The Kybalion 2 — The Seven Hermetic Principles

"The Principles of Truth are Seven; he who knows these, understandingly, possesses the Magic Key before whose touch all the Doors of the Temple fly open."

The seven, with their core aphorisms:

1. Mentalism — "THE ALL IS MIND; The Universe is Mental."

2. Correspondence — "As above, so below; as below, so above."

3. Vibration — "Nothing rests; everything moves; everything vibrates."

4. 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; extremes meet; all truths are but half-truths; all paradoxes may be reconciled."

5. Rhythm — "Everything flows, out and in; everything has its tides; all things rise and fall; the pendulum-swing manifests in everything; the measure of the swing to the right is the measure of the swing to the left; rhythm compensates."

6. 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; there are many planes of causation, but nothing escapes the Law."

7. Gender — "Gender is in everything; everything has its Masculine and Feminine Principles; Gender manifests on all planes."

This is the architectural chapter — the table of contents of reality as the Hermetists draw it. Seven principles, each a compressed aphorism, each later expanded into its own chapter. The number seven is not incidental; it recurs across the ancient sciences (seven classical planets, seven musical notes, seven days) as a number associated with completeness, and the authors lean on that resonance to present the list as a finished whole rather than an arbitrary catalog.

What is striking is the order. Mentalism comes first because everything else hangs from it: if the universe is fundamentally mental — a thought in the mind of THE ALL — then the remaining six principles are descriptions of how that mental universe behaves. Correspondence (the harmony of planes) lets you reason from the known to the unknown. Then come the four "dynamic" principles describing how the mental universe moves: Vibration (everything is in motion), Polarity (everything has opposite poles), Rhythm (everything swings between them), and Cause and Effect (nothing happens by chance). Gender closes the list as the generative principle — the masculine and feminine aspects present in all creation, on every plane, which the book is careful to distinguish from sex.

The genius of the structure is its claim to universality. Each principle is asserted to operate identically on the physical, mental, and spiritual planes — which means the same seven keys are said to unlock chemistry, psychology, and metaphysics alike. Whether one accepts that sweeping claim or not, the seven principles function as an elegant heuristic: a small set of patterns you can look for in any system. The chapters that follow are simply these seven sentences, slowed down.

The Hermetic seven invite comparison with other compact "laws of everything" across traditions, though the parallels should be drawn carefully rather than collapsed. The Principle of Polarity and the Principle of Rhythm together strongly echo the Chinese yin–yang framework of the Yijing and Daoism, in which all phenomena arise from the interplay of complementary opposites that perpetually wax and wane into one another. The Principle of Cause and Effect — "nothing escapes the Law" — is the Indian doctrine of karma stated in Western terms: lawful consequence rather than chance, operating across multiple planes.

The Principle of Gender, with its masculine and feminine principles present in all creation, resonates with the Indian pairing of Śiva and Śakti — the still ground and the creative power — and again with yin and yang. The Principle of Correspondence is the direct heir of the Hermetic Emerald Tablet's "that which is below is like that which is above." And the Principle of Mentalism stands in the long lineage of philosophical idealism — from the Yogācāra Buddhist cittamātra ("mind-only") to Advaita Vedānta's non-dual consciousness to Bishop Berkeley's esse est percipi.

It is worth being honest that the convergence is partial. These traditions developed independently and disagree on much; the Hermetic system harmonizes them by abstraction, smoothing genuine differences into a single grid. The value of the comparison is not to prove the traditions are secretly identical, but to notice how often serious contemplatives reached for opposites-in-tension, lawful consequence, and an underlying unity as load-bearing ideas.

The practical worth of a seven-principle scheme is that it gives the mind a small set of lenses to rotate through when facing any situation. Stuck on a problem? Ask which principle is operative. Is this a polarity I'm treating as an either/or when it's really two ends of one continuum? Is this a rhythm — a low point in a swing that will return — that I'm mistaking for a permanent state? Am I looking for a cause where I assumed only chance? Is this an effect whose cause I haven't traced?

The principles work less as metaphysical claims to defend than as questions to ask. "Everything has its pair of opposites" reminds you to look for the hidden other side of any position. "The measure of the swing to the right is the measure of the swing to the left" warns that the height of an elation predicts the depth of the coming low. "Chance is but a name for Law not recognized" pushes you to look for pattern where you'd settled for randomness. Used this way, the list becomes a portable diagnostic rather than a creed.

Treat the seven principles as a mental checklist for analyzing any system — a relationship, a business, a mood, a market. When something feels stuck or chaotic, run down the list: motion (is anything actually changing?), polarity (am I forcing an either/or?), rhythm (is this a temporary swing?), causation (what's the upstream cause?), and so on. The exercise reliably surfaces angles you'd otherwise miss.

The most immediately useful pair for everyday life is Polarity and Rhythm. Recognizing that emotional states are poles on a continuum — and that they swing rhythmically — defuses a great deal of suffering. A bad mood understood as the low point of a pendulum swing, rather than a verdict on your life, is far easier to wait out. The later "Hermetic Axioms" chapter turns this into an explicit technique; this chapter simply plants the seeds.

A caution for modern readers: resist the temptation to treat the seven as a literal physics. Their power is as a framework for thought, not as verified mechanism. Held that way — loosely, as lenses — they remain genuinely useful long after the 1908 cosmology around them has dated.