The Hermetic Principle of Cause and Effect

The Principle of Cause and Effect is the sixth of the seven Hermetic Principles, summed up in the axiom: "Every cause has its effect; every effect has its cause." It holds that nothing happens by chance, every event standing in a chain of causes, whether or not those causes are known.

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.