The 12 Principles of Hermeticism

Daniele Corradetti - February 25, 2013

Introduction

After Gianluca's presentation, I wanted to give an overview of these Hermetic Principles or Axioms. First, regarding their purpose: these are not speculative philosophical principles because Hermeticism from the beginning has never had a speculative value. The Hermetist was not one who described nature like the Aristotelian, but one who imitates nature to modify nature. Therefore, they need a Science. Hermeticism and Alchemy were a spiritual science.

Science means that if you have a doubt and don't know how to proceed, you check what Science says, apply Science, and it tells you how to move forward. It therefore allows you to achieve what you have not yet conceived if you scrupulously adhere to the dictates of science. Conversely, in Art, the artist must have in mind the entire creation they will produce and therefore cannot obtain something different from what they already know or have.

This unless they apply a scientific theory that solves this problem, for example, a scientific theory of the icon that allows the Artist to realize a reality that transcends themselves. Therefore, the meaning of these Axioms or Laws is to provide the basic axioms to be able to operate.

The 12 Hermetic Principles

1. Law of Creation or Causality:

Everything has a cause. There is no effect without cause.

2. Law of Monotheism:

The set of invisible universal Laws implies an invisible and unique Legislator.

3. Law of Gender:

Everything has its gender, not only masculine and feminine humans, which philosophers compare to the Sun and Moon. Gender is in all things and manifests on all planes and states of cosmic consciousness.

4. Law of Polarity:

Everything has its pair of opposites. Everything has poles and is dual. Opposites touch. The similar and dissimilar are equal. All paradoxes can be reconciled. All truths are but half-truths.

5. Law of Panentheism:

At the base and beyond the Universe of time, space, and change, lies substantial Reality, fundamental Truth; what is fundamental Truth is unnameable, but the wise call it the All. In its essence it is unknowable.

6. Law of Analogy:

The microcosm is analogous to the macrocosm in the three planes of the unitrinity; as above, so below; as below, so above.

7. Law of Vibration:

Nothing is inert in the Universe, everything lives, everything vibrates, and in alternating rhythms everything moves.

8. Law of Evolution:

Everything evolves and progresses through Divine attraction, Providential help, natural adaptation, and spiritual transmutation.

9. Law of Solidarity:

Creation is organized in solidarized and hierarchized syntheses that humanity must imitate in its individual, family, national, and international conditions.

10. Law of Mentalism:

The Universe is mental. The materialistic thesis is false. Everything is mind and is held in the mind of the All. The All creates in its infinite mind innumerable universes, which exist for eons of time. However, for the All, the creation, development, decay, and death of a million universes have no greater duration than the opening and closing of an eye. The infinite mind of the All is the matrix of universes. Within the (God) Mother-Father mind, mortals are at home. No one is without Father and without Mother in the Universe.

11. Law of Alchemical Transmutation:

Mind, as well as metals and human and telluric elements, can be transmuted from state to state, from degree to degree, from condition to condition, from pole to pole, from vibration to vibration.

12. Law of Finality:

God, the Principle of all, is the providential means and the end of all, for the triumph of Truth and through sacrifice, He must be reached.

The Fundamental Questions

These principles guide you in finding an answer to the questions "Who are we? Where do we come from? Where are we going?" which were the questions of the Sphinx. Why is it important to answer these questions? Because a person as we conceive them, a body cannot answer these questions. It is not possible to answer these questions if one has a consciousness purely of the physical body.

The physical body is born at a certain point, dies at another point, how can it know where it comes from? So as long as we identify with a body, in the end we are like a postal package that is sent from parents to the grave, express courier. Sender? Unknown. Recipient? Unknown. And this is ordinary life to which a series of complexes are added that are grafted by society in early adolescence such as: no one knows what there is after death? no one knows the Truth, no one knows the meaning of Life, only what can be touched exists.

Yet there is a fact: all of us, given that we experience a life, have a consciousness and live as relative centers of the cosmos our life, we have the right and honor to answer these questions. Nor can we expect that someone else, anyone else, answer them for us.

To answer these questions it is necessary to find instead a state in which one's consciousness is free from the body, meaning being able to find a nucleus outside of time that can answer these questions. This state is symbolically synthesized by the Sphinx.

Therefore these laws or Axioms are useful laws to be applied by those who want to undertake this path. They are also Universal laws so one can use them for anything, Newton used them to formulate the bases of his physical theory, others for financial speculation, others to have a guide in biology, in historical interpretation etc... however, the Purpose of these axioms is expressed by a specific Law: the Law of Finality: God, the Principle of all, is the providential means and the end of all, for the triumph of Truth and through sacrifice...