The Cosmic Illuminations III
Our final installment about the hermetic principles includes five additional principles our order has integrated. Now, there are twelve.
Thank you for bearing with me during this series. I know it has not been easy—abstract and conceptual rather than concrete and straightforward. I appreciate readers who have made the effort, and I hope you don’t perceive this as too self-indulgent. I permitted myself to take you into some theoretical depths. Ultimately, though, you have to agree to come along.
Ontoepistemology is a big word. But being (ontos) and knowing (episteme) are inseparable—not just in the I-think-therefore-I-am sense. We are entities whose knowledge arises not from being disembodied observers of an external reality, but rather from knowing as a complex feature of existence itself.
Because there is no ‘view from nowhere,’ at least for us, every human act of knowing is situated. That is to say, it happens from within a particular form of being, which is always connected to the totality of being, which is the All.
That is why to know the cosmic illuminations is to wield them. Put simply, knowing has causal power. Understanding and reality intertwine. Subjective and objective are entangled. Enormous power can be unlocked with this insight.
Even if there is nothing supernatural, there is plenty that is inexplicable. Our situated perspectives, our ontoepistemologies, offer a glimpse of the All’s unfolding, as a lightning strike at night reveals a section of the vast ocean as we float upon the swells.
Gender
Gender is in everything; everything has its Masculine and Feminine Principles.
Creation requires both masculine (active, projective) and feminine (receptive, generative) forces. These exist in all things—not only biological sex, but in ideas, energies, and consciousness. The balance between the two yields harmony and creativity within constraints.
In our order, we cross masculine and feminine with Eros and Thanatos, which allows us to understand our Elemental Drives more clearly. Once we know them, we can sense them and balance them in equipoise. As the Elemental Drives radiate out from us in balance, the world around us begins to balance, too.
Eros Masculine. (Earth) The drive to make it so.
Thanatos Masculine. (Fire) The drive to end it now.
Eros Feminine. (Water) The drive to let it flow.
Thanatos Feminine. (Air) The drive to let it go.
The masculine symbolizes logic, direction, and assertion; the feminine symbolizes intuition, receptivity, and nurturance—and mastery requires us to see beyond polarity to the complementarity of gendered forces.
Combined with our understanding of beginnings and endings, life and death, we integrate all four Elemental Drives and anticipate cycles. This teaches us how to direct and apply the Drives as correctives in their proper measure. Whether the world is out of balance or our inner states are disordered, we can invoke the principle of gender. But this is never easy. It takes active, daily practice.
Integration of the masculine and feminine modes yields psychospiritual holism. At its best, this balanced expression manifests as healthy androgyny—or better, a fluidity between poles rather than the dominance of either. Wise leaders understand context matters. They know when and how to elevate or suppress a drive.
Danger lies in imbalance and excess.
Unhealthy excess manifests as the Devouring Mother or the Tyrannical Father—archetypes that must be recognized and resisted. When they are not, two types of catastrophes become possible: they may war against each other as opposing egregores, or they may unite, becoming lovers whose offspring is destruction.
Flow
All systems evolve to facilitate the less restricted flow of energy, matter, and information.
The Law of Flow in thermodynamics (Bejan) already articulates this: every system naturally reorganizes itself to improve the flow of what moves through it. In esoteric terms, this would be a principle of universal efficiency, as the cosmos continually redesigns itself to reduce friction, increase coherence, and improve circulation.
Flow applies to our internal states as well. When we reduce resistance—through openness, emotional regulation, and alignment—energy flows freely through the psyche and to and from the social field. But flow requires channelization, not flooding.
In some circumstances, such as intense creative work or play, we find an optimized state of heightened awareness and focus. This too is flow. Psychospiritually, flow invites us to become conduits for life’s movement, not dams against it.
The mark of flow is the vascular pattern—such as trunk, limb, branch, twig, or stream, brook, tributary, river. The ubiquity of such patterns indicates a phenomenon that animates the cosmos and traces of the unfolding All.
Organic Unity
Diversity and unity are mutually constraining.
Organic unity describes a universe in which value arises from integration, not mere aggregation. This principle, closely related to the Law of Flow, would recognize the universe as a living system—evolving and interdependent.
Here is a canonical description:
Unity, or more appropriately, unifiedness, is the degree to which the elements of a system cohere and seem to relate. Diversity is the degree to which aspects of a system can function independently and express characteristics of difference. We refer to the mutually constraining balance as ‘organic unity,’ following a great sage (Nozick).
To better understand this concept, we can examine scenarios of imbalance. A society with excessive unity but insufficient diversity may enforce conformity and obedience to an oppressive degree. A society with insufficient unity but excessive may be unruly, chaotic, and thus unpredictable and destructive. When a system is organically unified, unifying properties and diverse elements coexist not in stasis, but in a harmony that enables self-organization.
This principle is manifest across every domain of understanding.
In personal development, it can manifest as individuation—the synthesis of fragmented selves into a unified field of being. The principle also dissolves the illusion of separation among physical, mental, and spiritual.
Dialectics
All progress arises through the tension and sublation of opposites.
Where hermeticists sometimes treat polarity as mere complementarity, dialectics introduces change through contradiction, which can be volatile, even violent. Hegel’s insight—thesis, antithesis, sublation—reveals a principle that reality evolves by resolving tensions or collisions between opposing forces at higher levels of order. This becomes a principle of integration through conflict, which we can contrast with integration through coitus.
While both are essential change modalities, the coital modality emphasizes generative blending or combining properties. Complementary ideas merge harmoniously to create new forms without the necessity of violent rupture. By contrast, the dialectical modality emphasizes negation, antagonism, and transformation through struggle, in which contradictions must be overcome in conflict and the prior orders destroyed for higher-order sublation.
Both personal and societal evolution depend on confronting rather than avoiding this phenomenon. The adept learns not to destroy opposition but to reconcile it in a higher synthesis—either through both coital or conflictual transmutation.
Experience and reflection reveal which is which.
Light
The All’s Radiation (Ain Soph Aur) is all that is informational and relational.
The primordial light—what the ancients called Ain Soph Aur, the radiance of the All—existed before the command “Let there be light” was spoken. But this is not the light that shines upon the world by day, though that sunlight contains within it traces of the greater illumination. The light that is and has always been is a boundless radiance. Think of it as everything that is informational and relational, the substrate from which form itself emerges.
But to live in the created world is to live among fragments. The vessels shattered; creation itself is a fracturing, a division of the unified infinite into multiplicities. We who dwell in space and time inhabit this shattered realm, surrounded by those shards and fractures. Our comprehension, therefore, cannot be of the whole—only of pieces.
Yet this is not cause for despair. Through the patient work of gathering fragments, through the iterative processes of both scientific inquiry and spiritual contemplation, we approach understanding. We comprehend more and more of the finite and time-bound, shard by shard, slowly assembling a map of the broken landscape we inhabit.
The closer we get, the more we feel the sublime.
True comprehension—the direct apprehension of the infinite—belongs to a sentience capable of what might be called an onto-epistemology of the All. This would be a knowing appropriate to an unshattered world, where being and knowledge interpenetrate without division. Such is not for us. We are situated, perspectival beings, which means we possess neither this way of knowing nor this way of being. As the children of fragmentation, our knowledge reflects our condition.
Yet something remarkable emerges when we consider the nature of that primordial light more carefully. Some modern physicists, working from entirely different premises, believe that information-cum-relations are not a mere abstract category but a fundamental feature of physical reality. A few have proposed comprehensive theories suggesting that all possible transformations—the very laws governing what can and cannot occur—emerge from relational and informational properties. These thinkers have found that universal principles of computation and explanation underlie all knowledge, that finite structures can grasp truths of unlimited scope, and that the growth of understanding is potentially endless, but still limited.
What these investigations reveal, perhaps unknowingly, is something the sages already understood: the informational-relational properties of existence compose reality at its most fundamental level. Before there was matter or energy, space or time, there was the relational and informational, i.e., the capacity for one thing to be about another, and for patterns to give rise to patterns.
This understanding does not afford us a view from nowhere, but it does offer a conceptual reconciliation medium for the apparent polarity between mental and physical, subjective and objective. Categories that seem so fundamental to our fragmented experience are not ultimate or original. They are artifacts of the shattering. Ain Soph Aur’s radiance—being purely informational and relational—precedes such divisions. That radiant light of information and relations is neither mental nor physical because it is the ground from which both of these properties arise. It is neither subjective nor objective, because these properties make subjects and objects possible in the first place.
Non-duality, then, is not achieved through a negation-sublation process that somehow fuses opposites while preserving their opposition. It requires instead a kind of reverse dialectic—a recognition that these purported polarities betray something more primordial. The unity of opposites exists not as an achievement but as an original condition. Mental properties and physical properties alike originate from this light, this informational-relational radiance that precedes and transcends the categories of the shattered world.
We gather shards. We repair.
This is our sacred and scientific work. But in knowing the fragments, we remember: they are parts of something that was once undivided, just as we are.