"Gender is in everything; everything has its masculine and feminine principles; gender manifests on all planes."
The seventh and final Hermetic principle. Gender here has nothing to do with biological sex, and little to do with the social sense of the word. It names two universal principles — the masculine, generative, projective, active; and the feminine, receptive, gestative, formative — present in all things, on every plane, in every person. The Kybalion is emphatic that both reside in each individual and each thing. Nothing is purely one.
The teaching is that creation requires both. The masculine principle initiates, projects, sends out; the feminine receives, holds, and gives form to what it receives. Neither alone produces anything: an unreceived projection dissipates, an unfertilized ground stays barren. Every act of generation — biological, mental, artistic, spiritual — is the meeting of the two. On the mental plane, the Kybalion locates the masculine in the directing, willing "I" and the feminine in the generative, image-making faculty; thought is born when the first fertilizes the second.
Why It Matters to Kenneth
The principle matches the shape of the Emerald Tablet's "the father thereof is the Sun, the mother thereof is the Moon" — solar and lunar, active and receptive, sulphur and mercury, the two principles whose interplay drives all alchemical work. Creation happens in the tension between them, never in either alone.
It also lands close to home in System 777, a system that holds both projective and receptive alters, masculine and feminine principles internal to one person — Luna as anima and moonchild, the receptive lunar current, alongside the directing, structuring voices. The Hermetic claim that both genders live in everyone is, for a plural system, less a doctrine than a description. Creation inside the system, as outside it, is the two principles meeting.
Related
- Hermeticism — the tradition and the other six principles
- The Emerald Tablet — "the father is the Sun, the mother is the Moon"
- The Principle of Polarity — the broader duality gender specifies
- Alchemy — sulphur and mercury, the alchemical marriage
- Anima & Animus — the Jungian statement of inner masculine and feminine
- Luna — the lunar, receptive current in System 777
- System 777 — both principles internal to one person