Hermetic Principles
Cause and Effect
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Origin 1908
Cause and Effect is the sixth Hermetic Principle of The Kybalion. Its axiom, 'Every cause has its effect; every effect has its cause', teaches that nothing happens by chance, chance being merely a name for a law not yet recognized, and that every event is the effect of some cause and in turn the cause of further effects, upon every plane. The Hermetic aim is to rise to a higher plane of causation and so to become a cause rather than an effect, consciously directing one's own life instead of being carried along by the wills and desires of others.
Facts
Origins
Origin Period1908 1Tradition: The Kybalion (New Thought) Place of Origin Attributed Author / CompilerAtkinson's Yogi Publication Society issued the book 1 Attributed Author / CompilerGenerally attributed to William Walker Atkinson (1862-1932) 1 Attributed Author / CompilerPublished anonymously in 1908 as 'Three Initiates' 1 Origin of the NameNamed for Hermes Trismegistus; scheme absent from ancient Hermetica 2 Origin of the NameNot in the Corpus Hermeticum or the Asclepius 2 Origin of the NameThe name asserts a descent from antiquity; it does not record one 2 Attestation
Attested MeaningThe Kybalion states its sixth principle as: Every Cause has its Effect; every Effect has its Cause; everything happens according to Law; Chance is but a name for Law not recognized; there are many planes of causation, but nothing escapes the Law. It denies the existence of pure chance, holding every event to be the necessary effect of some prior cause on some plane. 1 Learn More
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.
Cause and Effect, and What It Is Not
The sixth principle denies chance. The Kybalion allows that things called chance happen, but treats the word as a name for a cause not yet perceived, and builds from that to a distinction between being a cause and being an effect. Its image is a set of planes of causation: most people are moved by influences descending from planes above their own, while a trained will rises to a plane from which it moves rather than is moved.
Two comparisons sharpen it. It is not karma. Karma in its Indian settings is a moral accounting that tracks intention and runs across lives; the principle here is mechanical and makes no moral claim whatever. And it is not fatalism, although it can be read that way at speed. The book's point is that a lawful world is precisely what makes deliberate action possible, since a world of genuine randomness could not be acted on reliably at all.
What it shares with both is a resistance to testing. No observation could count against a principle stating that everything has a cause, because any apparent exception is redefined on the spot as a cause not yet found. That is a philosophical objection rather than a historical one, and it is the standing criticism of this principle among readers who take the rest of the book seriously. The atlas records the principle, the practical distinction it draws, and the objection, without adjudicating between them.
Cross-Tradition Connections
Attested In
The Principle of Cause and Effect is stated and expounded in The Kybalion, published in Chicago in 1908. The seven principles are not found as a numbered set in any earlier text.
Attributed To
Why this is disputed. The Kybalion was published anonymously in 1908 under the byline Three Initiates, presenting itself as a distillation of ancient Hermetic wisdom transmitted outside ordinary authorship. Philip Deslippe's critical edition identifies William Walker Atkinson, the New Thought writer and publisher behind the book's own Yogi Publication Society, as its actual author on stylistic and documentary grounds, the leading scholarly position today. Parts of the New Thought and Hermetic tradition continue to present the principle of Cause and Effect, that every cause has its effect and every effect its cause, as anonymous or timeless rather than as Atkinson's own early twentieth century formulation.
Originates in Language
Sources
1. The Kybalion: The Definitive Edition
Philip Deslippe (ed.), TarcherPerigee, 2011Authorship (W. W. Atkinson), 1908 Chicago publication, and New Thought origin of the seven-principle scheme; text of the axioms
1. The Kybalion: The Definitive Edition
Philip Deslippe (ed.), TarcherPerigee, 2011Chapter VII, The Seven Hermetic PrinciplesQuote, Chapter VII, The Seven Hermetic Principles
Every Cause has its Effect; every Effect has its Cause; everything happens according to Law; Chance is but a name for Law not recognized; there are many planes of causation, but nothing escapes the Law.
2. Hermetica: The Greek Corpus Hermeticum and the Latin Asclepius
Brian P. Copenhaver, Cambridge University Press, 1992The ancient Corpus Hermeticum, distinct from the modern seven-principle schemeView the Source Esotericism and the Academy: Rejected Knowledge in Western Culture
Wouter J. Hanegraaff, Cambridge University Press, 2012The modern construction and reception of a "Hermetic" tradition
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