The Kybalion de Three Initiates

The Kybalion

Three Initiates

en Limba Engleză Paperback – 31 mar 2013

We take great pleasure in presenting to the attention of students and investigators of the Secret Doctrines this little work based upon the world-old Hermetic Teachings. There has been so little written upon this subject that the many earnest searchers after the Arcane Truths will doubtless welcome the appearance of this present volume.The purpose of this work is not the enunciation of any special philosophy or doctrine, but rather is to give to the students a statement of the Truth that will serve to reconcile the many bits of occult knowledge that they may have acquired, but which are apparently opposed to each other and which often serve to discourage and disgust the beginner in the study. Our intent is not to erect a new Temple of Knowledge, but rather to place in the hands of the student a Master-Key with which he may open the many inner doors in the Temple of Mystery through the main portals he has already entered.

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Notă biografică

The Three Initiates who authored The Kybalion chose to remain anonymous. As a result, a great deal of speculation has been made about who actually wrote the book. The most common proposal is that The Kybalion was authored by William Walker Atkinson, either alone or with others, such as Paul Foster Case and Elias Gewurz. Atkinson was known to use many pseudonyms, and to self-publish his works. Also suggestive is that among his earliest published pseudonymous and anonymous works may have been a series entitled The Arcane Teachings, which bears many superficial similarities to The Kybalion. While the latter explores seven "Hermetic Principles", The Arcane Teachings examines seven "Arcane Laws"; The Kybalion claims to be an elucidation of an ancient, unpublished Hermetic text of the same name, and The Arcane Teachings claims to reveal the wisdom of an ancient, unpublished scroll of occult aphorisms. Both books describe three "Great Planes" of reality which are further subdivided into seven lesser planes. Both also describe three of the lesser planes as "astral black keys" analogous to the black keys on a piano, and inhabited by elemental spirits. And both books describe the process of "Mental Alchemy" in great detail, and in near-complete agreement with each other. There are other similarities, and some argue that The Arcane Teachings might have been Atkinson's "first draft" of material which later became The Kybalion. Atkinson also attempted to describe the workings of the universe in terms of a set of laws in his last manuscript The Seven Cosmic Laws, written in 1931 and published posthumously in 2011.