# The Kybalion (Centenary Edition) ## 04_Copyright.xhtml The Kybalion: Centenary Edition An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC 375 Hudson Street New York, New York 10014 First TarcherPerigee Centenary Edition published 2018 Introduction to the Centenary Edition Copyright © 2018 Richard Smoley Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader. Tarcher and Perigee are registered trademarks, and the colophon is a trademark of Penguin Random House LLC. Ebook ISBN 9781524705695 Cover design: Jess Morphew Version_1 --- ## 05_Dedication.xhtml The Kybalion: Centenary Edition To Hermes Trismegistus known by the ancient Egyptians as “The Great Great” and “Master of Masters” This little volume of hermetic teachings is reverently dedicated --- ## 06_Contents.xhtml The Kybalion: Centenary Edition C ONTENTS Title Page Copyright Dedication Introduction to the Centenary Edition Introduction 1. The Hermetic Philosophy 2. The Seven Hermetic Principles 3. Mental Transmutation 4. The All 5. The Mental Universe 6. The Divine Paradox 7. “The All” in All 8. The Planes of Correspondence 9. Vibration 10. Polarity 11. Rhythm 12. Causation 13. Gender 14. Mental Gender 15. Hermetic Axioms About the Author --- ## 07_Introduction_to_the_C.xhtml The Kybalion: Centenary Edition I NTRODUCTION TO TH E C ENTENARY E DITION by Richard Smoley People grazing in metaphysical bookshops may have wondered about the mysterious volume called The Kybalion , written by “Three Initiates” and first issued by the Yogi Publication Society of Chicago in 1908. The best-known edition is a plain volume bound in blue cloth and stamped with gold, in a format like those of other books from the same publisher, including various works on yoga by one Swami Ramacharaka. The Kybalion claims to be a brief introduction to a mystical tradition that has survived from antiquity. The core of the work is a series of aphorisms which, the authors contend, go back to the “early days” and were “passed on from teacher to student . . . the exact signification and meaning of the terms having been lost for several centuries.” The word kybalion , taken at face value, looks vaguely Greek, but it has no meaning in that language; the closest word to it in the standard Greek lexicon, curiously, is kybeía , meaning “dice game.” It is also tempting to connect this word with the Jewish mystical tradition known as the Kabbalah, especially given that early modern occult texts (such as the seventeenth-century English translation of Cornelius Agrippa’s Three Books of Occult Philosophy ) sometimes use a Hebrew word for Kabbalists: mecubalim . But the Kabbalah is never mentioned in The Kybalion . Rather it presents itself as the essence of the teaching of Hermes Trismegistus (“Thrice-Greatest Hermes”), a legendary, semidivine figure who is said to have brought learning to Egypt in the remotest past. Hermes Trismegistus is often identified with both the Greek god Hermes and the Egyptian god Thoth. The Kybalion is organized according to seven basic principles, which, it says, form the basis of occult philosophy: 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.” Rhythm. “Everything flows, out and in; everything has its tides; all things rise and fall.” Cause and Effect. “Every Cause has its Effect; every Effect has its Cause; everything happens according to Law.” Gender. “Gender is in everything; everything has its Masculine and Feminine Principles; Gender manifests on all planes.” The origins of this book have mystified many. Scholar Philip Deslippe argues, convincingly, I believe, that it was written by William Walker Atkinson, who operated the Yogi Publication Society in Chicago (he is also thought to be “Swami Ramacharaka”). As the first principle—“Mentalism”—suggests, the ideas of The Kybalion bear some resemblance to New Thought, a movement to which Atkinson was closely connected. The universe, The Kybalion tells us, is contained in “the Mind of THE A LL ”: “T HE A LL creates the Universe MENT ALLY , in a manner akin to the process whereby Man creates Mental Images.” This idea is central to practically all New Thought teachings. Nevertheless, the book does echo a more remote past. The term “The All,” for example, resembles the Greek tò pân —which also means “the all” and which appears in some Hermetic maxims, most famously Hèn tò pân : “All is one.” Given the claims made for it, the most obvious source to examine for the roots of The Kybalion is the Corpus Hermeticum or “Hermetic body” of texts. These were composed probably in the early centuries CE and purport to expound the wisdom of Egypt as narrated in a series of discourses and dialogues including Hermes and his son Tat (a version of “Thoth”). And indeed there are intriguing resemblances between these works and The Kybalion . The first text in the Corpus Hermeticum , the Poimandres (probably a Greek adaptation of the Egyptian p-eime-n-re or “mind of authority”), tells us that the source of the universe was noûs —consciousness or mind—much as The Kybalion asserts the principle of “Mentalism.” Moreover, this divine mind is described as “being androgyne and existing as light and life”—which parallels the concept of “Gender” as set out in The Kybalion. The Kybalion also speaks of the principle of correspondence. This idea appears in another ancient Hermetic text: the extremely brief and elliptical Emerald Tablet , which says in Latin, “Quod est superius est sicut quod est inferius, et quod est inferius est sicut quod est superius, ad perpetranda miracula rei unius” : “What is above is like what is below, and what is below is like what is above, to enact the wonders of the one thing.” (The Emerald Tablet is said to have originally been written in Syriac, a Semitic language spoken in the eastern Mediterranean world in antiquity, but it survives only in somewhat dissimilar translations in Latin and Arabic.) Whether there really was a collection of aphorisms known as The Kybalion and passed down from master to pupil from the days of antiquity is hard to say. There are, to my knowledge, no copies of it or any references to it that predate the 1908 edition, but that does not mean there were none. And there are claims of similarly hidden texts in other traditions. The Russian esotericist Boris Mouravieff claimed that esoteric Christianity has an unpublished set of aphorisms called The Golden Book , some of which he quotes in his three-volume work Gnosis: Study and Commentaries on the Esoteric Tradition of Eastern Orthodoxy (although these do not resemble the maxims of The Kybalion to any degree). As for the author, William Walker Atkinson (1862–1932) was born in Baltimore, Maryland. After an abortive career as a lawyer, he moved to Chicago with his family in 1900, and lived there for most of the rest of his life. He began writing books and articles in the vein of New Thought, a movement that stresses the power of the mind in creating reality. His first book, Thought Force, was published in 1901. Most of Atkinson’s books were published pseudonymously. In 1903, he began writing under the name “Yogi Ramacharaka,” and in 1908 The Kybalion appeared, ascribed to “Three Initiates.” The publisher was Atkinson’s own Chicago-based Yogi Publication Society. The identity of these “Three Initiates” has long been a puzzle. Many candidates have been named, notably the occultist Paul Foster Case, founder of the society known as Builders of the Adytum. But as Philip Deslippe’s research has shown, the book almost certainly had a single author, and that was Atkinson. Indeed, in 1917, for a French edition, the translator identified the author as “ le Maître psychiste américain, W. W. Atkinson.” The Kybalion quotes a number of sources from Atkinson’s time: Thomson Jay Hudson’s 1893 work The Law of Psychic Phenomena, Rama Prasada’s 1890 title The Science of Breath and Philosophy of the Tatwas , as well as philosophers William James and Herbert Spencer. But its chief source probably lay elsewhere. In a 2009 blog posting, Tarot scholar Mary K. Greer suggests a plausible source for The Kybalion . In 1885, Anna Kingsford, an Englishwoman who founded an organization called the Hermetic Society, published a book titled The Virgin of the World of Hermes Mercurius Trismegistus , which contained an adaptation of the Hermetic texts. As Greer points out, this book, especially its introduction, written by Kingsford’s associate Edward Maitland, offers parallels for The Kybalion ’s seven principles: Mentalism. Maitland asserts that consciousness is “the indispensable condition of existence” (emphasis Maitland’s). Matter is itself merely “a mode of consciousness.” Correspondence. Maitland writes: “From the oneness of original Being comes, as a corollary, the law of correspondence between all planes, or spheres, of existence, in virtue of which the macrocosm is as the microcosm, the universal as the individual, the world as man, and man as God.” Vibration. The Kybalion formulates this principle thus: “Nothing rests; everything moves; everything vibrates.” This idea echoes a passage in one of the Hermetic texts (10): “There is nothing immutable, nothing stable, nothing unchanging in nature, either in the heavens or the earth.” Polarity. Maitland writes: “All being modes of the One, no inherent antagonism, or essential difference, is possible. . . . Total unconsciousness is . . . not-being and bears to consciousness the relation of darkness to light, the latter alone of the two being, however reduced, positive entity, and darkness being non-entity.” Rhythm. The Corpus Hermeticum 14 reads: “Order maintains the fabric of things established by Destiny and Necessity. For all this is an everlasting sequence without beginning or end. . . . It rises and falls alternately, and as time rolls onward, that which has disappeared, again rises uppermost.” Cause and Effect. Maitland refers to “that inexorable law of cause and effect in things moral, in virtue of which man’s nature and conditions in the future are the result of the tendencies voluntarily encouraged by him in the past and present.” Gender. Maitland writes: “So far from repudiating the relations of the sexes, [the Hermetic doctrine] exalts them as symbolising the loftiest divine mysteries, and enjoins their exercise as a duty, the fulfilment of which, in some at least of his incarnations, is essential to the full perfectionment and initiation of the individual.” Given these resemblances, along with The Kybalion ’s insistence that it contains the essence of Hermetic teaching, it is very likely that Kingsford and Maitland’s work was the main source for The Kybalion . But these examples also show that Atkinson was not plagiarizing The Virgin of the World. Rather he was attempting to distill its most important principles into his own words. The style and content of The Kybalion echo those of Atkinson’s other works. Here, for example, is The Kybalion : The Hermetic Teachings are that not only is everything in constant movement and vibration, but that the “differences” between the various manifestations of the universal power are due entirely to the varying rate and mode of vibrations. . . . Modern Science has proven that all that we call Matter and Energy are but “modes of vibratory motion.” Compare this to an excerpt from a booklet entitled Practical Mental Influence and Mental Fascination, published under Atkinson’s own name: Physical science teaches that underlying all forms, degrees and apparent differences, there is to be found a manifestation of some elementary energy which manifests in what is known as “Vibrations.” Everything in the material world is in vibration—ever manifesting a higher degree of motion. Without vibrations there would be no such thing as a material universe. . . . In fact physical science itself teaches that not only is Vibration the basic force underlying other forces and the various forms of matter, but also that the apparent differences between the various forms of matter, and also the various forms of energy, are caused simply and solely by the varying degrees of Vibration manifested. Another example. Here is The Kybalion: All the phenomenal world or universe is simply a Mental Creation of THE ALL , subject to the Laws of Created Things, and that the universe, as a whole, and in its parts and units, has its existence in the Mind of THE ALL , in which Mind we “live and move and have our being” [cf. Acts 17:28]. Here is a similar passage from Lessons in Gnani Yoga, by Atkinson, writing as Yogi Ramacharaka: This, indeed, is the highest conception of Truth in the Yogi Teachings—this, that all manifestation and emanations of the absolute are mental creations of the absolute—thought-forms held in the infinite mind—the infinite spirit in them—and they in the infinite spirit. But we are left with this question: Why are the pseudonymous authors said to be “ Three Initiates”? Was Atkinson collaborating with anyone else? If we go by the hypothesis that I have sketched out above, the answer becomes apparent: Atkinson wrote the book by himself. But he wanted to acknowledge his debt to Kingsford and Maitland. They were the other two “initiates.” He is not saying that they helped to write the book, which they did not do: both of them had died by the turn of the twentieth century (Kingsford in 1888, Maitland in 1897). Atkinson is simply paying homage to them by including them in the anonymous trinity of authors. Thus it is possible to trace out a lineage for The Kybalion : the original Hermetic texts, which have been known in the Western world since the fifteenth century and which have existed in English versions since at least the seventeenth; and the digest of these texts as presented by Kingsford and Maitland in Victorian London. In this sense, the aphorisms in The Kybalion are very likely a pious fraud. Certainly their style and mode of thought are more evocative of twentieth-century America than they are of ancient Egypt or Renaissance Europe. Even so, it would be a mistake, I think, to conclude that this work is unfaithful to the tradition it lays claim to. A spiritual tradition is based, certainly, on timeless and unchanging truths; but the application to which these truths are put will vary from age to age, in accordance with that age’s need. In this sense, The Kybalion is a genuine link in the Hermetic chain. •   •   • The Kybalion has been a central text for twentieth-century American occultism and spirituality. The book has been hailed in Rosicrucian and Hermetic circles, and in the realm of New Thought. Florence Scovel Shinn, a popular New Thought author of the early twentieth century, identified her positive thinking philosophy with the ideas of The Kybalion, and Shinn herself went on to influence probably the best-known advocate of positive thinking in the twentieth century: Norman Vincent Peale . In the twenty-first century, The Kybalion ’s ideas of vibration, frequency, mental alchemy, and the law of attraction were incorporated into Rhonda Byrne’s 2006 best seller, The Secret. Given all this, how do the ideas in The Kybalion relate to traditional esoteric teaching? The most striking thing about The Kybalion is its terminology: vibration, rhythm, polarity, causation. All of these point to a scientific, or a quasi-scientific, mode of thought. This fits the book perfectly into its context: the early twentieth century, when science had established itself as the ne plus ultra of human knowledge. To be taken seriously, thinkers felt the need to frame their ideas in quasi-scientific terms and invoke the hard physical sciences in support of them. We have already seen examples in the passages quoted above on vibration, which cite “modern science” and “physical science” as authorities. (Our own time has its updated version of this: metaphysical writers invoke quantum physics and relativity—often in garbled and almost unrecognizable forms—in much the same way.) This practice is legitimate, or at any rate understandable: one naturally wishes to frame ancient and presumably eternal ideas in the terms that will make the most sense to one’s contemporaries. But it has created a little-noticed effect: scientific terms and concepts, as framed today, characterize the entities they discuss as impersonal and inanimate : they are forces, not living beings. In the sixth century BCE , Thales of Miletus, the first thinker to explore the universe in a way that might be called scientific, insisted that “all things are full of gods.” No scientist would dare make such a statement today, even if he believed it. The Kybalion, then, is part of a long-range trend in Western esoteric thought to move from a world of the personal—from spirits, angels, demons, fairies—into the impersonal: vibration, polarity, causation. Some may automatically see this process as an advance, or evolution, of thought. I myself am not so sure. I do not believe so categorically either in the personal nature or in the impersonality of the forces that are being explored here. Rather, I would imagine, these forces could look personal viewed from one angle and impersonal from another—the totality being something larger than our minds are likely to be able to apprehend. Hence there is a major difference between the original Hermetic teachings and the New Thought–flavored doctrines of The Kybalion . The Corpus Hermeticum did not exist in a philosophical vacuum; its highly elevated and abstruse dialogues form only a part of the ancient Hermetic literature. Much of the rest consists of magical texts, and scholars have become increasingly aware that these cannot be so easily divorced in content or inspiration from the more theoretical Hermetic writings. In short, the ancient Hermetists probably did not use a type of New Thought–like mind power in their practice. Rather they probably made use of such things as magical rituals, divination, and invocations of the gods, just as we see in most forms of ancient religion. The use of mind power as we find it in New Thought seems to be very much an innovation of the nineteenth century, notably of the New England healer Phineas P. Quimby and his spiritual descendants, including Mary Baker Eddy, founder of Christian Science. •   •   • We now face the biggest and most difficult question of all: What value do the teachings of The Kybalion have? Are they true? There are many testimonials to the effects of thought power on events in the physical world, but then there are also countless cases, many of which we never hear about, in which these ideas simply did not work or did not work as expected. To speak personally again, I would endorse the basic idea of mind power: indeed there are levels of mind at which to think something is to make it happen. Nonetheless, the levels of mind that possess this creative power are surrounded by heavy defenses in the psyche. For most people, they are inaccessible. You can force your way through these barricades with certain techniques and certain drugs: this may be what the traditional occult literature calls the confrontation with the Dweller on the Threshold. This term, used in Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s classic occult novel Zanoni (1842), refers essentially to this psychic barrier between the conscious and unconscious minds. But unless you are extremely well trained and well prepared (and probably even then), this attempt is likely to distort and injure the mind rather than enlightening it. All this is as it should be: Do you really want the power to think something and instantly make it happen? Do you have the will and self-mastery that that would require? In any case, I believe that thought power, in its ultimate form, both offers more power and presents more risks than many people would believe. As for the simpler and easier (and less effective) forms of thought power—positive suggestion and so on—I believe they also work, although in less dramatic ways. Certainly it is better to be saying kind and cheering things to yourself than harmful and destructive ones. But I also believe there are limits to this practice: the subconscious knows when it is being lied to. •   •   • As for The Kybalion ’s specific teachings, my own opinion is that they are true, but it is not easy to grasp their essential connection from the terms it presents. Take the idea that the universe is entirely mental in nature. On the surface, this idea appears to be false. On the surface, it seems that there are (at least) two distinct types of events: mental events take place in one’s mind; they are not publicly accessible (not, at any rate, without some type of communication). We normally distinguish between these and physical events, which are, for the most part, publicly accessible. If you and I are in the same room, and there is a green lamp on the table, we will both see it. But as I have said in my book The Dice Game of Shiva: How Consciousness Creates the Universe, there is more truth to the idea of mentalism than there may seem to be. We can understand it more clearly if we take the following viewpoint: there is that which experiences and that which is experienced. The former has many names in the world’s traditions: the Self, Atman, purusha, the true I, Buddha nature, Spirit. It is pure cognition. It has no contents of its own. Then there is that which is experienced. This includes the sum total of all experience, both physical and mental. It is variously known as prakrti, “the world” (as in the Gospels), and even “matter.” But it is not matter as conventionally understood. It is simply that which is perceived in all forms. In this sense a rock is matter, but so is the image of a rock in your mind. Prakrti is constantly changing, constantly moving, constantly altering. Hence The Kybalion can tell us, “Nothing rests; everything moves; everything vibrates.” In ordinary human consciousness, that which experiences is entangled with that which is experienced. We believe we are what we experience; we believe we are the thoughts and emotions that pass through the mind; we become what we behold. It can be difficult to detach the two, but I believe that this is precisely the goal of many forms of meditation. The Self, as pure witness, watches all phenomena, mental and physical, inner and outer, pleasant and unpleasant, as images passing across the screen of the mind. In this sense we can say that “all is Mental.” Notice also that the interaction between Self and phenomena can itself vary. Self can identify with the contents of its experience; or it can detach itself from them. It seems likely to me that neither of these stances is absolute, and indeed they can alternate, or appear to alternate, rapidly in many cases. Self identifies with its contents; then it detaches itself from them. Let us go further and posit that this process takes place at all levels of manifestation, from that of the subatomic particle to the atom to our own level and beyond. (It is, in my view, entirely legitimate to speak of the consciousness of the atom.) If we posit some kind of process whereby this goes on constantly and, shall we say, habitually, we now see the source of the “Vibration” that The Kybalion describes and which, as it points out, is the standard feature of the universe. Because this process takes place at all levels and scales of reality, we also see the source of the correspondence among all levels that The Kybalion asserts. In fact these considerations help explain all the basic principles of The Kybalion. In addition to the ones I have just mentioned, we have: Polarity. This is the polarity between Self and the “world,” between that which experiences and that which is experienced. Gender. Self and other, that which experiences and that which is experienced, correspond to the masculine and feminine respectively. Rhythm. The perpetual alternation between identification and attachment between Self and other, again at all levels, generates the rhythm of the universe. Cause and Effect. What we observe as cause and effect is simply the operation and outcome of these processes. In any event, even these few brief points can help us see the depth and fertility of the ideas in The Kybalion. They also help us see that these ideas are not merely an arbitrary string of axioms, but expressions of certain basic principles that, once understood, illumine them all. Winfield, Illinois November 2016 --- ## 08_Sources.xhtml sorry something went wrong loading your content. 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Or contact us at support@bookshout.com --- ## 25_About_the_Author.xhtml sorry something went wrong loading your content. Check the table of contents or try paging forward. Or contact us at support@bookshout.com --- ## 26_next-reads.xhtml sorry something went wrong loading your content. Check the table of contents or try paging forward. Or contact us at support@bookshout.com --- ## toc.xhtml Cover Title Page Copyright Dedication Contents Introduction to the Centenary Edition Introduction 1 | The Hermetic Philosophy. 2 | The Seven Hermetic Principles. 3 | Mental Transmutation. 4 | The All. 5 | The Mental Universe. 6 | The Divine Paradox. 7 | “The All” in All. 8 | The Planes of Correspondence. 9 | Vibration. 10 | Polarity. 11 | Rhythm. 12 | Causation. 13 | Gender. 14 | Mental Gender. 15 | Hermetic Axioms. About the Author