I didn't find Hermeticism in a classroom. I found it the way most people do: a phrase here, a quote there. "As above, so below." It was the title of a horror movie I watched in my last year of high school, it sounded profound, so I went looking for it. I then stumbled on a translation of the Emerald Tablet by Hermes Trismegistus. I didn't understand it but what stuck with me was the end,

"As above, so below,
As within so without,
As the universe so the soul"

I did no further reading until I found an audiobook for the Kybalion by The Three Initiates. This enhanced my outlook on my existence and myself. So where does Hermeticism come from?

It comes from Hermes Trismegistus, "Hermes the Thrice-Great." He is a figure the Greeks built by joining their god Hermes to an older one: Thoth, the Egyptian god of wisdom and writing, the one who stood at the weighing of the heart and wrote down the result. So before anything else, know this. The roots of this tradition are not in Europe. They are in Egypt, in Africa.

The wisdom traveled. It passed through Greek hands, then through early twentieth-century American ones. The version most people know today, the seven principles and "as above, so below," comes from a small book published in 1908 called the Kybalion. Its authors called themselves "the Three Initiates," but they were almost certainly a single American man, William Walker Atkinson. That book is a doorway, not the house. The house is much older, and part of it belongs to the same continent we do.

You already know about tarot and astrology and the ancestors. You already trust that there's more going on than the eye can see. The seven principles are a way of putting names to things you already sense, and a way of using them. The Kybalion says, "When the ears of the student are ready to hear, then cometh the lips to fill them with wisdom." I suppose now, with the work you're doing, turning toward the hidden parts of yourself, you're already in exactly the territory these principles map. Shadow work has older cousins than you might think. Here is one of them.

I'm not an initiate. I'm a person who read the book and found it useful, and I think you will too.

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 Kybalion

Before I go into each one, here's the whole map. Seven principles. You don't have to hold onto them all now. You just need to see that they exist, so that when I walk through them one by one, you know where each one sits.

The Kybalion lists them like this:

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.
5. Rhythm: Everything flows, out and in; everything has its tides; all things rise and fall.
6. Cause and Effect: Every cause has its effect; every effect has its cause; nothing happens by chance.
7. Gender: Gender is in everything; everything has its masculine and feminine principles.

That's it. Seven sentences. Most of the rest of this book is just me unpacking what those seven sentences mean, and what they let you do.

But there are two things I need to give you first, because the principles sit on top of them. One is the All. The other is the trick that turns these from ideas into tools. That trick has an old name: transmutation.

Mind (as well as metals and elements) may be transmuted, from state to state; degree to degree; condition to condition; pole to pole; vibration to vibration.The Kybalion

Here's the part that separates reading about this stuff from actually using it.

"Transmutation" is an old word from alchemy. The alchemists wanted to turn lead into gold. The Hermetic take is that the same trick works on the mind. A state of mind can be changed into another state of mind. Fear into courage. Confusion into clarity. Not by pretending the first state isn't there, but by moving it, the way you'd turn a dial.

The word matters, because "change" makes it sound like you're swapping one thing for another. You're not. You're shifting something along a scale. The principles you're about to read give you the scales: vibration, polarity, rhythm. Transmutation is the skill of turning the dials.

Here's why I put this before the principles. A lot of people read the seven principles like they're seven facts about the universe. That's fine, but facts don't help you much at 2am when your mind is racing. The principles are levers. Transmutation is the hand that pulls them.

And this is not new to you. You already transmute states all the time. You pull yourself out of a mood. You sit with a feeling until it shifts. The principles just give you names for how it works.

THE ALL is Infinite Living Mind; the Illumined call it SPIRIT.The Kybalion

If Mentalism says the universe is mental, the natural next question is: the mind of what? The Kybalion's answer is the All.

The All is the name this tradition gives to the one thing underneath everything. Not a god in the sky, not a person with moods. Something simpler and stranger: the infinite, living mind that everything exists inside. The Kybalion is careful here. It says the All is everything, and at the same time it's more than everything, and that our minds can't actually hold it. The finite can't grasp the infinite. We can point at it. We can't wrap our arms around it.

Different traditions point at it with different names. Your ancestors had names for it. The tarot points at it sideways, through symbols. The Kybalion calls it the All. The name matters less than the idea: there is one thing, and it's alive, and it's mind, and you are inside it.

This is the ground the principles stand on. Keep it in the back of your mind as you read. When a principle says "everything," it means everything in the All.

The All is Mind; the Universe is Mental.The Kybalion

This is the first principle and the deepest.

As a photographer, when I look through a viewfinder, the photograph doesn't exist yet. It starts as something I see in my mind: a frame, a moment, a decision about what matters. Then the shutter opens and the image becomes real. The mind comes first. The picture follows.

Mentalism says reality works the same way, bigger than we can see from the inside. Everything that exists, exists first in a mind. Not your mind or mine. The mind of the All. The claim is this: the universe is not a machine made of dead matter. It is mind, consciousness all the way down. And we are inside it, the way a thought is inside the mind that is thinking it.

That's the whole of it, and it's easy to get wrong, so I'll say what it doesn't mean. It doesn't mean "you create your reality with your thoughts." That's the thin self-help version, and it flatters us by putting us at the centre. The Hermetic claim is stranger and more honest: reality is not shaped by mind. Reality IS mind. The All thinks, and we are what it is thinking.

The consequence of this is, if the universe is mental, then your inner life is the main room, not a side room. Shadow work is not a retreat from reality. It's where reality gets made.

As above, so below; as below, so above.The Kybalion

You already met this one in the Emerald Tablet, back in the first chapter. "As within, so without. As the universe, so the soul." It's the same idea, said three ways.

Correspondence says the patterns repeat. The same shape shows up at every level: in the universe, in a life, in a mind. The spiritual plane, the mental plane, the physical plane, they're not separate countries. They're the same country at different scales.

Now, that's pretty on its own, but the Kybalion treats it as a tool, and this is the part most people miss. If the levels mirror each other, then you can study one level and learn about another. You can study the part you can see, your own mind and your own life, and read the part you can't. As a photographer, I'll put it like this: I can tell you how the whole room is lit from a single shadow, because light behaves the same everywhere. The pattern in the small thing is the pattern in the whole thing.

That's what "as above, so below" is for. It's not a slogan. It's a method.

Nothing rests; everything moves; everything vibrates.The Kybalion

Nothing is still. Matter, thoughts, feelings, spirit. All of it is in motion. The only difference between one thing and another is the rate of the vibration. That's the whole principle. Simple, but it changes how you see the world.

Light is the easiest way to see it. The only difference between red and blue is the speed of the wave. Same stuff, different vibration. The Kybalion says reality works the same way. The difference between a rock and a thought is not that one is "real" and the other isn't. It's a difference of vibration. Spirit is the highest rate, matter the lowest, and everything in between is a point on that same scale.

Here's the useful part. If states are just vibration, then vibration can be changed. You can raise it. Grief, shame, the stuck feeling. These are low vibrations, not fixed facts about you. The wheel that's spinning fast enough looks still, and so does the stone that isn't moving at all. The extremes trick you into thinking nothing can change. The principle says otherwise.

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.The Kybalion

This is the one I want to spend the most time on, because it's the one people get wrong most often, and it's the one that speaks most directly to the work you're doing.

Polarity says every thing has two poles, and the poles are the same thing at different degrees. Heat and cold are not two different things. They're both temperature. Light and dark are not two different things. They're both light. There's no point where the light "ends" and the dark "begins."

As a photographer I think about this all the time. Look at a penumbra: the soft edge between a shadow and the light around it. Where does the darkness start? You can't point to it, because darkness is just a degree of the absence of light. And it works the other way too. Without that contrast, an image goes flat. Nothing stands out. It's the difference between the poles that lets you see anything at all.

Now, the trap. "Opposites are the same thing" sounds like it means "good and bad are the same, so nothing matters." That's not what it says. Each degree is different from the one next to it. Love and hate are not the same. They're on the same scale. At their most extreme, they can look almost indistinguishable, which is a strange and real thing, the way deep cold burns. But they're not the same, and the work is being able to move along that scale consciously.

That's the actual use of the principle. Because the poles are connected, you can walk from one to the other by degrees. You can't jump from hate to love. But you can move a little. That's what the Hermetic writers called the Art of Polarization.

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.The Kybalion

Everything swings. Everything breathes in and out. The tide comes in, the tide goes out. You feel good, then you feel bad, then good again. A pendulum. That's rhythm.

The hard part is the part people don't want to hear: the swing is measured. However far a thing swings to one side, it swings back just as far the other way. The Kybalion calls this compensation. What goes up must come down, and it comes down to the exact same depth. This is why the highest highs are followed by the lowest lows.

But here's the thing the principle actually gives you. You can't stop the swing, the pendulum will swing. But there's a still point at the centre, the exact middle of the arc, and a person can learn to rest there. Not holding still by force. Not resisting the swing. Just learning to stand at the point of rest, so the swing happens around you instead of dragging you with it. The writers called this the Law of Neutralization.

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.The Kybalion

This principle gets read as fatalism, "everything is caused, so nothing I do matters." It's the opposite.

Nothing happens by chance. "Chance" is just a word we use for a law we haven't spotted yet. That sounds cold until you see what it does. If nothing is random, then everything can be traced. When I sit down and actually look, I can follow a cause to its effect, and an effect back to its cause.

It's not a simple chain, though. It's more like dropping one group of marbles into another, a lot of causes touching a lot of causes, all at once. That's why tracing it takes time and honesty. But it can be traced.

And that's where the gift is. Most people live as effects. Things happen to them and they react. The Kybalion says the masters do something different: they rise above the plane of causation and become causes themselves. Instead of being the ball that gets knocked around, they learn to be the one who cues the shot.

Gender is in everything; everything has its masculine and feminine principles; gender manifests on all planes.The Kybalion

Last principle, and the one people misread the most, so let me be careful with it.

This is not about men and women. It's not about bodies, and it's not about who's on top. The Kybalion is explicit about that. "Gender" here comes from an old root that means "to generate, to create." The principle is about how anything gets made.

Everything that exists has two principles working in it. The masculine principle is the Will, the part that initiates, projects, directs. It pushes a seed outward. The feminine principle is the Reception and Generation. It receives that seed and gives birth to it. Neither one creates anything alone. The masculine projects, the feminine generates. Everything that exists is the child of both.

I should tell you I got this one wrong the first time. When I read it, I had it mapped as build and destroy. I thought the feminine principle was the builder and the masculine was the one that tears things down, so that new thinking could come in and take the old thinking's place. I was half right and half wrong. The feminine principle does build. It's the one that generates. But the masculine isn't destruction. It's will, the part that initiates and acts. My mistake was reading "receptive" and hearing "passive." Receiving and making turn out to be the same motion.

Look at a camera, and you'll see both. The shutter is the masculine principle: it acts, it releases, it initiates. The sensor is the feminine principle: it receives the light and generates the image. The shutter alone makes nothing. The sensor alone stays dark. The photograph is born of the two working together. And notice: the part doing the actual making is the one that receives.

Jung called the inner version of this the anima and the animus, the contrasexual principle inside each person. You already know this territory. Every person, whatever their body, carries both the will and the capacity to receive and generate.

So that's the seven principles. This little book was a doorway. The Kybalion is the house, and now you know your way around the rooms before you even walk in.

A few practical things, so the book doesn't throw you off when you meet it. It's short, maybe a hundred and fifty pages, and it reads like 1908, because that's when it was written. The prose is old-fashioned, a bit arch, full of "thee" and "thou" and capital letters. Don't let that put you off. Read past the language to the skeleton. The skeleton is the seven principles you already know.

Read it slowly, a chapter at a time. It's dense. And read it more than once. Like a tarot spread, it'll say different things each time, depending on where you are when you sit down with it.

You also don't have to agree with all of it. Take what works, leave the rest. The "Three Initiates" were one man with one perspective, writing in the early twentieth century. It's a tool, not a scripture. When you do read it, you'll recognize these seven principles. You'll have a place to stand. That was the whole point of this.