The Kybalion without Tears
Understanding a controversial occult classic
A little book of “Hermetic Philosophy” from 1908 called The Kybalion has recently polarized online opinion. Defenders of the “true way,” if ever there was such a thing, damn the slender work of popular metaphysics as fraudulent, plagiarized, or “crap.”
The facts are both simpler and subtler. Locating them requires less in the way of caffeinated language and more in the way of game investigation. Understanding occultism in the first part of the twentieth century and our own means reckoning with the popular or dramatized literature consumed by many seekers, including The Kybalion. Such an approach may open new doors — even for the critic. I know because I was one.
Like many readers, I once considered The Kybalion little more than a novelty of early twentieth-century occultism, which, in part, it is.
Fancifully attributed to “Three Initiates,” The Kybalion calls itself a commentary on a remote, hidden Hermetic work of the same name whose aphorisms are only quoted. The title phrase has no…
