A Teacher
Three Initiates (The Kybalion)
Seven Hermetic Principles
The transmission
The Kybalion: Hermetic Philosophy (1908) was published under the pseudonym “Three Initiates,” and is almost universally attributed by scholars to William Walker Atkinson, a prolific New Thought author who also wrote under names like Yogi Ramacharaka and Theron Q.
Dumont. The book claims to distill an ancient Hermetic oral tradition allegedly descended from Hermes Trismegistus, though modern researchers regard it as an early-20th-century synthesis of New Thought psychology dressed in Hermetic language rather than a genuine antique text.
Despite (or because of) its dubious provenance, The Kybalion became one of the most influential occult primers of the modern era. Its accessible, aphoristic style packaged complex esoteric ideas into seven memorable “principles” that countless later teachers absorbed, often without realizing the source.
It functions as a crucial bridge between 19th-century New Thought and the 20th-21st-century manifestation and Law of Attraction movements.
What they gave
The Principle of Mentalism: “The All is Mind; The Universe is Mental” — a foundational statement that reality is fundamentally consciousness, directly underwriting later manifestation claims.
- The Principle of Correspondence: “As above, so below; as below, so above” — links inner mental states to outer conditions.
- The Principle of Vibration: “Nothing rests; everything moves; everything vibrates” — a key ancestor of modern “raise your vibration / frequency” rhetoric.
- Mental Transmutation: The claim that one can change one’s mental state (and thus conditions) by deliberate application of these laws — the practical engine the self-help world inherited.
In their words
All is Mind; the Universe is Mental.
THE ALL is Mind; everything we see and experience is a mental creation of THE ALL.
Nothing rests; everything moves; everything vibrates.
As within, so without.
As above, so below; as below, so above.
The Principle of Correspondence… the truth that there is always a Correspondence between the laws and phenomena of the various planes of Being and Life.
The line they stand in
Influenced by: the broader Hermetic corpus and Hermes Trismegistus mythos; New Thought psychology; William Walker Atkinson’s own prolific output.
- Influenced: modern manifestation culture, Law of Attraction popularizers (Rhonda Byrne et al.), and a vast stream of occult self-help that recycles its seven principles.
Revelations they taught
Essential Works
- The Kybalion: A Study of the Hermetic Philosophy of Ancient Egypt and Greece1908