The Kybalion: a 1908 book that claims to be millennia old

The seven principles of the Kybalion are quoted everywhere: "As above, so below", "Everything vibrates", "Everything flows". It has been very influential in New Age circles since the twentieth century.¹ And there is a story that is rarely told: the book presents itself as the wisdom of a sage of ancient Egypt, Hermes Trismegistus, and it was published in 1908. Here is what the book says of itself, what is known about its origin, and what really is ancient in the Hermetic tradition. It is not mockery: it is the history of an idea, with its sources.

A 1908 book with an origin of millennia

The Kybalion: A Study of the Hermetic Philosophy of Ancient Egypt and Greece was published in 1908, in Chicago, by the Yogi Publication Society, signed by "Three Initiates".¹ What it says of its origin is very specific. It speaks of the Hermetic teachings "which have come down to us over the tens of centuries" since the lifetime of Hermes Trismegistus, who "dwelt in old Egypt" and was "contemporary with Abraham". "The best authorities", it adds without naming them, regard him so.²

And from that it draws an enormous consequence: "All the fundamental and basic teachings embedded in the esoteric teachings of every race may be traced back to Hermes. Even the most ancient teachings of India undoubtedly have their roots in the original Hermetic Teachings." In the first chapter it repeats it with more names: from Egypt's "Secret Doctrine all nations have borrowed": "India, Persia, Chaldea, Medea, China, Japan, Assyria, ancient Greece and Rome".² In the passages I read, the start of the introduction and of the first chapter, it offers no proof of any of it.

The seven principles

They are the heart of the book. These are its sentences:²

• Mentalism: "The All is Mind; the Universe is Mental."
• Correspondence: "As above, so below; as below, so above."
• Vibration: "Nothing rests; everything moves; everything vibrates."
• Polarity: "Everything is dual; everything has poles; everything has its pair of opposites… opposites are identical in nature, but different in degree; extremes meet; all truths are but half-truths; all paradoxes may be reconciled."
• Rhythm: "Everything flows, out and in; everything has its tides; all things rise and fall; the pendulum-swing manifests in everything…"
• Cause and effect: "Every cause has its effect; every effect has its cause; everything happens according to law; chance is but a name for law not recognized…"
• Gender: "Gender is in everything; everything has its masculine and feminine principles; gender manifests on all planes."

Who wrote it, and what "Kybalion" means

"Three Initiates" is a pseudonym. Several scholars, among them Philip Deslippe, Nicholas E. Chapel, Richard Smoley and Mitch Horowitz, identify the author as William Walker Atkinson (1862–1932), one of the pioneers of the New Thought movement.¹ And the word "Kybalion" looks Greek, but it has no known meaning in that language: it was probably made up to give a false sense of antiquity.¹

The book itself quotes aphorisms "of the Kybalion" as if from an older work: "Where fall the footsteps of the Master, the ears of those ready for his Teaching open wide", "The lips of Wisdom are closed, except to the ears of Understanding".² Scholars believe that earlier book did not exist and that the title was invented.

What the book does not mention

This can be checked in minutes, which is why I did it. In the full text of the book, in the Project Gutenberg edition, none of these words appears even once: "Emerald" (the Emerald Tablet), "Tablet", "Poimandres", "Pymander", "Asclepius", "Corpus Hermeticum", "Hermetica", "Ficino" or "Casaubon". Nor "Arab" or "Islam". "Hermes" does appear 17 times and "Trismegistus" 4.²

That is: a book that claims to transmit the doctrine of Hermes does not name the Corpus Hermeticum, or the Asclepius, or the Emerald Tablet, or those who translated and studied them, and it mentions nothing Arabic or Islamic, when the Arabic tradition is, as we will see, the one that preserved the Emerald Tablet.

The real Hermetic texts

The Corpus Hermeticum is a collection of 17 Greek treatises attributed to Hermes Trismegistus, a figure that blends the Greek god Hermes with the Egyptian god Thoth. They were written between c. 100 and c. 300 CE, and the collection, as we know it, was put together by Byzantine editors.³ Its history is also a lesson about antiquity. In 1462, Cosimo de' Medici had Marsilio Ficino translating Plato. When a manuscript of the Corpus became available, Ficino dropped Plato to translate Hermes, because it was believed to be much older and, therefore, more authoritative.³ It is the same Ficino and the same Cosimo as in our article on melancholy.

In 1614, Isaac Casaubon noticed that the Corpus was written in Koine Greek, which developed in the Hellenistic period, and with that it lost its claim to predate Plato.³ In 1945 Hermetic writings turned up at Nag Hammadi, and some scholars think the Corpus and other Hermetic writings may have a background in Hellenistic Egyptian texts. But the Corpus itself is still dated to c. 100–300 CE.³

The Emerald Tablet is something else. It is a short, cryptic text, and its oldest known versions are neither Egyptian nor Greek but four Arabic ones preserved in treatises between the 8th and 10th centuries, chiefly the Secret of Creation (Sirr al-Khalīqa). From the 12th century it began to be translated into Latin. Scholars believe the Secret of Creation was compiled, wholly or in part, from earlier Greek or Syriac materials. Isaac Newton prepared an English translation: "That which is below is like that which is above and that which is above is like that which is below to do the miracle of one only thing".⁴ "As above, so below" is a paraphrase of its second verse, and the Kybalion presents it as "the old Hermetic axiom" without saying where it comes from.²⁴

What is ancient, and what is not

Nicholas Chapel points out that several elements of the Kybalion have a background in ancient and medieval Hermetic texts: philosophical mentalism, the "as above, so below" of the Emerald Tablet, and the idea that everything exists as gendered polar pairs. Mitch Horowitz adds that the first principle was inspired by similar notions in the Greek Hermetic texts.¹

But Chapel also points out what is not. The principle of vibration comes from the philosophy of David Hartley (1705–1757), not from the Hermetic tradition. The book is anti-theological, whereas the Hermetic texts lay heavy emphasis on theology. And its centre is the practitioner's "mental transmutation", as against the traditional concern with reverence and union with the divine. His conclusion: the Kybalion is too bound up with early twentieth-century New Thought ideas to be representative of the historical Hermetic tradition.¹

The book itself shows its age. It explains vibration with the science of its day: atoms are "merely a grouping of units of force, called electrons or 'ions,' vibrating and in constant circular motion", and everything vibrates, it says, according to "facts which Modern Science endorses". And it adds: "And yet this Hermetic Principle was enunciated thousands of years ago."²

What exists yet?

All this fits on a timeline. Move the year in the block below: each text appears when it exists, according to this article's sources.

A book that has gone around the world

According to Wikipedia, The Kybalion has its own article in 20 languages besides English, among them Arabic, Chinese, Russian, Portuguese, Turkish and Ukrainian; when consulted, it has none in Hindi, Japanese, Korean or Persian.⁵ That does not say how much it is read in each place, only where someone has set out to write about it. But it gives an idea of how far a Chicago book of 1908 has travelled.

And there is an irony. A book that says the traditions of India, China and Japan come from Egypt says not a word about the tradition that did preserve the Emerald Tablet, the Arabic one. To know the world you need the opposite of what the book does: to look at each tradition in its own texts and its own languages, without deriving it from any other. It is what this Diary wants to do when it gets to the non-European traditions.

What we do with this

Anima Mundis calls "frequencies" the four ways of being that can be tuned in to. It is a name, not a physical claim: no vibration is measured here, and nothing this site says depends on the Kybalion being right. What we do measure, and it can be checked, is how many times someone said how they were and at what UTC hour, at the Observatory.

The Kybalion does not need to be ancient to be of value to whoever reads it; its mistake is to say that it is. Here the opposite rule holds: everything that is claimed has to be checkable, and what could not be checked is said so.