Gender

The Principle of Gender is the seventh of the seven Hermetic Principles, summed up in the axiom: "Gender is in everything; everything has its masculine and feminine principles." It holds that a masculine and a feminine principle are present in all things and at work in every act of creation, on every plane.

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.

The Kybalion opens its treatment of the seventh principle by trying to head off a misreading, and the attempt is worth recording. Gender here is meant as a pair of functions, one that projects and directs and one that receives, gestates and forms. The book states flatly that this has nothing to do with sex, and nothing to do with the sexual theories then circulating in occult publishing. The disclaimer is aimed at real contemporaries and at material its author wanted no association with.

The functions are given as the Masculine and Feminine principles, and applied to mind under the names the I and the Me. The I wills and directs; the Me receives, holds and brings forth. Every act of thought, on this account, uses both, which is why the book denies that any person or thing is of one gender only.

The vocabulary has aged badly and its critics say so plainly. Assigning direction to a masculine principle and reception to a feminine one imports exactly the associations the disclaimer disowns, and later writers in the tradition have proposed renaming the pair rather than defending it. Others hold that the terms carry the alchemical inheritance of sulphur and mercury and cannot be swapped without losing what they were carrying. The atlas records the principle in the book's own terms, records what the book says it does not mean, and records the objection alongside.