The Creation of Life

In a battery, we definitely see that repulsion is as necessary as attraction—electrons are driven away from each other as they are driven toward protons. There’s no standard analogous magical act, and it’s a rich area worth exploring.

Further, the occult and science view the moment of energizing differently. Electrons energize as they move toward a proton; upon arrival, they neutralize. In magic, a common method of polarity work is to hold the unlike forces apart as long as possible and then bring them together, creating energy and immediately releasing it, at which point the work is complete and the force can be grounded/neutralized. Again, this difference creates a ripe field for exploration and experimentation, moving the magical work to different points in the connection of the polar forces.

The Creation of Life

Theories about the origins of life on earth are suggestive of polarity as well, including the theory that electricity itself was the catalyst. To quote one scientist, “Electric sparks can generate amino acids and sugars from an atmosphere loaded with water, methane, ammonia and hydrogen…[suggesting] that lightning might have helped create the key building blocks of life on Earth in its early days.”12 Or the catalyst might have been hydrothermal vents, generating immense heat in the ocean.

What’s clear is that a catalyst is required. Something—heat, electricity, crystals—acted to move molecules toward one another in a way that created life. The idea of polarity-as-catalyst is a powerful one, transcending gender, sex, and the human body entirely.

In an essay about polarity in Wicca, Lynna Landstreet sees this as critical. Describing the Wiccan ritual sometimes called the “symbolic Great Rite,” in which the ritual blade (athame) is plunged into a goblet of wine, she says:

That, to me, is the true Great Rite, of which all other enactments, sexual or not, are merely symbolic. That moment of lightning striking

12. Choi, “7 Theories on the Origin of Life.”