The Hermetic Principle of Polarity

The Principle of Polarity is the fourth of the seven Hermetic Principles, summed up in the axiom: "Everything is dual; everything has poles." It holds that opposites are two extremes of one thing, differing in degree, so that heat and cold or love and hate shade into one another along a single scale.

A modern statement, an old name

These seven principles should be dated with care. They were set out in The Kybalion, published in Chicago in 1908 under the pseudonym "Three Initiates," a work generally attributed to the New Thought writer William Walker Atkinson. Although it invokes the name of Hermes Trismegistus and calls itself a Hermetic teaching, the seven-principle scheme is a product of the early twentieth-century New Thought movement, not of the ancient Hermetic writings such as the Corpus Hermeticum.

The principle is described here as part of that documented modern esoteric tradition, which has been widely influential in later occult and self-help literature.