Books & Texts — 90 entries | Encyclopedia of Mystery

Book · Hermetica · around 800 CE

The Emerald Tablet

A Tablet Nobody Has Seen

'As above, so below' — a cosmology in a few lines, resting on a tablet nobody has produced.

SignificanceAs above, so below is a working instruction before it is a cosmology: it licenses the alchemist to read the vessel as a small heaven and act on one by acting on the other. Newton translated it. The text's promise is that scale is not a barrier to correspondence.

The FindingIts authority rests on a fiction it states openly: a tablet nobody has produced, found in a vault nobody entered, signed with a name its author did not own. The earliest version is Arabic, of about 750–850, with no Egyptian or Greek original behind it.

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Book · Hermetica · 1908

The Kybalion

New Thought in Egyptian Dress

Seven teachable principles that carried Hermetic vocabulary far, on a pedigree the 1908 book never had.

SignificanceIts first principle is mentalism — the All is mind, the universe is mental — and everything else in the book follows from it. That is the New Thought claim in Hermetic costume, and it is the one that made the book usable: if reality is mental, changing thought changes reality.

The FindingThe seven 'Hermetic principles' sold as ancient Egyptian teaching appear first in Chicago in 1908, signed by Three Initiates. No such text is known, and the word Kybalion has no Greek or Egyptian source at all.

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Book · around 200 BCE

The Bhagavad Gītā

An Episode Made Scripture

A claim on the action, none on its fruit; it has tended to return to each reader the duty he brought.

SignificanceIts most quoted verse gives a right to the action and none at all to its fruit — and it is spoken to a man who wants to leave the field. The teaching is not detachment from the work but detachment from the outcome, which is the harder half and the one that permits acting at all.

The FindingCommented on as a book in its own right since Śaṅkara in the eighth century, the Gītā became the Hindu book about duty in action — and the one most outsiders meet first — through a modern chain of readers: Wilkins 1785, Tilak 1915, Gandhi 1929-30.

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