The Kybalion and the Ancient Hermetic Writings

“Hermetic” is one of the most widely used words in modern esotericism, and one of the least precise. It names an ancient body of Greek religious and philosophical writing. It also names a short American book of 1908 that took the word for its subtitle and has since become, for many readers, the definition of Hermeticism itself. The two are related, but they are not the same, and a good deal of confusion comes from treating them as one. This article sets out what each is, where they genuinely meet, and a simple discipline for keeping them apart.

A book from Chicago

The title page of The Kybalion reads: A Study of the Hermetic Philosophy of Ancient Egypt and Greece, “by Three Initiates”, published by the Yogi Publication Society, Masonic Temple, Chicago. The first edition appeared in 1908, and the book has been reprinted continually since; many of the copies in circulation, and many of the scans online, are of later printings. There is no author’s name, only the three initiates.

Researchers usually attribute the book to William Walker Atkinson (1862–1932), a prolific Chicago writer of the New Thought movement, several of whose other books the same publisher issued under various names. That is a conclusion drawn from style, vocabulary and circumstance, and it is widely accepted. The book itself is unsigned, and the attribution should be stated as what it is.

New Thought, the setting in which the book was written, was a broad American movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that held mind to be the primary reality and taught that right thinking could shape health and circumstance. The Kybalion shares that atmosphere, and its first principle, that “THE ALL is MIND”, is New Thought expressed in Hermetic dress.

What the book says about itself

The book presents itself as something much older than 1908. It says there was once a collection of Hermetic maxims called The Kybalion, handed down by word of mouth among initiates, and that it now prints some of those maxims for the first time. In its own words: “Its precepts have never been written down, or printed, so far as we know.” No earlier text of these maxims is known. Everything the book quotes as “The Kybalion” stands in the 1908 book, and in nothing older that can be shown.

It also tells a story about Hermes Trismegistus: that he lived in Egypt in its earliest days, before Moses, that he was the father of occult wisdom, and that he was later deified as Thoth. That is the book’s account, and it echoes beliefs held by Renaissance readers. It is not the account of modern scholarship.

None of this makes it a bad book. It is a clear, well-organised summary of a way of thinking that was widely held in its milieu, and its seven principles are memorable because they are well made. Its claim about its own age is a separate matter. The principles can be read carefully on their merits while the claim is reported for what it is, and neither depends on the other.

What the ancient Hermetic writings are

The ancient Hermetic writings are real and old. They are a group of Greek treatises attributed to Hermes Trismegistus, the “thrice-great” Hermes, a figure who merged the Greek Hermes with the Egyptian Thoth, god of writing and wisdom. The treatises were composed in Roman Egypt in roughly the first three centuries AD. The best known of them were gathered into the collection now called the Corpus Hermeticum, whose first treatise is the Poimandres.

They were rediscovered in fifteenth-century Florence. A manuscript reached Cosimo de’ Medici, who had Marsilio Ficino set aside his translation of Plato to translate it into Latin; the translation was completed in 1463 and printed in 1471. For more than a century the texts were believed to be of immense antiquity, the work of an Egyptian sage contemporary with Moses. In 1614 the scholar Isaac Casaubon showed from their language and content that they belonged to the early Christian era, and that dating has held.

In English they reached many readers through John Everard’s translation of 1650, The Divine Pymander of Hermes Mercurius Trismegistus, and later through the versions of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

What they contain

The treatises are mostly dialogues and revelations about God, Mind and the soul. They describe how the world came forth from Mind; how a human being is bound by Fate through the body and can rise above it through Mind; how knowledge of God is a kind of rebirth; and how the soul ascends after death through the planetary spheres, leaving behind at each the vices it acquired there. They are religious texts as much as philosophical ones, close in spirit to the Platonism and the devotional currents of their age.

Where the two meet

The Kybalion takes its name and its atmosphere from that tradition, and some of its principles have genuine relatives there. The Pymander calls God Mind. It says that all things consist of contraries. It has Fate governing bodies while Mind governs Fate. It calls God both male and female. Each of these has an echo in one of the Kybalion’s seven principles: Mentalism, Polarity, Cause and Effect, and Gender.

What the old writings do not contain is the Kybalion’s system: seven numbered principles, vibration as the measure of all things, opposites as degrees on a single scale, the pendulum of Rhythm, the “mental transmutation” of states, or the doctrine of Mental Gender. Nor do they contain the axioms in the form in which the book gives them. Those belong to 1908.

“As above, so below”

The most famous Hermetic phrase illustrates the problem well. “As above, so below” is widely quoted as an ancient maxim, and The Kybalion uses it for its second principle, Correspondence. Its famous short form is not found in the Greek Corpus Hermeticum. The idea it expresses does have an older home: the Emerald Tablet, a brief text attributed to Hermes that is first attested in Arabic sources of the early Middle Ages and was widely read in Latin by the alchemists, says in its Latin form that what is below is like what is above. The thought is old; the slogan, and the system built on it, are modern.

Three levels of evidence

A simple discipline helps anyone reading Hermetic material, old or new. Every claim can be placed at one of three levels, according to where it can be found, not according to whether it is true.

Hermetic. The idea stands in the ancient Hermetic writings, and a passage can be pointed to. A claim should be raised to this level only when the passage has actually been found.

Kybalion. The idea stands in the 1908 book and in nothing older that can be shown. All seven of the Kybalion’s axioms belong here. Some of them have real relatives in the older writings, and where they do, the relative can be cited beside them at its own level; but the axioms themselves, in the words quoted everywhere, are the Kybalion’s.

Modern. The idea comes from a later author or teacher: a commentary, a summary, an exercise, an interpretation. This is the plainest level and the most honest one for anything written today, including this article.

When the evidence is unclear, the lower level should be used. A higher level has to be earned with a passage; a lower one is always safe. Applied consistently, this one rule clears away most of the confusion around the word “Hermetic”. It does not diminish the Kybalion, which can stand on its own as a coherent modern philosophy. It simply lets the ancient writings and the modern book each be read for what they are.

Two things with one name

So “Hermetic” names two things at once, and they are worth keeping apart: an ancient body of Greek writing from Roman Egypt, rediscovered in Renaissance Florence, and a modern American book that took its name. The first is a religious literature concerned with Mind, Fate and the rebirth of the soul. The second is a compact system of seven principles shaped by the New Thought movement. Readers who come to the subject through The Kybalion, as many do, lose nothing by learning where its ideas meet the older texts and where they part from them. They gain the ability to read both.