Are dualities arbitrary concepts?

Yes and no.

>>17972207
Good answer

To an extent. Certainly, a lot of systems of occult thought give dualities an undue amount of attention. In particular, I would say that the major writings on chaos magic focus far too much on it for a magic theory that is based around freeing oneself from preconceptions.

That being said, dualities do exist, and are important, but they are often what we make of them. Take the elements, for example. We tend to think of fire and water as opposed elements, and there are a lot of reasons to do so, which have been elaborated upon in enough sources that it's unnecessary to reiterate them here. But we can also make a case for earth as the opposite of fire, in that fire is the most active element and earth the most passive. Even fire and air could be considered opposites in that they represent different and opposing types of opposing principles. Similar arguments can be applied to other combinations of elements.