Coming Across The Kybalion
Looking through the shelves of a Barnes and Noble bookstore that was going out of business I noticed a few copies of a small black book with gold stamping. The cover read, “THE KYBALION: HERMETIC PHILOSOPHY,” and I remembered that I heard this book referenced a lot by various people when discussing such topics as New Age mysticism, the Law of Attraction, and the power of the mind. Naturally, my interest was piqued and since the entire store was at least 50% off, I decided to purchase this book and a few others to get back into the habit of reading.
Doing some light research, it seems that this book is the origin of a lot of modern spiritual concepts (energy, vibrations, forces, etc.) that I had assumed developed organically from various sources. This seemed like a worthwhile endeavor to tackle works such as these head on and see what they say themselves firsthand. A flaw in the current way the Internet is set up is that it is very easy to disseminate knowledge and concepts, but it is very difficult to get the proper context for that knowledge. As such, I believe that provides fertile grounds for a more formal look into such topics and that is the general reason why I am writing this blog.
What is The Kybalion?
So, what is The Kybalion? Generally, it is a collection of aphorisms that are claimed to have been passed down from teacher to student through the ages from Hermes Trismegistus in ancient Egypt, and their explanations ostensibly given by 3 masters of the occult, the enigmatic Three Initiates, which provide the basis for understanding Hermetic philosophy. My copy of The Kybalion starts with an introduction by Richard Smoley, who is described as a “celebrated scholar of mystical traditions,” and indeed, he does an excellent job of quickly going through the origin of The Kybalion as well as the probable identity of the Three Initiates. According to Smoley, The Kybalion is rooted primarily on late 19th century adaptations of Hermetic texts written by Anna Kingsford and Edward Maitland and was written by William Walker Atkinson, an author in the New Thought movement. These 3 writers would then be the Three Initiates.
However, Smoley does not take too much issue with this, “pious fraud,” as The Kybalion seems to be faithful to the Hermetic tradition. It does indeed still draw upon passed down knowledge given from master to student and importantly adapts it to be understandable to a modern audience as science became the dominant force in our understanding of the world around the 20th century. Events began to be understood as interactions between particles and forces as opposed to the will of the gods and spirits. This shift in framing is the largest issue in connecting The Kybalion to ancient Hermetic teaching, Smoley points to this as a significant ongoing shift in Western esoteric thought; a shift from the personal to the impersonal, a shift from living gods and their whims to one of inanimate forces.
Smoley believes that the the basic principles presented in The Kybalion do still provide a useful source of information for understanding how the Universe works and how the power of the mind can be used.