Join Kadmus and JD Kelley as they investigate celestial polarities, planetary dualities, and stellar oppositions to speculate on the fecundity of astral paradoxes and the pluralism they produce.
Embedded within the coherence of Western Astrology are a series of fundamental relationships to the great circles, the elements, the luminaries, the planets, the signs, the stars, and the houses. These relationships are not exclusive to, but perhaps best approached foremost through their arrangement in polarities.
Polarity, in a strict astrological sense, refers to the division of the twelve zodiacal signs into two groups, positive/odd/masculine/finite and negative/even/feminine/infinite, with roots in Pythagorean philosophy. However, we can approach the term in a broader way metaphysically to involve duality and the interplay of seemingly opposing forces.
By way of introduction we will focus on Mercury. For it to be most fully understood astrologically, we can relate it to the polarity of which it is a part, that of the Mercurial-Jupiterian. Wherever we find Mercury we, too, find Jupiter. Considering the Mercurial and its associated impulses within this pairing offers a fuller spectrum of expression to clearly describe this necessarily ambiguous force.
While it may be easy to assume that these connections are allotted, fastened to their associations and like oil and water, never mix, this goes against the coherence implied within these relationships. For even prior to the sources of Hermetism, Heraclitus reminds us, “everything flows”, and, equally, “the way up and the way down are one and the same.” These fundamental relationships are paradoxical in nature—constantly pushing us to go beyond the polarities out of which they are made—and as such they are decidedly generative in effect, much like the cosmos from which they are based. It is these productive paradoxes, attesting and giving rise to pluralism, that we will seek to explore.
Kadmus is a practicing ceremonial magician. He published the book True to the Earth: Pagan Political Theology through Gods and Radicals Press and has taught classes every year for Salem Summer Symposium as well as for The Cauldron Black. He has also presented at the AstroMagia astrological magic conference the last two years including two keynote address, “Towards a High Pagan Astrology” and “Orpheus and Art as a Model of Magic”. Most recently he published the paper "Every Nekuomanteia is a Katabasis: Ancient Insights for Contemporary Necromancy" in Hadean Press’ Conjure Codex: Black anthology.