The Seven Hermetic Principles from the Kybalion
The most widely circulated summary of the Hermetic tradition in the modern world is the Kybalion, published in 1908 by the Yogi Publication Society of Chicago. The work appeared under the pseudonym “Three Initiates,” and modern scholarship now generally attributes the authorship to the American New Thought writer William Walker Atkinson (1862–1932). The seven principles set out in the Kybalion — mentalism, correspondence, vibration, polarity, rhythm, cause and effect, and gender — are not found together in any older Hermetic text. The work is best read as a 1908 compilation drawing on the Corpus Hermeticum, the Emerald Tablet, Knorr von Rosenroth’s Kabbala Denudata (1677–1684), and the New Thought and Mental Science movements of the period. The Kybalion is a modern text, not a recovered ancient one, and the sevenfold scheme is Atkinson’s, not the Corpus’s. The principles do, however, present recognisable elaborations of ideas that genuinely run through the older Hermetic tradition, and they have become the standard modern summary of the Hermetic worldview in the English-speaking world.
The seven principles are mentalism, correspondence, vibration, polarity, rhythm, cause and effect, and gender. What follows is an exposition of each.
Mentalism
The principle of mentalism holds that “the All is Mind” and that the universe is a mental creation. The cosmos is not a dead material thing outside of mind; it is the living thought of a living mind, and the physical world is a translation of that thought into a form perceivable by the senses. The Kybalion’s reading is sharper than the older Hermetic texts: for the Kybalion, the mental level is the only level, and everything else is a manifestation of it (Kybalion, chapter 1).
A dream is the standard illustration: a dream seems to be a world while it is being dreamed, even though it has no physical substance. The Kybalion asks the reader to take seriously the possibility that the waking world is, in this sense, also a kind of dream — a thought held in the mind of the All.
Correspondence
The principle of correspondence holds that there is a harmony between the several planes of manifestation, of existence, and of life. This is the famous “as above, so below,” drawn from the Emerald Tablet. The principle asserts that the laws that operate at one level of being operate analogously at every other level, so that the structure of the macrocosm can be read in the structure of the microcosm (Kybalion, chapter 2).
The human circulatory system, the branching of a tree, the shape of a river delta, and the structure of a lightning bolt are all governed by similar mathematical forms. The principle of correspondence would say that this is not coincidence but a deep structural harmony in the way being is organized.
Vibration
The principle of vibration holds that everything is in motion, in a constant state of vibration. Vibration is the principle that explains how the mental and physical worlds are related: the difference between them is not a difference of substance but a difference of frequency. Light, heat, sound, the motion of the planets, the thoughts of the mind, the emotions of the heart — all are vibrations, differing only in rate and amplitude. The Kybalion extends the older Pythagorean “harmony of the spheres” into a general metaphysics (Kybalion, chapter 3).
The difference between ice, water, and steam is a difference of molecular motion, not of substance.
Polarity
The principle of polarity holds that everything is dual, that everything has poles, and that everything has its pair of opposites. Opposites are not absolute but relative. Heat and cold, light and dark, love and hate, attraction and repulsion, are not separate things but two ends of the same thing. They differ in degree, not in kind. This principle underlies the alchemical operation of the chymical wedding (the chymos gamos or hieros gamos, the sacred marriage of opposites). The alchemists did not typically use the term coniunctio, which is Jung’s own term for what he identified in the alchemical texts (Jung, Mysterium Coniunctionis, 1955–56); the historical alchemical vocabulary is hieros gamos or chymos gamos (Kybalion, chapter 4).
The same person can be loving in one moment and cruel in the next. Love and hate are not two different things residing in the same person, but the same thing at different degrees of intensity.
Rhythm
The principle of rhythm holds that everything flows, out and in, and that everything has its tides, its rises and falls, its measured swing forward and back. The universe operates by cycles, and no state is permanent. Growth is followed by decay, expansion by contraction, activity by rest. The Hermetic tradition treats rhythm as the mechanism by which the principle of polarity operates: if opposites are not absolute, then the swing between them is the natural motion of things (Kybalion, chapter 5).
The breath is a rhythm. The heart is a rhythm. The sleep-wake cycle is a rhythm. Mood and energy rise and fall in rhythm.
Cause and Effect
The principle of cause and effect holds that every cause has its effect, and every effect has its cause. Nothing happens by chance; the chain of causation is unbroken. The Kybalion adds a practical edge: the principle is not only a description of the way things are, but also a tool of practice. To understand causation is to rise above it, to plant new causes for the effects one wishes to see. The Kybalion describes this as “the art of becoming a ‘mover’ rather than a ‘moved’” (Kybalion, chapter 6).
A small irritation that is left unaddressed does not stay small. By the time it becomes a serious problem, the chain of causation that produced it is long.
Gender
The principle of gender holds that gender is in everything, that everything has its masculine and feminine principles, and that gender manifests on every plane. Creation requires the union of opposites; the masculine and feminine principles are present in all things, and the work of generation is the work of bringing them together. The masculine principle is projection, activity, giving; the feminine principle is reception, gestation, bringing forth (Kybalion, chapter 7).
The seed is the masculine principle, the soil is the feminine principle, and the plant is the product of their union.
The Place of the Seven Principles
The seven principles, as a set, are not ancient Hermetic doctrine. They are a 1908 summary of an older tradition. Treated as a clear and structured summary, they are an effective introduction to the Hermetic worldview. The principles continue to be used, cited, and taught in contemporary occult and self-development contexts. The groups that use the principles most consistently include Builders of the Adytum (founded by Paul Foster Case in 1922), the Fraternitas Saturni (founded 1926 in Germany), the Confraternity of the Rose Cross (a Rosicrucian body), and the various post-Golden Dawn orders that draw on the Kybalion as a basic text.
The seven principles are not the same as the seven classical planets, the seven sephirot of the Kabbalistic Tree of Life, the seven rishis of Hindu tradition, or the seven rays of Theosophy, and the number 7 in Hermetic contexts is not a fixed quantity. The absolute idealism of the principle of mentalism is sharper than anything in the older Hermetic texts, which treat the material and the mental as two registers of a single cosmos rather than as one being reducible to the other.