Book review: The Kybalion, Three Initiates / William Walker Atkinson (1908) TarcherPerigee Centenary Edition (2018), 145 pages
If you are going to buy this book, get the Centenary Edition, as the introduction by Richard Smoley is both sympathetic and honest about the book, its heritage and place in history. The introduction is arguably as important as the book itself; without it, the book falls prey to its own writing style.
Along with other ancient wisdom and philosophy, The Kybalion has become fashionable in contemporary discussion. This small book claims to be a distillation of ancient Hermetic Teachings (teachings attributed to Hermes), passed down from student to teacher by word of mouth over millennia. But do these claims hold true, and do the teachings have any inherent value?
Brief overview#
I found this book difficult to read for a number of reasons. The first is frustration with the lack of transparency. The volume is deliberately written and released in such a way as to generate a sense of mystique around it. It claims to be written by three people, yet in all likelihood was written by one. Richard Smoley comments that Atkinson may have been referring to an intellectual debt to Edward Maitland and Anna Kingsford.
You will find its chapters framed with quotes. The quotes are all cited as having come from The Kybalion, and the text then refers to the quotes as if they are a legitimate source. Circular reasoning, also known as self-referential fallacy, erodes credibility because it signals that the idea has no external validation. For a person to consider whether the ‘quote’ has any internal truth, they have to ignore the author’s attempt to give the text intellectual weight through such obvious sleight of hand.
The book is written in the style of a religious text. The author, again, attempts to give credibility to the work by writing sentences in such a way that they are, perhaps deliberately, both hard to read and riddled with circular logic. Some readers might assume the lack of immediate understanding points to an underlying complexity. This is, in fact, far from the truth; the principles and ideas in the book could easily be written simply.
Finally—and interestingly—the writing style involves frequent use of all-caps to denote importance in certain parts of the sentences. This might be a writing style of the day, or perhaps of the New Thought movement itself. The book Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill (1937), was published 29 years later, similarly making frequent use of caps and being deeply rooted in New Thought. It would be interesting to investigate the correlation between sales funnels and sales letters (particularly in the U.S.), marketing copy, and the use of all-caps as a means of creating sales conversions—and how this relates to non-academic texts that attempt to build audience.
What we can say is that this book is an early, increasingly popular, and oft-commented-on book of the New Thought movement of the 19th and 20th centuries, probably written by an author who predominantly wrote about New Thought. The first edition was self-published, and the initially small number of copies might also have had an effect on its popularity. I doubt this was a deliberate form of scarcity marketing, but it may have had an effect.
What the book says#
The book puts forward seven axioms or principles of reality. Each one takes between four and five pages, and a proportion of the prose is dedicated to circular argument, meaning there is little depth. Of these seven, only the first two are truly Hermetic. The principles are:
- Mentalism – All is mind.
- Correspondence – As above, so below.
- Vibration – Nothing rests; everything moves.
- Polarity – Everything has opposites.
- Rhythm – Everything flows in and out.
- Cause and Effect – Every cause has an effect.
- Gender – Everything has masculine and feminine principles.
Richard Smoley, in his introduction, says: “The Kybalion … is part of a long-range trend in Western esoteric thought to move from the personal – from angels, spirits, demons, fairies – into the impersonal: vibration, polarity, causation.” I think this is possibly the most telling statement in the book.
When The Kybalion is viewed through this lens, a number of things fall into place. We can see throughout the text numerous attempts to fit spiritual thought into the context of modern scientific reasoning. Given the book was written in 1908, much of this now falls flat. The science referenced was, at the time, still theory, and is long obsolete. There are some extended paragraphs which refer to occult esoteric ‘science’ of the era, spiritualist cosmology, and mentalist metaphysics, which are stated as fact and have no basis in Hermetic wisdom.
We can see modern New Thought teachers doing the same thing, this time creating a metaphysical melting pot of ideas around, most frequently, quantum physics.
All is Mind: New Thought, philosophical Idealism and other TOEs#
The chapter on “All is mind” is actually quite well written and an interesting way of engaging with the idea, if you have not come across it before.
The principle that “All is mind” strongly resonates with ancient thought, the earliest of which might be Daoism, but most succinctly with ancient Indian texts—the Upanishads (800–500 BCE)—in which Brahman is “pure undivided consciousness” and Atman, the individual soul, is identical to this universal consciousness.
There are modern thinkers and scientists whose ideas intersect with the concepts underpinning New Thought. As a philosophy, New Thought is so wrapped up in the commoditisation of the American dream of meritocratic capitalist society, its persistent use of pseudo science, and its sales tactics, that it is hard to see how it can be taken seriously. However, one of the founding principles, as stated in The Kybalion, is that “all is mind” —which is to say that matter comes out of mind, rather than mind being a by-product of matter. This flies in the face of most serious modern science and philosophy, but not all. Bernardo Kastrup has put forward a ‘Theory of Everything’ (a TOE), called Analytic Idealism, in which he presents exactly this idea. Donald Hoffman, an evolutionary biologist, has put forward a theory that normal Darwinian evolutionary processes guarantee that we cannot see the ‘real’ world. At a deeper level, he posits the idea that animals exist as minds that are connected to each other in a relational network.
Another way of looking at the principle is from the lens of Social Constructionism. It might indeed be argued that the entire New Thought ‘science’ of “bending” the world to your will by presenting yourself in it with different (potentially more adaptive) thoughts and feelings can be explained entirely in the socially constructed domain —with the issue of synchronicities being considered as cognitive or confirmation bias. A simple example: if you walk into a room expecting strangers to treat you poorly, that expectation will be reflected in both your verbal and non-verbal communication—meaning other people in the room have to move beyond your social discomfort before they can co-construct a safe space with you for meaningful interactions. Success in social space (social capital) is strongly related to other forms of success in the human realm.
As above, so below#
This is interesting from a modern perspective because we can look at it in two different ways. The first and most obvious is that the axiom suggests self-similarity in the universe occurring at different scales. To the modern eye, we understand this to be related to fractal mathematics. When we look at galactic scales, then human scales, then microscopic scales, we see patterns that have remarkable similarity. It is only at the quantum scale that this apparently breaks down. While modern science would not wish to speculate, the layperson might be tempted to think there is something at play in the broader ontology of existence. It is still a matter of philosophy rather than science.
The second point—and perhaps a stretch of the definition—is that reality, and particularly human consciousness, is in some way holographic. Rumi, the 13th-century Persian Sufi mystic and poet, is quoted as saying: “You are not a drop in the ocean. You are the entire ocean in a drop.”
Vibration#
This is the part of the book—and indeed the part of the New Age and New Thought movement—that is the most difficult to comprehend and accept. It had its initial basis in the early understanding of the electromagnetic spectrum, but rapidly became a metaphor and cultural artefact, completely disconnected from reality. An example of its inbuilt inconsistencies can be found in its treatment of the word frequency. To be connecting with your higher self, or to be in a happy or spiritually elevated state, the parlance is to “raise your frequency.” However, the scientific data is unequivocal: high levels of cognitive function, such as driving on a busy motorway, occur at Beta and Gamma brain states, where brainwaves can be recorded between 30–100Hz. Meditation and psychedelic “transcendental” states actually lower the brain to Theta and Alpha waves between 4–13 Hz.
There is also a confusing mix of terms: Vibration, Polarity, and Rhythm are to some extent related—particularly in the scientific realm—so the book stumbles over its own desire to relate metaphors and philosophical ideas to the science of the day. A simple example is that for there to be vibration, there must be energy in the system you are measuring. Vibration, to exist at all, must occur between two opposite poles (polarity), and in some sense rhythm and frequency are interchangeable. What has not been measured is the amplitude. It’s easy to see that the 19th-century project to create metaphors that join science, spirituality, and philosophy has not aged well.
Is it relevant or useful today?#
I think The Kybalion is worth reading for a number of reasons. It’s small, and it won’t take long to get through. The use of repetition is noticeable, allowing the reader to skim large amounts of text. If you have any prior knowledge of the subject area, it is possible to read without having to think deeply about the content. The text forms a good introduction to many of the core tenets of New Thought —a spiritual, social, and self-help movement that is still thriving, with its primary consumer bases being the United States, Japan, Brazil, and India. It is sufficiently old that it slightly predates the rapid commercialisation of the genre.
Do the seven axioms have the merit the author claims —for bending reality to your will? Almost certainly not. However, they have enough merit to consider as starting points for further personal thought, potentially useful as self-coaching prompts.
Some examples might be:
- “What in my outer world is mirroring something within me? What internal change could create an external shift?”
- “Where am I seeing this as ‘bad’ or ‘wrong’ — and what’s the other pole of this experience that I haven’t explored yet?”
- “Where am I resisting the natural ebb or flow in my life? What would it look like to ride this wave instead of fighting it?”
