The seven Hermetic principles are Mentalism, Correspondence, Vibration, Polarity, Rhythm, Cause and Effect, and Gender, as set out in The Kybalion, a book published in Chicago in 1908 under the name "Three Initiates." The book presents them as the distilled core of the ancient teachings of Hermes Trismegistus, but it is a modern work, widely attributed to the New Thought writer William Walker Atkinson, and no text called the Kybalion is known from before 1908.
That distinction matters because these seven principles have become the most widely quoted summary of Hermeticism in the English-speaking world. They appear in self-development books, lectures and social media captions, often attached to ancient Egypt. Readers who want to use them well, including those who follow Billy Carson's work on the [Emerald Tablets](/topics/emerald-tablets), are better served by knowing what the Kybalion is, what the older Hermetic writings actually say, and where the two genuinely meet.
What is The Kybalion?
The Kybalion is a short book of esoteric philosophy published in 1908 by the Yogi Publication Society in Chicago, with its authorship credited only to "Three Initiates." Its subtitle describes it as a study of the Hermetic philosophy of ancient Egypt and Greece, and its introduction claims that the teachings it explains were handed down from Hermes Trismegistus through a line of initiates, partly in the form of a collection of axioms called the Kybalion.
The book is organised around those axioms. It introduces seven principles, gives each a short italicised maxim, explains it in plain modern prose, and closes with a set of practical "Hermetic Axioms" on applying the teaching to everyday life. Its central promise is practical: a person who understands the laws of mind can change their own mental states and, through them, their circumstances. The book calls this "mental transmutation," borrowing the alchemical idea of turning one metal into another and applying it to thought.
Who wrote The Kybalion?
The author of The Kybalion is widely identified as William Walker Atkinson (1862–1932), a former lawyer who became one of the most prolific writers of the American New Thought movement. Atkinson wrote dozens of books under his own name and under pseudonyms, the best known being Yogi Ramacharaka, and many of them were issued by the same Yogi Publication Society that published the Kybalion.
The case for Atkinson rests on the publisher, the vocabulary and the ideas. The Kybalion's emphasis on mental power, positive mental states and the mind's influence on circumstance is the language of New Thought, a movement that taught that right thinking shapes health, success and experience. Some researchers think one or two collaborators were involved, which would fit the "Three Initiates" credit, but who they were has never been established.
The claim that the book transmits a far older secret text is best understood as a literary device, common in esoteric publishing of the period. No manuscript, earlier edition or independent reference to a Kybalion has ever been found, so the principles are best read as an early twentieth-century synthesis rather than a translation of an Egyptian original.
The seven Hermetic principles, one by one
The seven Hermetic principles are the Kybalion's framework for how reality works, from the nature of the universe to the way change and creation operate within it. Each is summarised below with its maxim from the book.
1. The Principle of Mentalism
"The All is Mind; the Universe is Mental." The Kybalion teaches that the underlying reality, which it calls The All, is an infinite living Mind, and that the universe exists as a mental creation within it. This is the foundation for everything else in the book: if the universe is mental, then understanding the laws of mind is understanding the laws of the universe.
2. The Principle of Correspondence
"As above, so below; as below, so above." There is a correspondence between the different planes of existence, physical, mental and spiritual, so that patterns found on one level can be used to understand the others. The maxim adapts the most famous line of the medieval Emerald Tablet, discussed below.
3. The Principle of Vibration
"Nothing rests; everything moves; everything vibrates." Matter, energy, mind and spirit are described as differing mainly in their rate of vibration. The Kybalion extends this to mental states, which it treats as vibrations that can be raised or changed by an act of will.
4. The Principle of Polarity
"Everything is Dual; everything has poles; everything has its pair of opposites." Opposites, the book argues, are the same thing at different degrees: hot and cold are both temperature, love and hate both feeling. Its practical teaching is that a person can shift a mental state along its own scale, from fear towards courage, rather than trying to leap to something unrelated.
5. The Principle of Rhythm
"Everything flows, out and in; everything has its tides." Every movement has a returning swing, like a pendulum. The Kybalion teaches that the swing cannot be abolished, but that a person can learn to avoid being carried by it, a technique the book calls the Law of Neutralization.
6. The Principle of Cause and Effect
"Every Cause has its Effect; every Effect has its Cause." The book adds that "Chance is but a name for Law not recognized." Its aim is to move the reader from being an effect of other people's thoughts and circumstances to being a conscious cause.
7. The Principle of Gender
"Gender is in everything; everything has its Masculine and Feminine Principles." The Kybalion is explicit that it does not mean biological sex; it uses gender in the sense of generation and creation, and applies it to the mind, pairing an active, willing aspect with a receptive, form-giving one.
What the genuine Hermetic texts actually say
The genuine Hermetic writings are a body of Greek and Latin texts from Roman Egypt, and they are primarily religious and philosophical works about God, the cosmos and the human soul. The most important collection is the Corpus Hermeticum, a set of Greek treatises composed in Egypt around the second and third centuries CE, usually written as dialogues between Hermes Trismegistus and his students. The first treatise, the Poimandres, opens with a vision in which Poimandres identifies himself as Nous, the divine Mind, and reveals the creation of the world and the soul's path of ascent. A second key text, the Asclepius, survives in Latin.
The figure of Hermes Trismegistus, "thrice-great Hermes," grew out of the Greek identification of Hermes with the Egyptian god [Thoth, the god of wisdom and writing](/who-was-thoth-egyptian-god-of-wisdom-hermes-trismegistus). That is the real link between the Hermetica and Egypt: Greek-speaking authors in Egypt wrote in the name of a Hellenised Thoth.
The texts re-entered Western Europe in the Renaissance. In 1463 Marsilio Ficino translated the Greek treatises into Latin for Cosimo de' Medici, who, as Frances Yates recounts in Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition (1964), had asked him to finish the Hermetica before turning to Plato. For more than a century they were read as the writings of an Egyptian sage older than Moses, until the scholar Isaac Casaubon showed in 1614, on the evidence of their Greek, that they belonged to the early Christian era. Modern scholarship, including Brian Copenhaver's translation Hermetica (1992), Garth Fowden's The Egyptian Hermes and the work of Wouter Hanegraaff, places them firmly in the religious and philosophical world of Roman Egypt.
The Emerald Tablet and "as above, so below"
"As above, so below" comes from the Emerald Tablet, or Tabula Smaragdina, a short Hermetic text that is separate from the Corpus Hermeticum. Its earliest known versions are in Arabic sources of the eighth and ninth centuries, and Latin translations circulated from the twelfth century, when it became a foundational text for European alchemy.
Isaac Newton made his own English translation around 1680, which renders the key line as "That which is below is like that which is above & that which is above is like that which is below to do the miracles of one only thing." The Kybalion's "As above, so below; as below, so above" is a compressed paraphrase of this tradition, lifted from its original alchemical context and turned into a general law of correspondence between planes of existence.
The medieval Emerald Tablet should also be kept apart from The Emerald Tablets of Thoth the Atlantean, the much longer text published by Maurice Doreal in 1939, which is the subject of Carson's commentary. The [guide to the Emerald Tablets of Thoth](/emerald-tablets-of-thoth-explained) sets out how the two differ.
How the Kybalion differs from classical Hermeticism
The Kybalion differs from classical Hermeticism mainly in purpose: it is a manual of practical mental power, while the ancient Hermetica are devotional texts about knowing God. The Corpus Hermeticum contains hymns, prayers and teachings on piety, rebirth and the ascent of the soul; its goal is spiritual knowledge of the divine, not success or the management of moods.
There is real continuity in some ideas. The ancient texts describe divine Mind as the source of the cosmos and see the human being as a small world reflecting the larger one. The Kybalion recasts those themes in the idiom of New Thought, where the mind is a force to be trained and applied. For that reason, scholars of esotericism treat the Kybalion as a document of American metaphysical religion around 1900, valuable in its own right, rather than as a source for ancient Hermeticism.
Some modern readers go further and link Mentalism and Correspondence to the idea that [the universe is a hologram](/is-the-universe-a-hologram-holographic-principle-explained). The holographic principle in physics is a claim about how the information in a region of space can be described on its boundary; it says nothing about mind, so that link is an interpretation rather than a scientific finding.
Billy Carson's reading
Billy Carson uses the seven principles as a practical framework for working with consciousness and manifestation, and he reads them alongside the Emerald Tablets rather than in isolation. In his teaching, Correspondence and Mentalism carry the most weight: the idea that inner states and outer reality mirror each other is, in his reading of the tablets, the core message that Thoth's teaching and the later Hermetic tradition share.
That connection runs through the "master the matrix" theme of his lectures. As Carson frames it, reality operates by rules, and a person who understands those rules, starting with the primacy of mind, can navigate life more deliberately instead of being moved by circumstance. The principles of Vibration, Polarity and Rhythm become tools in that approach, ways to recognise where a mental state sits and to shift it, while Cause and Effect underlines personal responsibility for the results. His [method for manifesting what you want](/how-to-manifest-what-you-want-billy-carson-method) puts this framework into practical steps.
This is Carson's application of the principles, not a claim about their age. Readers can accept the historical record on the Kybalion's 1908 origin and still find its framework useful, which is broadly how his work treats it. His fullest treatment of the tablets behind this reading is the Compendium of the Emerald Tablets, available with his other titles on the books page.
Watch, read and go deeper
The [Compendium of the Emerald Tablets audiobook](/watch/compendium-of-the-emerald-tablets-audio-book) on 4BK TV follows the tablets in order with Carson's commentary, and it is the best place to hear how he connects them to the Hermetic principles. For related material on mind, perception and inner practice, the [consciousness topic hub](/topics/consciousness) collects the site's articles and episodes. The [Emerald Tablets topic hub](/topics/emerald-tablets) gathers everything on Thoth, Hermeticism and the tablets in one place.
Frequently asked questions
Is The Kybalion an ancient text?
No. The Kybalion was first published in Chicago in 1908 by the Yogi Publication Society, and no earlier text by that name has ever been found. It presents itself as a summary of ancient Hermetic teaching, but historians treat that framing as a literary device.
What are the seven Hermetic principles?
They are Mentalism ("The All is Mind"), Correspondence ("As above, so below"), Vibration, Polarity, Rhythm, Cause and Effect, and Gender. All seven come from The Kybalion (1908), which organises them as the laws governing mind and reality. They do not appear as a set of seven in the ancient Hermetic writings.
Who wrote The Kybalion?
The book is credited to "Three Initiates," but the author is widely identified as William Walker Atkinson (1862–1932), a prolific New Thought writer who also published as Yogi Ramacharaka. Collaborators may have been involved, but none has been confirmed.
Did Hermes Trismegistus write "as above, so below"?
The phrase comes from the Emerald Tablet, a short text attributed to Hermes Trismegistus that survives in Arabic sources from the eighth or ninth century and in Latin from the twelfth. The attribution to Hermes is traditional; like the other Hermetica, the text was written by later authors in his name. The Kybalion's wording is a modern paraphrase of that line.
Is The Kybalion the same as the Emerald Tablets?
No. The Kybalion is a 1908 book of New Thought philosophy; the Emerald Tablet is a short medieval Hermetic text; and The Emerald Tablets of Thoth the Atlantean is a 1939 book by Maurice Doreal. They are often discussed together, and Billy Carson reads them together, but each has its own history.
Sources and further reading
- Three Initiates, The Kybalion: A Study of the Hermetic Philosophy of Ancient Egypt and Greece (Yogi Publication Society, 1908)
- Brian P. Copenhaver, Hermetica: The Greek Corpus Hermeticum and the Latin Asclepius in a New English Translation (Cambridge University Press, 1992)
- Frances A. Yates, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition (1964)
- Garth Fowden, The Egyptian Hermes: A Historical Approach to the Late Pagan Mind (1986)
- Wouter J. Hanegraaff, Esotericism and the Academy: Rejected Knowledge in Western Culture (2012)
- Isaac Newton's translation of the Emerald Tablet (Keynes MS 28, King's College, Cambridge)
- Billy Carson, Compendium of the Emerald Tablets (2019)
