The Kybalion

This book announces itself as the work of Three Initiates and presents its seven principles as a distillation of teaching descended from ancient Egypt through a line of Hermetic adepts. It is, on the evidence, a 1908 American book by a single identifiable author.

William Walker Atkinson was a former lawyer who became one of the most prolific figures of the New Thought movement, editing its magazines and publishing under his own name and under at least three pseudonyms, among them Yogi Ramacharaka and Theron Q. Dumont. Philip Deslippe's edition assembles the case. The book was issued by the Yogi Publication Society, Atkinson's own Chicago imprint. Its vocabulary, its habits of construction, its characteristic use of capitalised abstractions, and its underlying mental-causation doctrine all correspond to his signed work of the same years. The advertising in the back of contemporary printings is for his other titles.

The content is New Thought. The principle of Mentalism, that the universe is mental in nature; the principle of Correspondence, in the form "as above, so below"; the principle of Vibration, expressed in terms borrowed loosely from nineteenth-century physics, these belong to the American metaphysical religion of the turn of the twentieth century, and they read as such. They do not correspond closely to the actual Hermetic treatises, which are available and can be compared. The seven principles are not found there, and the Emerald Tablet, the one place the correspondence axiom does appear, is a medieval Arabic text rather than an ancient Egyptian one.

None of this makes the book worthless, and its influence is beyond dispute; a great deal of twentieth-century popular occultism, and a good deal of subsequent self-help, comes through it. But it should be shelved as what it is. It is a modern work of American metaphysical religion that adopted an ancient frame, and it is regularly cited as a primary source for Hermetic doctrine by readers who have not gone to the primary sources.

The pattern is the same as the one visible in the Golden Dawn's charter and in eighteenth-century Templar Masonry: a genuine composition presented as a transmission. It recurs often enough in this subject to be worth naming as a convention rather than treating each instance as a scandal.

The book states seven principles and treats them as the whole of its teaching. They are worth listing plainly, since the book is far more often invoked than read, and since dating them to 1908 rather than to ancient Egypt changes what they are.

1. Mentalism, "The All is Mind; the Universe is Mental." The ground claim, and the one that makes the rest work: reality is fundamentally mental, so thought is causal. This is New Thought's central doctrine, not a Hermetic one.

2. Correspondence, "As above, so below; as below, so above." The one principle with a genuine old pedigree, since the phrase paraphrases the Emerald Tablet, though that text is a medieval Arabic work rather than an ancient Egyptian one.

3. Vibration, "Nothing rests; everything moves; everything vibrates." Stated in language borrowed loosely from nineteenth-century physics, and used to argue that raising one's 'vibration' changes one's circumstances.

4. Polarity, "Everything is dual; everything has poles." Opposites are held to be the same thing in different degree, so that hate and love, or heat and cold, differ only in position on a single scale.

5. Rhythm, "Everything flows, out and in; everything has its tides." A pendulum-swing between the poles, which the adept is said to escape by rising above the swing rather than being carried by it.

6. Cause and Effect, "Every Cause has its Effect; every Effect has its Cause." Offered as a law of universal determinism, with 'chance' recast as a name for unrecognised causes, and the adept as one who becomes a cause rather than an effect.

7. Gender, "Gender is in everything." A masculine and feminine principle held to operate on every plane, mental and spiritual as well as physical, and explicitly distinguished by the authors from sex.

The set is symmetrical, memorable and quotable, which is much of why it spread. None of the seven is found in the actual Hermetic treatises, which survive and can be compared; the framework is an early-twentieth-century American construction given an ancient frame.