The Kybalion

Primary source

• Three Initiates, The Kybalion: A Study of the Hermetic Philosophy of Ancient Egypt and Greece, 1908, Introduction, pp. 8–9; chapter II, The Seven Hermetic Principles; chapters III, XIII and XIVThe 1908 title and copyright, seven principles, mental transmutation, claimed ancient oral transmission and the book’s gender theory, all independently read in original-edition OCR.

Scholarship

• Philip Deslippe, The Kybalion: The Definitive Edition, 2011, Editor’s introduction; publisher’s description of the 2011 definitive edition, ISBN 9781585428748The 2011 editorial attribution to William Walker Atkinson and New Thought context, with reception extending into Black Nationalism, independently confirmed in the publisher’s description. The complete editorial introduction was not available for direct reading.
• Frances A. Yates, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition, 1964, Chapter XXI, After Hermes Trismegistus Was Dated, pp. 398–403 and 416–417Casaubon’s 1614 redating and the uneven reception of that critique. Yates explicitly records readers ignoring or rejecting it, and Kircher retaining Hermes’s Abrahamic antiquity; it did not simply end all such reception.