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.

Polarity holds that opposites are one thing at different degrees. Heat and cold are a single scale read up or down, and so, the book says, are love and hate, courage and fear. The consequence it wants, and the reason the principle is there at all, is that a state can be moved along its own scale rather than replaced by its contrary.

Antecedents are not hard to find. Heraclitus has the road up and the road down as one road. The alchemical literature works constantly with the reconciling of opposites, and Nicholas of Cusa gave that idea a name in the fifteenth century. What The Kybalion adds is a flattening: every pair is treated as one scale, without asking whether every pair really is one.

That is where the principle is weakest, and the atlas records it as contested rather than settled. Temperature genuinely is a single scale. Truth and falsity are not, and treating them as poles of one thing yields the conclusion that any statement is true to a degree, which the book does not shrink from. Readers within the Hermetic tradition have divided on this for a century. Some take Polarity as a psychological technique wearing a physical metaphor, useful precisely because moods do behave like a scale. Others take it as a metaphysical claim about how reality is built, and accept the consequences for truth. The atlas does not settle the question and does not need to.