The Seven Hermetic Principles

A good few centuries back, a handful of humans in robes and with not-enough-sleep faces sat down to write seven little sentences about how the whole universe works. They called them the hermetic principles, pinned them on a fellow named Hermes Trismegistus, and tucked them away in a slim book, the Kybalion, like someone hiding the good mushroom so the neighbour won't nab it.

We Brownies have a quiet little chuckle about it. Because we've been living those seven principles since long before robes were even a thing. We don't study them. We tread them barefoot every morning while the rest of the forest is still yawning.

And don't worry, we're not here to sell you wands or fog you up with incense smoke. The hermetic principles aren't a fairground trick. They're the small print of everyday life, the thing that makes the omelette set, the puddle copy the sky, and the laugh you let out today come bouncing back at you next week. Let's get them down off the pedestal and into a pair of wellies.

What are the seven hermetic principles?

The seven hermetic principles are seven ideas gathered in the Kybalion, a book from 1908, that sum up how reality behaves: mentalism, correspondence, vibration, polarity, rhythm, cause and effect, and gender. They're not religion or superstition, just an old way of saying that everything starts in the mind, everything vibrates, everything has its opposite and its tide, and nothing happens by accident. In Brownie terms, they're the universe's instruction manual printed on the back cover, in tiny letters so almost nobody bothers to read it.

Let's go through them one by one, no robe, feet in the mud.

1. Mentalism: it all starts in the noggin

The first one says "the All is Mind". Before an omelette exists, that omelette already lived inside a head that got hungry. The forest, your house, this little moment you're reading, all of it was first an idea somebody thought up on purpose. Reality doesn't drop from the sky ready-built. It gets thought first and sets later.

For us this is daily bread. A Brownie who wakes up sure the whole day will go sideways trips over his own shadow. The one who wakes up picturing a juicy day has already started building it before lacing his boots. It's not wand magic, it's just that the noggin is the workshop where everything else gets cooked. That's how we see the world round here, and it's what our whole Magikita philosophy is about.

2. Correspondence: as above, so below

Lean over a still puddle at night and you'll see the whole sky sitting inside it, stars and all. That's correspondence: the big repeats in the small, and what's inside always ends up peeking out. The classic line is "as above, so below, as below, so above".

Translated into wellies and apron: your messy room is your messy head hung out to dry. The corner you live in tells on your mood, even if you've said nothing to anyone. That's why tidying one drawer makes something inside you feel tidied too, and it's no fluke, it's pure correspondence. Humans gave a name to playing with this at home and called it feng shui, but the puddle knew it first.

3. Vibration: not even the stone sits still

The third one dizzies you at first: "nothing rests, everything moves, everything vibrates". Whatever looks perfectly still, a stone, a table, your gran having a nap, is a riot of tiny things zooming about inside. Everything is energy vibrating, and the only thing that changes from one thing to another is how fast it does it.

The stone vibrates slow and bored. Joy vibrates fast and bouncy. And here's the good bit: you can crank your own frequency up whenever you fancy. A song, a hug, a walk among trees, and you've switched stations. On the street they call that a vibe shift, and it describes the law of vibration better than any dusty treatise. That contagious energy that lifts the whole tone is exactly what all our talk about magic sparks is made of.

Hate isn't the opposite of love. It's love with a blown bulb.

4. Polarity: cold is just heat feeling lazy

"Everything is double, everything has poles, everything has its pair of opposites." Sounds obvious until you look closely. Cold and heat aren't enemies, they're the same thing measured at a different degree. Where does cold end and warm begin? Nowhere and everywhere, because it's a scale, not two rival camps.

Same goes for feelings. The mischievous Brownie and the kind Brownie aren't two Brownies, they're one with the bulb turned up or down. And the lovely part of knowing you're on a scale is that you can walk along it. From fear to respect, from a strop to a spark, from the dumps to "go on then". No impossible leap needed, just nudging the dial up one notch.

5. Rhythm: everything has its tides

The fifth principle is a pendulum: "everything flows, out and in, everything has its tides, everything rises and falls". Nothing stays up forever, and that's the bad news and the good news at once. The party ends, true. But low tide pulls back too, and that's the bit almost nobody remembers when they're stuck in the mud.

Grey days aren't a punishment or a breakdown. They're low tide, and low tide exists so the high one means something. When a leaden day catches us, we don't fight the current. We sit down, put our boots out to dry, and wait, because the pendulum has never once left anyone stranded at the bottom. It always swings back for you.

6. Cause and effect: no chance, just consequence

"Every cause has its effect, every effect has its cause." What you call coincidence is nearly always a cause you didn't clock out of the corner of your eye. It's not that fate has it in for you, it's that every little thing you let loose into the world weaves the next one without asking your permission.

That's why we Brownies are careful with what we sow. A laugh today doesn't vanish into the air, it gets stashed somewhere and comes bouncing back when you least expect it, sometimes across someone else's face. Sow rushing and you'll reap stumbles. Sow good vibes and brace yourself to get them back with interest. The forest keeps the tally, even if it never shows you the book.

7. Gender: you need the dreaming and the doing

The seventh one closes the circle: "everything has its masculine and feminine principle, on every plane". And before anyone gets in a muddle, this isn't about sexes or moustaches. It's about two energies you need to make anything at all: one that dreams the idea, and one that births it into the world and gets it walking.

One alone won't cut it. A dream with no hands to work it stays a pretty puff of smoke. And hands with no dream to steer them spend the day shuffling things about without building a thing. Everything that truly gets born, a loaf, a bit of tenderness, a little clay figure, needs both: the spark that imagines and the callus that sweats. Dreaming and doing, always hand in hand.

Are the hermetic principles any use in everyday life?

They are, hugely, once you stop treating them like a museum relic and start using them as a compass. Correspondence tells you that tidying your corner tidies your mood. Vibration, that you can switch stations with a song or a walk. Rhythm, that no slump lasts forever. Cause and effect, that what you sow comes back. You don't need to believe anything odd, just look at your day through these seven lenses and watch how nearly everything clicks into place. They're old, sure, but they work like day one.

So you don't lose track of them, here they all are together, boiled down to one line each with a translation into forest-speak:

So now you know. The seven hermetic principles don't live in a dusty temple or ask you to dress up as anything. They live in the puddle, in the drawer, in the laugh you let out and the tide that comes and goes. We Brownies tread them barefoot because they're the very floor of the forest. And now that you can see them, you've been treading them your whole life too. You just didn't know their names until today.