the standard sextile; the waning qualifier names which side of the opposition it occupies.

In Tradition

In Dane Rudhyar's humanistic phase-aspect framework the sextile is one of the constructive aspects of the cycle — the second triangular-series aspect — at which the project or idea is brought forth into the active patterning of personality. The waxing/waning distinction adds a second axis: aspects formed before the opposition are waxing (building and outpouring), aspects after the opposition are waning (consolidating and distributing). The waning sextile inherits the sextile's constructive valence and adds the waning-phase quality of releasing the cycle's harvest back into shared life.

In Practice

Practitioners working in the humanistic-astrology lineage read the waning sextile as a moment in a transit or progression cycle when the consolidating phase opens an opportunity for the cycle's accumulated work to be expressed outward toward others or distributed back into the wider community. For an outer-planet transit to a natal point, the waning sextile is identified by checking that the transiting body has already passed the opposition with the natal position and is now approaching the conjunction at the 60° marker. The phase reading is typically paired with the eight-phase lunation-cycle framework Rudhyar developed for sun-moon relationships and generalised to any two-body cycle. The technique is most often surfaced in evolutionary and humanistic readings; classical Hellenistic practice does not split the sextile into waxing and waning forms.

Historical Origin

The waxing/waning sextile distinction is a 20th-century humanistic-astrology refinement, articulated in Dane Rudhyar's *The Astrology of Personality* (1936) as part of his reframing of aspects as phases of a cyclic process rather than fixed valuations of fortune or misfortune. Rudhyar's eight-phase lunation cycle (developed in his later *Lunation Cycle*) supplied the template that the waxing/waning aspect distinction generalises across all two-body relationships. The classical Hellenistic tradition treats the sextile as a single aspect without the waxing/waning split.

Definition

In Tradition

In Practice

Historical Origin

Further Reading