I recently received some questions from a visitor to this website. One of them was in which sense the Sibilla is considered “chiacchierina”, i.e., chatty.
This is an interesting question, because it gets to the heart of how divination works (and not just divination with cards). I don’t want to foster the belief that the Sibilla is more capable of conveying information than other divination systems. This would be false advertising. Every deck and every system is capable of informing us.
But the way in which the Sibilla informs us is rather unique. Here we get into the specific character that each deck and system has. The Sibilla is like an off-beat aunt with a poor sense of boundaries.
A girl once asked me how her crush for a guy would develop. The girl had moved in with her grandma and the grandma disapproved of the guy. The Sibilla started off not with an answer to the question, but by telling me that the girl’s grandma disapproved of the situation. If I had asked another one of the decks I work with, I probably would have gotten a more straightforward answer.
It takes working with each deck in order to understand their language and personality, but these always emerge sooner or later. This is also probably why old folk diviners believed that each deck has a spirit attached to it that lives inside its cards and infuses them with its peculiar traits, a belief that I tend to share, since it explains this phenomenon much better than the impersonal Jungian theory of synchronicity.
The reality is that each (valid) divination system is chatty in its own way. I’ve heard the Bolognese tarot being referred to as chatty, and as I work with it I understand that its chattiness really is a factor, even though it is less chaotic than the Sibilla.
This is a recurrent question I get. Some people are of the opinion that reading decks have something akin to a shelf life, after which they stop answering or they become impregnated with negative energy from all the readings. I often get asked if this is the case.
To which my answer is: under normal circumstances, your deck will keep answering you (or at least it will keep working, even if it occasionally snubs your questions) for as long as you use it. This has been my experience, as well as that of all my teachers, and I’ve had the good luck having many teachers.
My first teacher, from whom I learned to read playing cards and the Sibilla, followed the Italian tradition that divination decks need to be old, must have been used to play at the local inn and the people playing with them must have covered them in offensive swearwords (read here my hypothesis on why this tradition exists).
This obviously doesn’t apply to the Sibilla, since Sibilla decks, as well as similar decks like Lenormand or Kipper cards, are pretty much the only card decks specifically designed for divination. But tarot was a playing card game, and playing cards… well, it’s in the name, and so, according to my teacher, they needed to be “giocati e bestiemmati” (played with and offended with swearwords). And after you got a hold of one such deck, you probably were going to use it for as long as you lived.
When I started learning the tarot, my other teacher held on to her first deck as if it was a relic, and it did answer her beautifully. She was of the opinion, however, that the deck could stop answering correctly or become more negative in its answers if you read for many people with a tragic life. When this happened, she usually took the deck to church and had it blessed by the priest. I honestly cannot say I ever needed this, but there you have it.
As for the Bolognese tarot, I do not know what deck the person who taught me the 45-card system used, but I do know that my teacher for the 50-card system still uses her grandmother’s deck. Another person I am in contact with, who uses 49 cards, still uses the deck her teacher gifted her.
As for me, I have a conservative outlook on life, and I don’t throw away something unless I really, really have to. The Sibilla deck I use is the one I bought when I started learning, and while I don’t insist on always using the same playing card deck, I still occasionally whip out my old one.
Still, there are people who believe decks can stop working after a while, including people I admire (see Josephine MacCarthy). Is there anything to it? Obviously, much depends on the theoretical framework one uses for their magical activities (which includes divination).
I was taught that divination (any divination) can stop working if you are the recipient of a curse, but that’s an extreme scenario. More often, the people who complain about their deck going lazy on them tend to torture them with repeated questions on the same topic over and over.
As much as skeptics may point out that this is proof that divination doesn’t work because it cannot be repeated ad libitum in lab conditions, it is simply how it is: if you annoy the deck it will stop answering. This simple fact shows, at least in my opinion, that there is something alive attached to the deck.
Usually, in traditional divination folklore, we would say that the deck has a little spirit hidden inside. And while this may sound like a childish explanation, it is the one that best explains my experience, as well as being perfectly in line with traditional hermetic principles. The point is that while many valiant attempts have been made at explaining divination using more or less recognized principles (see Jung’s views), we are at work with something we don’t fully understand. Some level of respect is due to this something, if for nothing else than to keep the work environment positive with whatever it is.
One thing that never ceases to amuse me is how so many of the people who try to sell courses in ‘wisdom’ or other metaphysical services, who pretend to have had access to the ultimate secrets of the universe, all seem obsessed with increasing the weight their own name carries. There they are, engaged in cock fights with one another, vying for the attention and legitimation of a small number of clapping seals.
I’m not one to rain on other people’s parade, but if anyone reading this is on any sort of quest for ‘development’ (let’s use the shallow, non-descript term), you can safely forget fame. There is nothing wrong with wanting your merits recognized, but realize that you will be forgotten. Even the greatest of the greatest, the Shakespeare’s and the Einstein’s, will in the fullness of time be forgotten.
I understand the allure of an above-average level of recognition. I was raised by a mother who thought the only way for her to have a meaningful life was to birth and raise the next great genius of humanity. It took me years to distinguish my own aims from hers, to recognize that I am smart but not a genius, driven but not obsessed, and that my desire for recognition was actually hers. To this day I have to remind myself of that on a daily basis because the old education constantly rears its head within me.
I’m also not willing to reject humanity’s drive for recognition out of hand. I see that it has been the fuel behind some great accomplishments. But what I do find funny is that exactly the field that we might broadly speaking define as spirituality should be so full of egomaniacs of the shallowest, most recognizable sort.
As someone whose magical motto is ‘I shall neither lead nor follow’, I am not necessarily looking for a guru. But I know that there are people who look for a teacher, and in itself that is alright. But do be careful. Recognize them by their fruits. And some of their fruits include their actions. If they are screaming on socials at the top of their lungs, they might not be a great example to follow.
This is not to say they can’t have something to say or to teach. As a deeply flawed individual, I have learned a lot from deeply flawed individuals. But don’t put them on a pedestal. Don’t be a groupie. If you are on a path to wisdom, you cannot afford that.
I keep coming across people on the Internet who dabble either in magic or spirituality (generally alternative spirituality) who lament that after a while they still feel miserable. Although my heart breaks for them, I think there is great confusion surrounding the place of spirituality and, let’s say, alternative practices.
One of the very few perks of rigid orthodoxy is that it exists beyond individual’s will, so that each practitioner needs to adapt to it rather than adapting it to themselves.
Once the idea of orthodoxy crumbled, at least in the West, spiritual and other practices became a supermaket of parts that each person could adapt to their own whim, picking and choosing what currently fit their mental narrative.
Although with some discernment this power of personal choice can yield great results, what in practice often ends up happening is that spirituality is reduced to a crutch for personal prejudices about oneself, others and the world.
In the end, each individual flavor of postmodern spirituality is more an inkblot test of what the person would be better off discussing with a therapist than a workable spiritual path.
What’s more, the expectation of finding a definitive cure for life is always dangerous: firstly, because life is not an illness; secondly, because spirituality is not a good substitute for therapy or other forms of support; and thirdly, and most importantly, because anything that promises to turn our life into happy trip is always to be looked at with skepticism. No serious spiritual or magical doctrine can promise that.
The life of someone who always smiles and is always happy is not balanced. If anything, it’s creepy. There is a time for happiness and there is a time for sorrow. A balanced person is someone who responds to life in an adequate manner depending on the concrete situation. Look at the traditional descriptions of wisdom in Daoism or ancient Western philosophy, and you’ll always note that the wise person is the one who always reacts in the adequate manner, with as little influence from their personal demons as possible.
It is unfortunate that these practices are often the go-to for people who would benefit from other types of help. Sometimes they simply cannot afford official help, and this is another conversation, so they simply look for something they can afford and promises them miracles.
When it comes to searching for philosophical-magical inspiration from pre-Christian times, many occultists look at Plotinus and Proclus, two of the most important among Plato’s successors. After Plato, they are the most noteworthy representatives of Platonism, and if Platonism is up your alley, as it is right up mine, you’ve probably looked into them.
Proclus, who was one of Plotinus’ successors as head of the Academy, and was also the last noteworthy Platonist, is especially popular among those who seek inspiration for magical work. The reason is that, unlike Plotinus, Proclus did have a strong interest in religious and magical practices as well as being an important philosopher.
My personal preference, though, is Plotinus. I discovered his work, the Enneads, in my late teens and read it all throughout college. Unlike Proclus, Plotinus was a pure philosopher, with no interests outside of philosophy. Yet his writings have inspired many generations of theologians, occultists, hermeticians and devotees.
Writing at a time when Christianity and other early odd religious beliefs held sway, Plotinus managed to single-handedly revive philosophy as an exalted pursuit that connected the mind with the divine realm. Although he did not appear out of nowhere (his predecessors at the Academy had already laid the groundwork), his genius does tower over anything and anyone who lived in his time.
Plotinus had the aspiration to simply explain Plato’s work, and as a matter of fact we often find assertions in his writings that he is doing nothing more than saying what Plato has already said. But this is not true. His philosophy sought to coherently explain the whole of reality starting from the initial unity, and to trace the steps that mortals can take to re-experience that unity in their ascent back to the One. Although one could argue that the same aspiration is present in Plato, and especially in his esoteric doctrines, the two philosophers are still very much distinct, as is to be expected, considering how many centuries separate them.
From a philosophical standpoint, Proclus is not a cipher like some others of Plotinus’ successors. In fact, he was a gifted philosopher, who would have probably contributed much more, had he lived a couple of centuries earlier. Yet most of the innovations he introduced in the Platonic doctrine feel like complications rather than meaningful developments. His (over)zealous attempts at systematizing and consolidating the entire wisdom of the Greeks, from religion to philosophy to magic, may appear impressive at first, but soon one realizes that they are just the last ossification of the dying world of classical antiquity.
His systematic fervor, so appreciated by Hegel, finds a neat little place to everything that the Greeks had produced, yet at the cost of sucking them dry of their lymph. Everything is there–the gods, the beliefs, the art, the spirituality, the science of the time–yet only as an empty husk, as a relic with a tag underneath in an intellectual museum.
What many occultists today admire in Proclus is his commitment to theurgy. And from that standpoint, Proclus is definitely an important source of inspiration for us. Yet even that was a product of the crisis of the Greek worldview and of Proclus’ spiritual weakness (or rather, of the spiritual weakness that was typical of his time).
Plotinus, still firmly rooted in the Greek tradition, had no place for rituals. Union with the divine was certainly the aim of his philosophy, but his method was and remained that of philosophy, that is, pure inner moral, intellectual and spiritual cultivation. It’s not that he didn’t believe in the gods or in magic. He simply thought the method of philosophy was superior.
But by the time Proclus came to prominence, the old Greek confidence in the sole power of the human mind had crumbled under the attacks of early Christian or Christian-inspired irrationalism. Everywhere Proclus looked, people were scrambling for a source of salvation outside of themselves, because they felt small and powerless in an uncertain world. Come to think of it, we don’t live in much different times today.
Nothing that belongs to history can ever be retrieved and applied 1:1. But it is certainly permissible to look for inspiration. From a philosophical standpoint, there is no contest: Plotinus’ philosophy is still very much alive, if one knows how to get to its pulp, how to work with it, where to trim, where to add, where to change a part. By contrast, Proclus’ philosophy feels rigid, like a sculpted sarcophagus lid trying to capture the likeness of the dear departed.
From a magical standpoint, one would think that Proclus, given his interest in the topic, would have more to offer than the scoffing, eyebrow-raising Plotinus. Yet a look at Renaissance magic, heavily inspired by Plotinus’ philosophy, tells us otherwise. In fact, though Plotinus’ Enneads are a challenging text, the reader often comes across evocative bits full of beauty and wonder that may be easily adapted to prayer, ritual and other magical aims.
The fact is that Plotinus’ philosophy is a living thing that captures something universal, so it is a good framework for other pursuits, including occultism, while Proclus tried to supplement philosophy with magic because he had no confidence in it, so even his view of magic is remedial and somewhat desperate.
I do not mean to be overly critical of Proclus. He did what he had to, given the circumstances he found himself in. Plus, there is much in his work that can be salvaged, if one has the patience to wade through the abstractions. But what one cannot get from Proclus, or at least what I cannot get from him, is the sense that the cohesive picture he presents is still alive, whereas Plotinus’ system is considerably harder to recontruct, and less cohesive than Proclus’, but feels animated by a flame that was alive before him, was alive in him and will be alive forever.
I don’t know about you, but at the ripe old age of 35 I’m an old fart who remembers the wild west days of the Internet, when people tried cool stuff just because they could. In the last few years I’ve noticed a shift, which probably started in the early 2010s when governments and corporations decided the internet wasn’t something to be vilified as they had done up until that point, but a space to be sanitized, homogenized and monetized.
I am not one to decry money as evil: money is simply an equivalent for one’s work that may be exchanged for the equivalent of another person’s work. In this sense, money has deep metaphysical properties and implications.
What I did notice, however, is that now, wherever I go, someone is trying to sell me something, even if it’s just a free, safe, “binge-worthy” series of videos designed to hook me in so that they may make money out of my attention.
And the more safe formulas get proofed and tested for grabbing people’s attention as quickly as possible, often with AI to provide the missing accelerationist flavor, the more the content that is peddled can be identified as slop. The existential ennui of someone who browses the internet in the year of our Lord 2025 with a smidgen of self-awareness is not to be undererstimated.
I’m bringing this up because I recently received an (automated) email on the account I use for my youtube channel where I was invited to take a course for blowing up my channel, which included such thoughtful advice as “make bad content” (their words, not mine). And honestly, that might very well work, if it wasn’t for the fact that I don’t give a rat’s tutu about drawing big numbers and am perfectly happy with my little corner.
Essentially, slop has been acknowledged as the fastest and most effective way to plug oneself into a premade template of ‘Internet success story’. This, in itself, is not a revolutionary discovery: crap has always existed and has always had success, and the reason why we often don’t know about the crap that existed in the past is that crap tends to be forgotten in the long run, unless it’s so bad it becomes an acquired taste.
What is new is the psychotic speed at which this is happening as attention spans get shorter, the number of people competing for them gets higher and the tools for achieving the result get more powerful.
From a metaphysical and esoteric standpoint, slop is simply the elevation of the lower aspects of the human consciousness to the status of aim to be pursued, with a result that might very well be seen as a form of anti-initiation.
The word initiation tends to conjure images of hooded figures bestowing grace on a supplicant. While the ritual aspect of it is not insignificant, the idea of initiation is far broader and it applies to many fields, not just esoteric, as a path that forces the person’s spirit to acquire, develop or balance certain qualities that allow it to adapt to the ideals of that path.
An anti-initiation, in this sense, is a process whereby the human spirit ossifies, rots and collapses in on itself, having lost any semblance of a guiding light and being only stirred into motion by the gravitational pull of its own ass.
I am not a prude and I am not a no-fun Fräulein Rottenmeier. I enjoy some of the products of our current age, and I accept the rest with some irony (what else is left?) I am merely observing an interesting trend. It is often repeated that initiation (any initiation) is for the few, but it seems to me that is becoming something for the fewer.
Many people who think they are communing with the gods are simply reacting to crap that their subconscious slings at them. This may or may not have therapeutic value, but it is not magic, since metaphysical forces cannot be psychologized away just so someone can have the safe thrill of believing outside of consensus reality while also appearing sane.
And this is where a fine line needs to be trodden. If on one hand we have the excess of trying to rationalize everything and reduce it to consensus reality, on the other hand irrationalism is just as destructive, and the idea of believing in crap exactly because it is absurd (credo quia absurdum) can lead us down really dark paths, and not the curling-up-with-a-vampire-novel type of dark.
Sometimes I get outraged messages by people who whine that there is no recipe for magic, so I should let them believe what they want. People are absolutely free to believe what they want, but I am also free to call it how I see it. Those people, it is worth noting, tend to be of the soapboxing-on-social-media variety who constantly try to educate others on what’s right and what’s wrong, yet they often fail to realize that they nurture a worldview within which there is no space for right or wrong, true or false.
This type of worldview, in part, is due to the fact that there is no space for magic in our current worldview, and so as soon as one dabbles in it, they immediately find themselves outside of all current definitions of what is reasonable, and so they end up embracing the role of the crazy ones, often subconsciously. And hey, being crazy can be fun at times, and sometimes it can be a good front to protect ourselves, but it needs to be done with some awareness.
Plus, if we take the time to research the history of occultism, both in the West and elsewhere, we find that there are different paradigms that are fruitful from a magical standpoint without having to give up rationality, which is a part of the human make-up, and as such is worth cultivating.
An occultist, a hermetician, a magus, in so far as they act in their magical capacity, are more spaces than individuals: they are liminal spaces between worlds. In order to become that space, we often need to let go of certain convictions, and many of our limits of all kinds will be pushed. This is where working on oneself can be useful and complement occult training.
But this need to go beyond our initial limits (the old adage “you cannot seek initiation and remain the same”), could lead us to believe that irrationalism is simply the last frontier: that reason is simply just another limit to overcome, just another trap of our ego. This, by the way, is what’s behind the kind of zealots who poke snakes with sticks because God told them he would protect them.
Traditionally, in most schools, aspirants to initiation are taught how to screen the perceptions they have during their experiments to see if they are talking to something outside of themselves or not (and if the thing outside of themselves is benign).
One of the first things to apply is logic: if the thing tells you to jump off a window and they will catch you, it’s either a larva with a sense of humor or, more probably, your cupio dissolvi hard at work. If the thing tells you something that goes against reason or contradicts what cannot be doubted (“you won’t fall if you throw yourself from a bridge”), that’s also a red flag. If the thing tells you stuff you know or if it flatters you, it’s just you.
I’m not one to try to scare others unnecessarily: many times, nothing dangerous happens, in part because existence is not as dark as some make it out to be (nor as light as others make it out to be), and in a much larger part because we are often shielded from danger by our own incompetence.
That being said, getting rid of one of your human faculties (reason) instead of cultivating it sensibly can be something you end up paying for dearly. Irrationalism may appear like a way to get read of the ego, but it is often just the last refuge of the ego that cannot stand to be corrected, since reason is so good at countering its poppycock.
Regardless of what one thinks of the church as an institution, it is hard not to be impressed by the sheer power and majesty of its rituals and customs. As a non-Christian, or rather as a post-Christian, I am still convinced that the Catholic mass, especially in its older forms, is one of the best-constructed rituals in the history of humanity (I was reminded of it during my dad’s funeral last year).
When I talk about power I am not talking about political or social power, which are undeniable. I’m talking about the power to create a ritualized experience of reality that mobilizes real forces.
This, I’ve noticed, is something many people are not willing to concede, partly out of spite toward the institution (which I may understand), partly as a result of the typical view underpinning modern esotericism that anything goes, and so the rituals of the church have no particular quality compared to the ones anyone could make up on the go, except maybe that traditional religious rituals, being older, have become more powerful through engramming.
Let us leave aside for now the memetic esoteric aspect, which however is certainly present, especially with how Leo XIV’s election has literally been turned into one of the biggest memeplexes I’ve seen in recent times.
I think that the fundamental misconception that is at the root of so much esoteric junk is that something becomes true simply by way of repetition. Yet, in spite of the dogma, reality is not merely what we make of it, as anyone who tried to fly off a skyscraper won’t be able to testify.
True: just like the small mind (the human mind) the great mind (the larger universe) is endowed with a certain level of plasticity. Just like the small brain can be impressed with habits, so can the great brain be impressed with certain forms or procedures that wouldn’t naturally arise. That’s because there is a difference between different gradations of reality: my reflection in the mirror is, from a physical standpoint, just as real as me, but in another sense, being completely dependent on the form of the mirror and my own form, it is subordinated and can be changed, to a degree.
But good rituals are not powerful simply because they have been repeated enough times. While repetition does engram rituals with an authentic foundation, if we take the time to study various magical traditions, we notice that they often utilize the ritual blueprint of the dominant religion of their area, but bending it in other directions.
The spiritual “aeon” within which they operate is their source of authentic power, because most major religions and philosophical currents do capture something of the universal life and its might. Authenticity is the keyword.
In addition, there may sometimes be certain powerful experiences that allow different traditions to fuse together into new ones (take for instance some of the magical traditions created by the descendants of African slaves converted to Christianity).
But the root of magic is always an authentic source of power, which is ultimately always the same, but which is channeled and shaped through the form of the religious or philosophical tradition, and regardless of the how corrupt or unlikeable the representatives of that tradition become. Lacking it, the most one can conjure, if anything at all, are some cheap tricks of lower esoteric jugglery.
This is also why it’s important to take the time to soak into the traditions we want to work with. Eclecticism is pure vanity if it is divorced from understanding. If I had a euro for everytime I saw someone on social media simply plucking formulas left and right, one from the magical papyri, one from esoteric Daoism and so on, without understanding their philosophical contours… Well I wouldn’t be able to buy much, because I’m not often on social media, but a nice coat would probably be within my price range.
Following up on yesterday’s post about the Kybalion, I felt the need to clarify a bit further the difference between the panpsychism or mentalism of traditional Hermeticism as opposed to that of modern occultism, as espoused in books like the Kybalion. It is actually a topic that deserves a much longer discussion, and maybe one day I’ll start that discussion. This is just a short collection of incomplete notes.
The trouble with philosophical terms is that they often originate in ancient times, but they develop additional or alternative meanings as history goes on. The term psyche, for instance, is usually taken in a psychological sense today, but in most older philosophers it was just the term for ‘soul’. The idea of soul, in turn, was somewhat different in pre-Christian pagan philosophy than it ended up being after Christianity took over.
When we read in texts like the Kybalion statements like “the universe is mental” (in the sense of part of the mind, not in the sense of crazy, which would be understandable) and compare it with assertions found in the Hermetica about the nous (usually translated mind) revealing itself as the ultimate principle; or even when we compare it with the great presocratic philosophers that certainly inspired the mysteries that later merged into the Hermetic tradition (take Heraclitus’ “the limits of the soul you could not discover”, or Anaxagoras’ assertion that the mind/nous is the principle that orders all things), then we would at first think that this person writing the Kybalion must have been exactly in the same tradition.
But between the ancient notion of mind and the Kybalion’s notion of mind there are two millennia. Two millennia during which Christianity essentially reinvented the concept of soul to mean something much closer to what we understand it to be; then modern philosophy radicalized the subject-object and mind-world distinction; then Idealism mashed everything together again into a new panpsychism that is only an echo of the ancient one; then philosophical decadence set in, leading to the gradual dissolution of all great philosophies; during which time the notion of psyche or mind was slowly appropriated by people attempting to treat it according to the scientific method (those who would later become the first psychologists), as well as by irrationalists of the vitalistic trend.
Against this background, it is unreasonable to think that the concept of mind would remain the same, especially since XIX century occultism is largely the product of the post-revolutionary (as in French revolution) desire for the exotic and strange that the revolution had wiped away together with the old regime.
When there is a historical paradigm shift, finding ourselves in the new paradigm usually estranges us from the old one, and since we operate from the new paradigm, we tend to apply its categories in our attempt to understand how the old paradigm was. This, for instance, is also what led people after the French revolution to look at the tarot as an incomprehensible artifact with arcane meanings, even though it was perfectly understandable within the medieval framework in which it was created.
Well, the cultural paradigm from which the author of the Kybalion talked about the mind is evidently modern. This, in itself, is not bad. No one says that old Hermeticism had all the answers and everything past that is junk. I am not a reactionary who believes all that needed to be said and done has been said and done in times of yore and now all that is left is to go back to it.
The problem arises when the author of the Kybalion is so clearly ignorant of his own paradigm that he uses it to concoct a philosophy that is just a mediocre expression of its own Zeitgeist but uses enough words of the old Hermeticism to make it seem as though he is just summing up millennia of history in a pamphlet. This, in itself, is clearly un-hermetic.
Again, creating new philosophies is not in itself a problem. The problem is that modern occultism (of which the Kybalion is an expression, and not even the best one) is intellectually stuck in that period and has turned into a philosophical and spiritual cul-de-sac of misunderstandings.
In that cul-de-sac, mentalism is simply the triumph of the subjectivistic view of the mind that was en vogue at the time, and that forms the framework of today’s nonsense (see law of attraction, for instance); whereas in the old philosophy, the mind was generally seen as a superior ordering principle of which humans could partake (when they were reasonable, that is, reason-like) but not exhaust.
It is probably one of the ironies of history that nowadays, many who become curious about Hermeticism bump into the Kybalion as their first text, either directly or indirectly through reelaborations of the same ideas. This in spite of the fact that the Kybalion has nothing to do with Hermeticism.
There are a couple of reasons for this: for one, because whoever wrote the Kybalion managed to fool some leading Occultists into believing it was an authentic text (most notably Paul Foster Case, but not only); for two, because the so called laws that are discussed in the text have become embedded into pop-alternative-spirituality since the late 60s. They are like invasive weeds that one can never truly get rid of.
Many people, even today, buy into the Kybalion in different ways. The first line of defense is asserting that it is an authentic text. As few people now can truly believe this in good faith, a more apparently reasonable approach has been to assert that the text is a forgery but its contents are an authentic distillation of Hermetic principles.
This is also demonstrably false. If you read any of the authors who are considered part of the Western philosophical or esoteric canon, you will find no similarity with the Kybalion’s ideas until, perhaps, well into American transcendentalism, unless you are desperate to force the texts to say what they don’t.
Certainly those ideas are not found in the Hermetica. True, there are superficial similarities of vocabulary, on occasion. For instance, you will often read the author(s) of the Hermetica ramble on about “the Mind”, so it would seem that the Kybalion’s emphasis on the mind would place it in the Hermetic tradition.
Too bad that the ancient concept of ‘mind’, as used in philosophical and magical texts, had almost nothing to do with the psychologized concepts of it that fall under the same name and that clearly show that the Kybalion is a modern text both in its authorship and in its content. In fact, it is pretty much a condensation of very fashionable late XIX century ideas, and little more beyond that.
Broadly speaking, no one with some level of historical awareness can believe the Kybalion is anything more than a rather straightforward summary of Victorian beliefs.
This is what leads another group of people to say that the Kybalion is neither an authentic text nor an authentically Hermetic text, but its principles are still valid. Of course you can believe what you please, but there is no necessity of believing in its “laws”, which are often either not laws at all or are simply superficial and partial observations about mental phenomena cast in a glamorous esoteric light. Nothing of what is described in that book is either self-evident, clearly logical or practically useful.
All in all there is nothing of special interest contained in the Kybalion. That it hasn’t been forgotten like the mass of esoteric booklets produced in the same period is largely due to the way it marketed itself and was marketed by others.
