By Kirsti Melto, with editing by Chad Townsend
Polarity is a quintessential principle in astrology. It is one of the keystones of Hermetic philosophy. This principle embodies the idea that everything is dual; there are two sides to everything. Good and evil, for example, are the two extremes of the same thing, and there are many varying degrees between them.
Another Hermetic principle is that of gender. Everything in the cosmos has its masculine and feminine principles. All things rise and fall; sometimes the masculine aspect is manifesting itself more clearly, and at other times the feminine.
In astrology these principles are at work in the opposite signs of the zodiac, in the house polarity, and also on the plane of the planet symbolism.
In the Sagittarius Full Moon chart, the Sun and the Moon, a pair of masculine and feminine symbols are opposite each other, as they are at the moment of any Full Moon. Another pair of planets representing the principle of gender are Venus and Mars, this time conjoined in the early degrees of Taurus. They are trining Pluto in Capricorn.
Isabel M. Hickey was emphasizing the dual nature of Pluto in her pamphlet Pluto or Minerva: The Choice is Yours in 1973. She proposed that there was what we normally think of as the Plutonian aspect of Pluto, and then the wisdom aspect, which she described as Minerva. Quoting Hickey: “Every energy that challenges us has two poles that act as attracting forces. As individuals we are pulled by both of them until we find the balancing force in the third force which is the center between the two opposing pulls.”
It turned out later that Pluto is a binary planet. In 1978 Pluto’s companion Charon was discovered. A binary planet is a pair of worlds that are usually roughly similar in mass. They orbit around their common center of mass, called the barycenter. The barycenter is the point between two objects where they balance each other.