Tag Archives: Hermetica

Occultism and Esoterism, Spirituality and Psychology

Mentalism in Hermeticism vs Modern Occultism

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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.

MQS

Occultism and Esoterism, Spirituality and Psychology, Uncategorized

Stuff You Don’t HAVE to Believe: the Kybalion

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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.

MQS