Callie Reads... The Kybalion 🤮: 2, The Hermetic Philosophy We Were Told Last Time Doesn't Exist

But the issue of course is that Egypt had its own priestly traditions, and Atkinson is just kind of making up what he wants to be there.

They weren't teaching anybody who wandered by (he literally says they did) they taught the people enrolled in their apprenticeships and those who lived in and worked for the temples.

First, no traditions say Hermes was around at the time of Abraham. It's always Moses. You can see Atkinson trying to argue with that as he brings up Moses for no apparent reason. If "the best authorities" think otherwise, Atkinson could easily quote them. He doesn't. He never will.

Astrology is mainly from Etruscan and Phoenician sources, last I read, filtered through Greece and Egypt. Egypt had its own astrology, but we don't actually know much about it. It appeared to be based on the hours and the decans, with each decans housing a god that was propitiated when they ruled the heavens.

One of the actual founders of alchemy as we know it was a woman named Maria, who invented a number of the devices still used today, but Atkinson could never admit that.

It's unclear to me why Atkinson needs Hermes Trismegistus to be even older than his traditions said he was. He's obviously peddling the idea that the older something is the better it is. But I feel like the time of Moses is pretty fucking old. My first thought it some kind of weird anti Jewish sentiment, as Moses is the epitome of Jewish magic and wisdom. But Abraham isn't exactly a gentile.

Atkinson probably knew his christianized Torah well enough, but this actually introduces more complications than otherwise. Moses learned Egyptian wisdom, and in fact led Egyptian military, before going into the wilderness and hearing G-d. He's a prime candidate for learning Trismegistus's teachings and injecting them into Judaism, and therefore Christianity. But Abraham doesn't make any sense in this role.

I really can't talk my way into figuring this one out. It's just nonsensical. If anybody else has any ideas, let me know.

Other texts seem to identify Trismegistus even more closely with the Greek Hermes, as he talks about his planet's position in regards to the Sun. But in some texts he's plainly human.

So Atkinson is trying to have it both ways while also insulting ancient Egypt. Hermes was a human sage who was turned into a god after the fact by the credulous Egyptians, and also Hermes is that ancient god of wisdom.

"Hermetic seals" as a term comes from Hermes's association with alchemy, where you need to seal the tubes. Not from any supposed secrecy involved.

This is a trick. He's quoting a text readers will know in order to trigger their feelings, as well as a sense of superiority, as they're obviously the men, not the babies, and then saying it's really ancient Egyptian wisdom.

🤢

Hold on.

🤮

Right ok.

All right. I don't have to tell you, I hope, how that's deeply racist and insulting. In fact, it's also stupid, for a number of reasons.

Greek and Roman culture had just as much magic and "superstition" as the Persians.

India still has an incredible, flourishing plurality of philosophical traditions to this day.

He's pulling a fast one. He's claiming not to be part of superstitious religion but also laying claim to the work of religions. Again, Hermeticism was a product of the priest system of Egypt. It is explicitly religious and magical in the senses we would recognize Egyptian priestcraft to be, especially in what's known now as the "technical Hermetica" (though the "philosophical Hermetica" is still a set of instructions for getting at the gods, so yeah).

He's also engaging in some good old fashioned misunderstanding of evolutionary theory. This is some Oswald Spengler shit, though his dumbass book was published after The Kybalion.

Herbert Spencer has a lot to answer for.

The short version is that people took the old metaphor of the state or society as a body (the shield of a military, the leader as head of state, and so on) and literalized it via evolutionary theory, or a bad misreading of same. If societies are alive, then they must evolve. And since evolution is a constant upward trend towards improvement (no it's not), and since some societies "failed," they must devolve -- much in the same way that, if white Europeans are the highest pinnacle of evolution (they aren't) and they still produce murderers and rapists, individuals must devolve.

So Atkinson is drawing on that line of thought that was a few decades old already, steeped as it is in racism and ahistorical claims, to basically excuse himself from pilfering all over the place.

You see, if Hermes Trismegistus is the source of all mysticism -- but not religion, those are totally different things, and not in any way related both anecdotally and historically -- and if all these societies that happen to be old and full of people the wrong color, who we already "know" are devolved, or not as evolved, as us white people, Atkinson says, then we can just take their shit.

See the following passage's final line.

However, he's also cribbing from both Buddhism and "druidic" stuff here, I suspect. Buddhism has an actual tradition of things like koans, which don't appear to make sense at first until you arrive at an understanding of the practices, doctrines, and metaphysics of the religion. The "druidic" stuff is what I'm seeing when he says this was passed on orally instead of written down -- it wasn't that long beforehand that Iolo Morganwg passed off his writing as newly-discovered manuscripts that had been written down in the last dying age of the druids, recording their oral traditions. It's also actually true that real historical druids seem to have been forbidden to write down their stuff. That's why we know virtually none of it now.

This is only important insofar as he's quietly grabbing hold of even more popular stuff to shore up his house built with no foundation.