Polarities

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

A polarity entry records the twofold division of the zodiac signs into an active, outward charge and a receptive, inward one, running in strict alternation from Aries onward so that every sign of one polarity sits beside two signs of the other, a division Ptolemy's Tetrabiblos treats as a basic structural fact about the zodiac rather than as a late addition to it.

An entry records which polarity a sign or a chart factor belongs to under this documented ancient scheme, active for the odd numbered fire and air signs, receptive for the even numbered earth and water signs, and states the classical vocabulary, masculine and feminine, diurnal and nocturnal, that Ptolemy's own text actually uses for the distinction, distinct from the active and receptive language, or the yang and yin language, that later and other traditions have used to describe a comparable pairing.

Where modern practice borrows yin and yang specifically to describe this Western polarity, an entry names that as a documented modern pairing of two originally separate systems' vocabulary, since Ptolemy's own scheme and the Chinese cosmological pairing arose independently of one another and answer different, though structurally similar, questions.

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Richard Smith's academic study of the Yijing traces how yin and yang, the receptive and active principles of classical Chinese cosmology, developed within their own documented intellectual tradition, rooted in the Yijing's system of broken and unbroken lines centuries before any contact with Hellenistic astrology's own, separately developed masculine and feminine sign polarity.

That independent documented origin matters for a polarity entry because the two systems are genuinely separate historical developments that happen to organize a comparable twofold distinction, active paired with passive, expansive paired with receptive, rather than one tradition borrowing from or descending from the other, and Smith's study traces yin and yang's own evolution through Han dynasty correlative cosmology and beyond on its own documented terms.

An entry therefore records a Western chart factor's polarity using the vocabulary its own tradition actually uses, while naming honestly, where the comparison is made at all, that yin and yang belongs to a separate and independently documented Chinese cosmological system that Smith's study is the source for, not an interchangeable synonym imported from it.