The Kybalion: The Seven Principles of Hermetic Alchemy
The Kybalion is a 1908 work which summarizes the Corpus Hermeticum for a modern audience. It taps into the same vein of thought which inspired Relativity and Quantum Mechanics, and is considered a foundational work for understanding Hermeticism and Alchemy.
The seven principles are: Mentalism, Correspondence, Vibration, Polarity, Rhythm, Cause and Effect, and Gender.
You can easily find it for free online, but if you want a handsome looking hardcover edition, it is available on Amazon (this is an affiliate link): https://amzn.to/47ymBMW
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This is the first video in a new series on alchemy and Hermeticism that's going to be put into a playlist on my channel.
The topic of this video is the seven principles of Hermeticism from the 1908 book, The Kabbalion, written by the Three Wise Masters.
It is a distillation of alchemical theory, of Hermetic philosophy.
Now, I'm sure that most of you have heard the term Hermetic before.
Some of you are thinking of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, others might be thinking of Hermetically Sealed.
Both those terms come from the same origin source.
And both of them come from medieval alchemy.
Hermes Trismegistus is the source of the term Hermetic.
He is the legendary figure to whom many in the 15th century attributed the Prisca Theologia, the original true religion.
Attributed to him and Moses, contemporaries, according to legend.
These were the men, the demigods, that brought so much truth and wisdom into this world.
And the Kabbalion, printed in 1908, sums up these philosophies into seven principles.
So in this video, We're going to be discussing the context in which the Kabbalion was written.
Who likely wrote it?
We're going to be discussing the seven principles themselves and how you can apply them in your own life.
And we're going to be taking a broader overview of what we are to make of all these ancient claims to knowledge.
So, as I said, the Kabbalion was written in 1908, published in 1908.
And the authorship is attributed to the three initiates.
The three initiates are likely, almost certainly, a pseudopigrapha, a nom de plume, a pseudonym for William Atkinson, who was a lawyer and a prominent figure in the New Thought movement of the early 20th century.
We're almost certain he wrote it.
Very, very interesting guy.
And now, when it comes to pseudopagrapha, to false attribution of author, this is one of those issues that is viewed a certain way by the modern audience, by the materialist science we live under, but likely appeared quite differently.
If you research the term, there were so many texts written.
In ancient times, with the authorship attributed to legendary figures.
This is viewed in modern times as trying to claim special authorship, trying to make your work seem more important than it is.
But I think this largely misses the point if you had such an important work, wouldn't you want to take credit for it?
No, pseudopagrapha, I think, can be better understood by the anonymous posters on the Chans.
Because when people post on the Chans, they don't get ego satisfaction.
They don't get fame.
They don't get reputation.
All they do is they get to post the truth as best they can speak it.
And so when we see these ancient texts claiming authorship of Hermes Trismegistus, claiming authorship of Moses, claiming authorship, Of Enoch.
Now, as historians, we are quite interested in trying to figure out where they came from, when they were written.
But to attribute these texts to venality, to desire for fame, to dishonesty, largely misunderstands what's going on.
So, in the case of the Kabbalion, the fact that it was written by a very prominent figure, by his own publishing house, William Atkinson, under a pseudonym, a pseudopagrapha, does that mean we should discount it so readily?
No, no, I think not.
Because the ideas encapsulated in it are profound.
In many ways, they are an excellent summation of Hermes Trismegistus, himself likely a pseudepigrapha figure.
Allegedly a contemporary of Moses, a historical reconstruction, a combination of Hermes, the god of communication, and Toth, the Egyptian god of wisdom.
Profound Connections in Reality00:12:19
Sort of a philosophical.
Enlightened sage in the vein of Hercules, who was based upon a real historical figure of King Heracles shortly before the Bronze Age collapse.
Likely a little bit more mythical than Heracles, but nonetheless pointing towards something, pointing towards that Prisca Theosophia.
Sorry, Prisca Theologia.
That dream, which was reinvigorated during the Renaissance, of an original true religion, of the primordial truth that presented in ancient times for all peoples, and which we are slowly trying to rediscover.
That is the vein in which we should approach this work.
And so, with that said, let us get to these seven principles of Hermetic philosophy.
These seven principles of alchemy.
They are number one, the principle of mentalism.
Number two, the principle of correspondence.
Number three, the principle of vibration.
Number four, the principle of Of polarity.
Number five, the principle of rhythm.
Number six, the principle of cause and effect.
Number seven, the principle of gender.
Let's dig into these one by one.
So, first we have the principle of mentalism, and this is a very ancient view.
It was at the time of publishing very much a reaction against the simple materialism which was so popular, the clockwork universe.
The principle of mentalism is that all is mind, that the universe has no meaningful existence outside of the realm of perception.
This is one of those things that it's so easy to lose yourself in these days.
It's so easy to get lost in doing what you do, living your life, that you forget that you are there observing the life.
It's the strangest thing about being an observer is not realizing that you're observing.
That all of this around you, your physical environment, this YouTube video, the physical state of your body, all of this is a simulation being created within your own mind.
Your eyes take in data from the universe around you.
They take in sensory perceptions.
They run it through a filter.
And then your mind creates this virtual reality for you to observe.
The world that we see is not the world, the world that we see is what our minds created for us to see.
It goes far more profound than that, obviously.
But the world is just what we are able to recreate from our understanding, from our own mind.
All is mind.
Without observation, without perception, without meaning, there's just mechanical functions, meaningless mechanical functions.
No, this is not a clockwork universe.
All is mind.
Principle number two the principle of correspondence.
As above, so below.
As within, so without.
As below, so above.
As without, so within.
This is the I thou dichotomy.
We're in this strange universe of multiple observers.
A solitary observer would just be an eternity of staring into the mirror.
Instead, we have a universe of multiple observers, of negotiated reality in between all the different observers, all the different.
Points of observation simulating their own mental reality.
And so, what we find, what the practitioner of the esoteric arts finds, is that the external world is a reflection of their internal self.
And their external self can manufacture the internal self.
That what happens at the highest levels of reality and what happens at the most primordial levels of reality are mirrors of one another.
They are connected to one another.
The great sages of our species are seldom concerned with high ideology.
They are concerned with base level operations.
You go to them with a marital squabble and they say, How are you eating?
There is a profound connection between the highest of things and the lowest of things.
And the crudest, most external of things, and the interior, most intimate of things.
As above, so below.
Third, we have the principle of vibration.
Everything is vibrating, everything is changing, everything is moving.
Everything is vibe.
One of the great errors that the adult mind makes is the conception of object permanence.
This is a developmental achievement during childhood, which becomes a cage, because there is no object permanence.
Is change all is moving, just some of it moves so slowly that we don't notice.
We mistake something for being the truth, for being the absolute, when it's just a piece of metal that's going to rust away.
Everything is always vibrating up and down, up and down, hot and cold, left and right.
Between the crude physical world, which we directly apprehend and imagine ourselves to be a part of,
and the astral plane, which is the realm of ideas, of philosophies, of mathematics, of personalities, of Platonic forms.
In between those two realms, you get the ethereal, which is the realm of vibration, the realm of vibes.
It's where music is.
Music perfectly bounds these two realms.
On the one hand, music does fall into the concrete, vulgar reality of strings and sound waves, while also touching upon higher.
Astral concepts of meaning.
The ethereal is that level of reality where vibration exists and everything is vibrating all the time.
Next, we get the principle of polarity, which is the one I find the most interesting.
And it's that all opposites are made out of the same substance.
Now, there is no true opposite, there's just one thing stretched out into the appearance of difference.
Pole of the magnet.
And to the crude perception of reality, these are opposites.
But there's a field going throughout them, curving invisibly on either side and throughout the object itself.
If you cut a magnet in half, you don't get two north poles, you get a north and a south.
And so it goes for all apparent opposites.
All opposites are made out of the same substance.
They are just different degrees of the same pattern.
Next, you get the principle of rhythm.
And as you can see, these are very dualistic laws, aren't they?
Each one building off of the last one.
Principle of rhythm is that all moves in rhythms.
You breathe in, you breathe out.
Your heart beats.
Sun comes up, sun goes down.
This rhythmic change is ongoing and inevitable, and you're participating in it, whether or not you realize it.
All is Rhythm.
The Rhythm of Everything00:04:06
Principle number six, the principle of cause and effect.
Now, this might seem like we're going back into simple materialism here.
Cause and effect, isn't that the primordial assumption underlying the materialist philosophy?
But the materialist philosophy always imagines itself an outside observer to cause and effect.
Some third party that's not consulted by the cause and effect, that merely observes a cause and the effect.
As opposed to the endless, embedded, enmeshed chain of cause and effect that's everywhere and constant, and you yourself are a participant within it.
And finally, principle number seven, the principle of gender, of masculine and feminine, of giving and receiving, building and nurturing.
Destroying and suppressing.
This gender conception is very foundational to reality itself.
And of course, each of us has these opposites within us.
Within the yin, yang is a dark spot of yin, within the yin is a white spot of yang.
Because of the principle of polarity.
All things are part of the same polarity.
They're not different in kind, they're just different in degree.
And yet this, these genders to reality are inherent.
So, those are the seven principles.
Once again, the principle of mentalism, all is mind.
The principle of correspondence, as above, so below.
The principle of vibration, all is vibrating, all is changing all the time.
The principle of polarity, opposites are the same, they're not different, they're just different in degree.
The principle of rhythm, everything is moving in rhythm.
Principle of cause and effect.
You are an embedded chain of cause and effects.
And the principle of gender.
There's the masculine, the solar, the creative, and the feminine, the absorbative, the nurturing, the destructive.
These are the elements that make up reality itself.
Perennial Philosophy Explained00:14:51
So, what are we to do with this book?
How ought we to regard it?
Is it an apt description of Hermetic philosophy?
And what are we to do with the concept of pseudepigrapha?
Now, let's go back to the 15th century for a moment.
If you remember what you were not taught in school, this was the Renaissance.
After the fall of Rome, we lost 99% of the books ever written.
They disappeared.
Books don't last forever.
It's not that they burned up.
In libraries, although sometimes that happened, it's that books back then, written on parchment, needed to be copied and rewritten periodically.
You couldn't just print them off Amazon, it was a very expensive endeavor.
That's what libraries were.
They were institutions that would take old, rotting books and copy them onto new vellum.
And when Rome collapsed, when the financial apocalypse hit, we lost 99% of our books.
The Renaissance is when we began to rediscover the 1% that had been somehow saved in various places.
And so we have this concept of the Prisca Theologia, the one true original philosophy.
In those books, if we can just find the sacred tone, we will have the wisdom of the ancients again.
This is not a philosophy I believe in.
If I had lived during the Renaissance, it would have been a school of thought I loved that I participated in.
But 600 years later, not so much.
I don't believe there was ever one true tome of knowledge.
Not exactly.
Yeah, I could be wrong on that.
I could be wrong.
But it's not the school of philosophy I believe in.
The school of philosophy I believe in is the perennial philosophy.
That true religion appears and manifests in different times and different places.
Thing.
It sounds a little bit different because it's for the people of that time, for the people of that place.
But there is this perennial philosophy.
There is this one truth that keeps appearing to humanity in different forms and different mottos.
But it keeps appearing again and again.
And so as a perennial philosophist, when I consider the Kabbalion, Is it some pseudoscientific work of false authorship and arrogance?
Or is it simultaneity?
Is it synchronicity?
Is it the perennial philosophy accurately re describing the words attributed to Hermes Trismegistus?
In a manner relevant for the time and the place.
As I said, William Atkinson wrote this book, almost certainly he wrote it, in 1908.
In 1905, Einstein published his first theory of relativity, and in 1915 he published the second.
This was also the period where all of the experimental data coming in that would eventually lead to quantum theory.
This is when it was coming in.
We didn't have quantum mechanics just yet.
But we were starting to notice the bits that didn't fit.
When I said all was vibration, how many of you thought about the fact that not only are photons both a particle and a wave, but in fact, all particles are also waves?
You have to believe that Atkinson was either completely on top of the advanced physics journals of his time, which completely goes against the standard assumptions about material reality, which sadly still are very prevalent.
This idea of the clockwork universe, of the billiard ball universe.
This has been thoroughly disproven for well over a century.
Is this a precise recounting of what the attributed writings of Hermes Trismegistus said?
The Corpus Hermeticum?
No, it's a bit more distilled.
It's distilled into modern language, but it's also extremely prophetic and useful.
In many ways, it better represented the contemporaneous theories of relativity that Einstein was playing with than anything else did.
I attribute it to synchronicity.
People don't have thoughts, thoughts have people.
And Atkinson was tapping into the same vein of idea as Einstein.
He was just expressing it in a more philosophical sense.
No, this is not an ancient book of wisdom.
This is not some distillation of primordial truth.
This is the perennial philosophy helping us to overthrow gross materialism and embrace the quantum mechanical nature of reality, which we are still very much struggling to understand.
Your average atheist cult person still believes in the material billiard ball universe.
So, yes, these concepts of Hermeticism and alchemy are extremely valuable.
So, let's go over these laws one more time, these principles, and discuss how you can apply them on a daily basis.
Coherent with our current understanding of physics, coherent with our current understanding of philosophy and psychology.
How you can apply all of this to not act like a dunce from the 19th century, but instead act like a person from the 21st century who is pursuing enlightenment.
Number one, the principle of mentalism.
All is mind.
The great conceit of the scientific method, the great shell game of it, is that the observer is outside of the experiment.
This is the issue that comes up with the observer effect.
Anytime you hear the observer effect, that observing the quantum mechanical reaction changes it.
Okay, give me five pounds of observer.
Observer is not a scientific concept.
The whole premise of the scientific method is that we observe the billiard balls and we never ask what an observer is.
I'll talk more about this in a future video.
But if all is mental, be aware that you are an observer, that you are mentally observing this universe.
You are not your body.
You are not your drives.
You are not your emotions.
You are not your thoughts.
You are the observer.
All is mental.
Number two, correspondence.
As above, so below.
As within, so without.
What you manifest inside yourself, you manifest outside yourself.
Be aware of what's operating internally, because what's operating internally creates what's operating externally.
The principle of vibration.
How are you vibrating right now?
What is your level of vibration?
Do you even know?
Because if you know, then you can change it.
There's nothing wrong with a low frequency, there's nothing right about a high frequency.
There's a time for each, a place for everything.
Be aware of your vibration.
Be aware of the vibration of your surroundings and harmonize.
Principle of polarity.
That which you hate is that what you are.
That which you resist persists.
That thing that you think is part of the external world is your Jungian shadow, which is the source of your greatest inspiration, creativity, and power.
To fight against the world is to fight against the self.
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Leading to the next one.
All is rhythm.
All is the pendulum.
This one in particular is really throwing society off the rails right now.
Everything is a pendulum.
Summer and winter.
People vote left.
People vote right.
The pendulum is getting faster and faster and faster.
And the harder you fight something, the harder it swings back.
Do you want to be a part of this pendulum?
When you join the part that goes this way, you're predicting the part that goes this way.
You're.
condemning yourself to the part that goes this way.
you What you should be seeking to do as part of rhythm, there's a part of the song where the guitar solo happens.
There's a part of the song where the drum solo happens.
And you should be seeking out parts of the rhythm which accommodate you without imagining that there's never going to be a drum solo.
Participate when it's good.
When your success means another's failure, that's called hubris and nemesis.
Be very, very wary of that.
The pendulum can also generate energy for an electric motor.
Whose motor are you fueling?
Principle of cause and effect.
You are not an independent agent.
The world is not some RPG universe just waiting for the player character to come push buttons, just waiting patiently until you show up.
You're actively engaged in this cause and effect at all times.
Be conscious of every effect which arrives at your door and every cause.
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That you initiate.
And finally, the principality of gender.
You know, 20 years ago, I think we were completely lost on the gender issue.
We had no idea what gender even was.
We just knew that the feminists were quite angry about everything.
We had no conception of the masculine altering reality, the feminine being receptive to reality.
There's a time and place for both.
And you, regardless of your sex, have both of those gendered aspects within you.
Though generally based upon your sex, you are called to manifest one overtly and manifest the other covertly.
Of all these things.
If you, and I heartily recommend, if you go and read the Kabbalion, one of the things that stood out to me is that it was written in 1908.
I hope I've put a little bit more of a modern spin, a little bit more modern profundity to some of these principles than appeared in the original text.
And I think that you will as well.
Okay, it didn't take some great act of genius for me to see that, geez, principle of vibration.
That's the double slit experiment right there.
There's no great genius there.
It's just being somebody who perceives reality in the current year of our Lord, the foul year of our Lord, 2026.
I think you'll see a little bit further than Atkinson saw when you read his principles.