Is “The Kybalion” Ancient? The 1908 Book and the Hermetic Sources

Where it comes from

The book. The Kybalion: A Study of the Hermetic Philosophy of Ancient Egypt and Greece was published in Chicago in 1908 by the Yogi Publication Society, which gave its address on the title page as the Masonic Temple. The authors are named only as "Three Initiates", and the book is dedicated to Hermes Trismegistus (Three Initiates 1908, title page and dedication). Its Introduction says that it does not set out a philosophy of its own: its purpose is "not the enunciation of any special philosophy or doctrine" (p. 7).

That teaching, in the book's account, goes back to Hermes himself, a sage of early Egypt whom it calls "the father of the Occult Wisdom; the founder of Astrology; the discoverer of Alchemy" and whom "the best authorities" make a contemporary of Abraham (p. 17). It was handed down from teacher to pupil in a collection of "maxims, axioms, and precepts" called the Kybalion, which no outsider could understand (p. 21). The book is careful to say that this collection has no written form:

Its precepts have never been written down, or printed, so far as we know.

The seven Principles. The book arranges the teaching as seven Principles: Mentalism, Correspondence, Vibration, Polarity, Rhythm, Cause and Effect, and Gender (pp. 25–26). Each is introduced by a maxim; the first, for Mentalism, is credited to "The Kybalion" and reads:

THE ALL is MIND; The Universe is Mental.

The maxim for Correspondence, also credited to "The Kybalion", is "As above, so below; as below, so above" (p. 28). The later chapters turn the Principles into a practice the book calls Mental Transmutation, "the art of changing and transforming mental states, forms, and conditions, into others" (p. 45), and the book says that "mental science", "new-thought phenomena" and similar things all work by this one principle (p. 48). The claim tested here is the book's own account of where its teaching comes from.

Who wrote it

The Yogi Publication Society also issued, from the same address in the Masonic Temple, the books of "Yogi Ramacharaka" (Ramacharaka 1906, title page). Who's Who in America for 1910–1911 names the man behind that pen name as William Walker Atkinson, born in Baltimore in 1862 and admitted to the bar in Pennsylvania and Illinois, associate editor of the magazine Suggestion in 1900 and editor of New Thought in Chicago from 1901 to 1905, whose own books include Thought Force (1900), The Law of the New Thought (1902), Self-Healing (1907) and The Secret of Success (1908) (Who's Who in America 1910, p. 56). These are books of the New Thought movement, and The Kybalion itself says that "mental science" and "new-thought phenomena" work by its one principle (p. 48). The 1910 entry does not list The Kybalion. According to Mitch Horowitz, the 1912 edition of the same reference work records the book as Atkinson's alone; AKASHA has not been able to read that volume (Horowitz 2025).

Horowitz, who named Atkinson as the sole author in Occult America (2009), holds that he wrote it alone. The opposing view takes the pen name at its word and looks for three writers. The candidate Horowitz discusses is the occultist Paul Foster Case, and the report that Case was one of the three seems to go back to Case himself. Horowitz doubts it: in 1908 Case was a young man of twenty-four, newly settled in Chicago, though the two men may have exchanged ideas (Horowitz 2025). Whether anyone wrote the book with Atkinson is debated(evidence: Contested). The title itself has no known earlier use (Horowitz 2025), and the book's own account, that its precepts were never written down (p. 21), leaves no earlier text to look for.

What the sources say

The Hermetic writings that survive

The books that ancient and medieval readers knew as the works of Hermes Trismegistus are Greek and Latin treatises from the Roman world. The Corpus Hermeticum is a collection of Greek treatises, numbered I to XVIII in the editions (there is no XV); the Asclepius survives in a Latin version once wrongly attributed to Apuleius (Scott 1924, pp. 15, 19–20). The collection as a whole cannot be traced in manuscripts before the fourteenth century, though Walter Scott thought it was probably known by about 1050 CE (Scott 1924, pp. 27–28).

When the treatises were written has been argued since the seventeenth century. Isaac Casaubon, in his Exercitationes of 1614, dated the Corpus to about the end of the first century CE; Scott (1924), who thought that date "a little too early", placed most if not all of the treatises in the third century, allowed that some might be of the late second, and thought probably none as early as the first (Scott 1924, pp. 10, 41). Wouter Hanegraaff (2022) studies them as the products of Roman Egypt in the first centuries CE. Casaubon and Scott differ by as much as two centuries, but not on the era: Casaubon, Scott and Hanegraaff all place the treatises in the Roman period.

What they teach

The first treatise, the Poimandres, opens with a vision. A great being appears to the narrator and names himself "Man-Shepherd, Mind of all-masterhood" (I.2, Mead's translation). He then explains the light the narrator has seen:

That Light, He said, am I, thy God, Mind, prior to Moist Nature which appeared from Darkness; the Light-Word (Logos) [that appeared] from Mind is Son of God.

The words in square brackets are Mead's own addition to the sense. God-the-Mind, the treatise goes on, is "male and female both", and brings forth a second Mind who forms seven Rulers enclosing the visible cosmos (I.9, p. 7). At the end of the treatise the soul rises after death through the zones of those Rulers, giving up at the first "the Energy of Growth and Waning", at the second the "Device of Evils" (p. 16), and so on through the seventh, until it reaches God (I.24–26).

Some of the Kybalion's themes therefore have a real basis in the Hermetic texts. The Poimandres does call God Mind, and it does describe a Mind that is both male and female. What the treatises do not contain is the Kybalion's system. No treatise sets out seven Principles; none mentions a book or teaching called the Kybalion; and the maxims the book credits to it, such as "THE ALL is MIND; The Universe is Mental", do not occur in them. The idea that those maxims are ancient Hermetic sayings is not supported(evidence: Not supported): by the book's own account they had never been written down, so nothing older than 1908 can be checked. The aims also differ. The Poimandres leads the soul away from the powers it took on in the body and towards knowledge of God; The Kybalion teaches its reader to change mental states by "Mental Transmutation".

"As above, so below"

The Kybalion's best-known axiom comes from a different text, the Emerald Tablet (Latin Tabula smaragdina), a short alchemical work also ascribed to Hermes. It is not one of the Greek treatises. Its earliest surviving versions are in Arabic, where its wisdom is traced to a book of Balīnās, a name often taken, though never proved, to be Apollonius of Tyana; the Latin versions descend from an Arabic one, and a Latin text was current by the thirteenth century (Azize 2025, pp. 131–132, 135). When the Arabic text was first composed is uncertain(evidence: Contested). Julius Ruska, author in 1926 of what is still the only book-length study (Azize 2025, p. 135 n. 17), set it between the sixth century and 750 CE. Joseph Azize accepts that span as a working range, holds the earlier limit to be the less secure of the two, and suggests that the Arabic may rest on a lost Syriac text written by a Christian (Azize 2025, p. 136).

An English version printed in London in 1597 gives the sentence as follows:

That which is beneath is like that which is aboue: & that which is aboue, is like that which is beneath, to worke the miracles of one thing.

In the Tablet the likeness of below and above has a purpose, "to worke the miracles of one thing", the substance of which the rest of the Tablet speaks. The Kybalion keeps the comparison, drops the purpose, and makes it a general Principle, "As above, so below; as below, so above" (p. 28). The comparison is older than the book by many centuries, but it is the Emerald Tablet's, not the Kybalion's, and it comes from alchemy, not from the Greek Hermetic treatises.

The date of Hermes

The book's Hermes, an Egyptian sage of Abraham's time, is older than the book. From Lactantius in late antiquity to Casaubon in the seventeenth century, readers took the Hermetic writings to be the genuine work of an ancient sage (Scott 1924, p. 6). A manuscript of the Corpus was brought to Cosimo de' Medici in Florence, and Marsilio Ficino translated it into Latin, in 1463 according to Richard Reitzenstein, a date Scott could not trace to its source; the translation was first printed at Treviso in 1471 (Scott 1924, pp. 20, 31). Francesco Patrizi (Scott: Patrizzi) made him a contemporary of Moses but a little older (coetaneus quidem fuisse Mosy, sed paulo senior, quoted by Scott 1924, p. 40), and the preface to John Everard's English translation of 1650 placed the book "some hundreds of yeers before Moses his time" (Scott 1924, p. 43). Casaubon's study of 1614 began to dismantle that picture. He argued from the language and vocabulary of the Greek that the treatises were written in Greek, not translated from Egyptian, and in the Christian era; Scott corrected him on one point, that the authors were pagans and not Christians, and recorded that his dating gradually prevailed (Scott 1924, pp. 41–43). The Kybalion repeats the older picture three centuries after Casaubon first challenged it.

Why it matters

The Kybalion is a real document with a place of its own in history. It is an American book of 1908, issued by a Chicago publisher whose house author edited the magazine New Thought, and it has been among the most widely read occult books of the last century (Horowitz 2025). Read and dated in that way, it can be studied like any other modern esoteric text. What it cannot be is a witness to what the Hermetic writings teach. Its source, by its own account, was never written down, so its quotations cannot be checked against anything older than the book that quotes them.

The Hermetic writings themselves survive and can be read. The Poimandres and the other treatises are available in public-domain translations, among them G. R. S. Mead's of 1906, published by the Theosophical Publishing Society, and Walter Scott's of 1924. Both reflect the scholarship and the commitments of their time, and modern translations such as Brian Copenhaver's (1992) are the place to check them. AKASHA cites Hermetic doctrine from those texts directly and never from The Kybalion.

The method also matters. The questions that dated the Corpus Hermeticum in 1614, when a text was written, in what language and with what vocabulary, settle the date of The Kybalion just as well. When a book names an unwritten teaching as its source, only the book can be checked, and the surviving texts are the only way to tell its teaching from the tradition it claims to transmit.