Walter Mason

It is sometimes stated that William Walker Atkinson (aka "Three Initiates") derived his "Seven Principles" in The Kybalion (1908) from an 1885 translation and commentary on Hermetic tracts, The Virgin of the World by Anna Kingsford and Edward Maitland (whose English translation is adapted from an 1866/67 French compendium by classicist Louis Ménard). This analysis first appeared in a 2009 blog article by esoteric scholar Mary K. Greer ("Source of The Kybalion in Anna Kingsford’s Hermetic System") and later in a 2018 introduction to The Kybalion that I commissioned from my friend and source of literary inspiration, Richard Smoley. Having compared Greer’s and Smoley’s comparisons—which variously correspond to and depart from one another—to Kingsford and Maitland's book, I find the evidence tangential—not necessarily thin but incomplete—that Atkinson devised (or in the overly determined phrasing of an online commentator “plagiarized”) his seven principles from The Virgin of the World. The Kybalion has passed through two stages of disdain in our generation. The first is that it is fake Hermeticism. This is overwrought. It is a modern novelty—in my estimation a meaningful novelty with insights into Hermetic themes and a canny analysis of New Thought and its physical limits. The second and more recent disdain results from commenters reading one another versus reading the book, and hence arriving at semi-bizarre political claims suggested nowhere in the century-old text. Ad fontes.

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