The seven Hermetic principles are the best known statement of Hermetic philosophy in the modern world. They are short enough to memorize and deep enough to occupy a lifetime of reflection. They are also widely misunderstood, both by those who treat them as ancient scripture and by those who dismiss them for not being so. This page sets out each principle, says honestly where the list comes from, and suggests how to work with it.
In brief
- The seven principles were first published as a list in The Kybalion in 1908.
- They are a modern summary, not a quotation from the ancient Hermetica, though several have ancient roots.
- Each is best treated as a working lens: a way of looking that you test in experience.
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The Principle of Mentalism
"The All is Mind; the Universe is Mental."
The first principle is the foundation of the other six. It states that the ultimate reality, which the text calls the All, is of the nature of mind, and that the universe exists as a thought exists within a thinker. This is not the claim that the world is your personal dream. Your mind is in the All; the All is not in your mind. But because the world is mental in its substance, mind is not a stranger in it, and a change in consciousness is a real event with real effects.
The idea has genuine ancient ancestry. The first treatise of the Corpus Hermeticum opens with a vision in which the divine Mind, Poimandres, reveals that all things began as light and thought.
In practice. Notice, for one week, how much of what you call the world reaches you already interpreted. Before changing anything outside, look at the picture you are holding of it.
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The Principle of Correspondence
"As above, so below; as below, so above."
There is a likeness between the different levels of existence. The pattern found in the heavens is found again in the human being, and again in the cell and the atom. What is true of the great world, the macrocosm, is true in its own manner of the small world, the microcosm. This is the oldest of the seven, taken almost word for word from the Emerald Tablet.
Correspondence is the working principle of all practical magick. It is the reason a metal, a color, a day of the week and a quality of character can be grouped under one planet, and the reason a symbol can stand for a force. It is a principle of analogy, and analogy has to be handled with care: likeness is not sameness.
In practice. Study the tables of correspondence. When a problem resists you on one level, ask what it resembles on another.
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The Principle of Vibration
"Nothing rests; everything moves; everything vibrates."
Nothing in the universe is still. Matter, energy, mind and spirit are said to differ not in kind but in their rate of motion, as ice, water and steam are one substance in three conditions. The practical teaching drawn from this is that states of mind are also rates of motion, and that they can be raised or lowered deliberately by attention, posture, breath, sound and image.
This principle is the one most often dressed in borrowed scientific language. It was written when the physics of waves and radiation was new and exciting, and it should be read as philosophy from that moment, not as physics.
In practice. Learn to notice the tone of your own mind several times a day, and learn two or three reliable ways of changing it. Meditation is the school for this.
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The Principle of Polarity
"Everything is dual; everything has poles; everything has its pair of opposites; like and unlike are the same; opposites are identical in nature, but different in degree."
Hot and cold are not two things but two ends of one thing, temperature. So, the principle claims, are courage and fear, love and hate, light and dark. Opposites are degrees on a single scale, and no one can say where one ends and the other begins. From this follows the art the book calls mental transmutation: a state can be changed into its opposite by moving along the scale, where it cannot be changed into something on a different scale altogether.
In practice. When caught in a state you do not want, name its opposite on the same scale and attend to that. Fear is not answered by reasoning but by cultivating courage, in small acts, one degree at a time.
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The Principle of Rhythm
"Everything flows, out and in; everything has its tides; all things rise and fall; the pendulum swing manifests in everything."
Between the poles of any pair there is movement, and the movement is rhythmic. Seasons, tides, breath, sleep and waking, enthusiasm and fatigue, the rise and decline of nations: all swing. The measure of the swing in one direction is the measure of the swing in the other. The student cannot abolish rhythm but can learn to recognize it, to avoid mistaking a low tide for a permanent loss, and to rest the mind at a point above the swing.
In practice. Keep the diary long enough to see your own cycles. Most people find a period of dryness follows every advance. Knowing this in advance removes much of its sting.
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The Principle of Cause and Effect
"Every cause has its effect; every effect has its cause; everything happens according to law; chance is but a name for law not recognized."
Nothing merely happens. Every event has a cause and becomes a cause in turn, in an unbroken chain. Most people, the text says, are moved about by causes outside themselves: heredity, suggestion, the moods of others, the habits of the crowd. The aim of training is not to escape causation, which is impossible, but to rise to a level at which one is more often a cause than an effect.
In practice. At the end of each day, find one action that was a reaction and trace what set it off. The training of the will begins with seeing how seldom it is used.
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The Principle of Gender
"Gender is in everything; everything has its masculine and feminine principles; gender manifests on all planes."
The word is used here in an old sense related to generation: the bringing of things into being. The principle holds that all creation requires two powers, one projective and one receptive and formative, and that both are present in every thing and every person. In the mind, the projective power is the will that sends out an idea and the receptive power is the imagination that takes it in and gives it body.
The principle is not a statement about men and women, their abilities or their roles, and it should not be read as one. The alchemists pictured the same idea as the marriage of the Sun and the Moon within a single vessel.
In practice. Notice which of the two powers you neglect. Those who only project exhaust themselves; those who only receive never begin.
Where the principles come from
The seven principles appear as a list in The Kybalion, a short book published in 1908 under the pen name Three Initiates. The book presents itself as a commentary on an ancient oral teaching. No such earlier source has ever been found, and historians regard the book as a product of its own time, shaped by the popular philosophy of mental power then current as much as by the ancient texts.
That does not make it a fraud. Correspondence comes directly from the Emerald Tablet. Mentalism restates the central doctrine of the Corpus Hermeticum. Polarity and rhythm echo early Greek philosophy. The others have looser connections. The fairest description is that The Kybalion is a modern Hermetic work: a restatement, in the idiom of 1908, of themes that are truly old. It should be read with the ancient sources and not instead of them.
Working with the principles
A principle read once is an opinion. A principle looked for every day for a week begins to be a perception. The following exercise has been used by many students in one form or another.
Practice
Seven weeks, seven lenses
- Take one principle each week, in order. Write its axiom on the first line of each day's diary entry.
- During the day, look for one clear instance of the principle at work, in nature, in other people or in yourself.
- In the evening, describe the instance in two or three sentences. Record also any case where the principle seemed not to fit.
- At the end of the seven weeks, read the whole record and note which principle taught you most and which you resisted.
Cautions
Three misuses are common enough to name. The first is to use cause and effect to blame people for their misfortunes, as if illness or poverty were proof of wrong thinking. The principle says that events have causes. It does not say that the sufferer is the cause. The second is to use vibration and mentalism to claim the support of modern physics. They do not have it and do not need it. The third is to treat the seven as a complete account of Hermeticism. They are a doorway. The ancient texts lie beyond it.