Axiom of Duality

Separation of the One

From nothing comes the indescribable and ineffable.

From the indescribable appears the One.

From this One emerges, through its separation that it might experience itself, the Duality.

On the Tree of Life this is illustrated in Binah, the divine feminine in counterpart to the divine male of Chockmah, the preceding sphere. Hence the divine Father and Mother are often portrayed at the top of the hierarchy of duality, or used to reference the overall idea throughout the language of the Mysteries.

Manifestations of the Duality

The duality is also manifested through the path connecting Chockmah and Binah, which represents, among other things, unlimited wisdom becoming structured understanding. Here are a few other expressions of this truth:

• God and Nature
• spirit and matter
• male and female
• up and down
• light and dark
• day and night
• sun and moon
• above and below
• within and without

You could easily add ten more to this list by thinking of the myriad opposites present in everyday reality. Without any one of these pairings the other becomes meaningless, so they are two poles of the same unified truth.

In the Chain of Being

In the great chain of being or continuum of spirit, everything including us descends from the One, has its cycle of existence, and then returns to the One after death or dissolution.

At the moment of entry into phenomenal reality is duality, the separation from the one source. Imagine this duality of masculine and feminine atop a hierarchy of states or attributes and you have laid the foundation for magical understanding.

So fundamental is the polarity that it can be called the nature when considered as an attribute of an individual person or anything else. When we catalog or study magical correspondences we use a hierarchy of being that goes something like this:

Item of Correspondence

• Nature (masculine or feminine)
  • Zodiac
    • Planetary Influences
      • Elemental Qualities
        • Other attributes under various headings per the tradition you are using

You could use a similar hierarchy to diagram yourself or another person as a hierarchy of spiritual or metaphysical attributes. For example I might look something like this on paper:

• male
  • Libran/Taurus/Sagittarius
    • Venus, Saturn, Jupiter
      • Air, Earth
        • intellectual, pragmatic, creative, etc.

There are many other headings and variant ways to arrange them for deciphering magical correspondences but my point is the nature, or polarity, is at the very top because it is the attribute that informs and influences the rest.