The Kybalion's authors, the Three Initiates, decided to remain anonymous. As a result, there has been a lot of discussion over who actually wrote the book. The Kybalion was most likely written by William Walker Atkinson, either alone or in collaboration with others like Paul Foster Case and Elias Gewurz. Atkinson was noted for using a variety of pen names and self-publishing his books. A series called The Arcane Teachings, which has many superficial parallels to The Kybalion, may have been among his early published pseudonymous and anonymous writings.

The Kybalion claims to be an explication of an ancient, unpublished Hermetic manuscript of the same name, while The Arcane Teachings claims to disclose the knowledge of an ancient, unpublished scroll of occult aphorisms; The Kybalion claims to be an elucidation of an ancient, unpublished Hermetic text of the same name, while The Arcane Teachings claims to reveal the wisdom of an ancient, unpublished scroll of occult The texts Read More chevron_right

The Kybalion's authors, the Three Initiates, decided to remain anonymous. As a result, there has been a lot of discussion over who actually wrote the book. The Kybalion was most likely written by William Walker Atkinson, either alone or in collaboration with others like Paul Foster Case and Elias Gewurz. Atkinson was noted for using a variety of pen names and self-publishing his books. A series called The Arcane Teachings, which has many superficial parallels to The Kybalion, may have been among his early published pseudonymous and anonymous writings.

The Kybalion claims to be an explication of an ancient, unpublished Hermetic manuscript of the same name, while The Arcane Teachings claims to disclose the knowledge of an ancient, unpublished scroll of occult aphorisms; The Kybalion claims to be an elucidation of an ancient, unpublished Hermetic text of the same name, while The Arcane Teachings claims to reveal the wisdom of an ancient, unpublished scroll of occult The texts describe three Big Planes of Reality, each of which is divided into seven smaller planes. Three of the lesser planes are also described as astral black keys, similar to the black keys on a piano, and inhabited by elemental spirits. And both books go into great length about the process of Mental Alchemy, and they are nearly identical.

Other parallels exist, and some speculate that The Arcane Teachings was Atkinson's earliest draft of the material that would ultimately become The Kybalion. In his final manuscript, The Seven Cosmic Laws, written in 1931 and released posthumously in 2011, Atkinson attempted to define the workings of the cosmos in terms of a set of principles.