I — The Principle of Mentalism
2026-11-08
A marble floor inlay showing an old bearded man in a tall pointed hat and long robes, Hermes Trismegistus, standing with one hand resting on a stone tablet carved with Latin text and held up by two sphinxes. Two smaller figures in turbans and hoods stand on the left, one of them holding an open book. A Latin inscription runs along the bottom edge.
Hermes Mercurius Trismegistus, Contemporaneus Moysi, inlaid marble floor of Siena Cathedral, 1480s. The panel is often attributed to Giovanni di Stefano. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
“The All is Mind; the Universe is Mental.” It is the first and most famous of the seven Hermetic Principles. It also comes from a book printed in Chicago in 1908, and most scholars believe it was written by a New Thought author rather than by three anonymous initiates. This essay sets the Kybalion beside the ancient Hermetica, the Greek treatises in which Mind, νοῦς, really does speak to Hermes, and tries to sort out what is genuinely old in the idea and what belongs to the twentieth century.
“THE ALL IS MIND; The Universe is Mental.”
The Kybalion, Chapter II, 1908
[](#a-promise-kept-out-of-order "Jump to this heading")A promise kept, out of order
When I wrote about Hermes Trismegistus, I promised to come back to the Hermetic principles “in later texts”. Then I wrote about the second one, Correspondence, before the first.
A very Hermetic way of counting, obviously.
So this is the post that should have come first: the Principle of Mentalism, the one the Kybalion calls the Master-Key. Without it, the book says, “the student knocks in vain at the many doors of The Temple.” It is the foundation the other six stand on. If the universe is mental, then correspondence, vibration, polarity, rhythm, cause and gender are all, in the end, laws of a mind.
But this time I want to do something slightly different. Instead of explaining the principle as the Kybalion explains it, I want to ask a historian’s question: where does this sentence actually come from?
The answer is more interesting than either side of the usual argument.
[](#the-sentence-everyone-knows "Jump to this heading")The sentence everyone knows
Open almost any modern book on Hermeticism, scroll through any esoteric account on social media, and you will meet the seven principles in the same order with the same wording. Mentalism, Correspondence, Vibration, Polarity, Rhythm, Cause and Effect, Gender. Seven clean axioms, each with its own little epigraph in capital letters, each attributed to “The Kybalion” as though the Kybalion were an ancient scroll the book merely quotes.
That is exactly the impression the book wants to give. Its introduction presents Hermes as a real teacher who lived in Egypt “in the days when the present race of men was in its infancy”, and adds that he was “Contemporary with Abraham, and, if the legends be true, an instructor of that venerable sage.” The quotations from “The Kybalion” are printed as though they came from an older collection of Hermetic maxims, which the three authors only explain.
No such older collection has ever been found.
There is no manuscript, no Greek, Latin, Arabic or Coptic text, no mention of a Kybalion in any author before 1908. The maxims in capitals appear for the first time in the book that comments on them. That does not make them worthless. It does make them modern.
[](#chicago-1908 "Jump to this heading")Chicago, 1908
The title page tells the story quietly. The Kybalion: A Study of the Hermetic Philosophy of Ancient Egypt and Greece, “by Three Initiates”, published by the Yogi Publication Society, Masonic Temple, Chicago.
The Masonic Temple was a famous office building on State Street, one of the tallest in the city when it went up, and it had nothing to do with the book’s teaching beyond renting rooms. As a Mason I cannot help smiling at the address. As a historian I have to say it proves nothing.
The title page of an early twentieth-century book, printed in black capitals on yellowed paper. It reads: The Kybalion, A Study of the Hermetic Philosophy of Ancient Egypt and Greece, by Three Initiates. Below is a small quotation, “The lips of wisdom are closed, except to the ears of understanding”, and at the foot: The Yogi Publication Society, Masonic Temple, Chicago, Ill. An old library shelf mark is written in pencil in the top corner.
Title page of The Kybalion, Yogi Publication Society, Chicago, 1908. Scan from a library copy digitised by the Internet Archive (American Libraries). Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
The Yogi Publication Society was not a mysterious brotherhood. It was the imprint that issued the books of “Yogi Ramacharaka”, and “Yogi Ramacharaka” was one of the pen names of William Walker Atkinson.
Atkinson was born in Baltimore in 1862 and died in Los Angeles in 1932. He trained as a lawyer, suffered a serious breakdown, and found his recovery in New Thought, the American movement that taught that right thinking heals the body and shapes circumstance. He then became one of its most prolific writers. He edited the magazines Suggestion and New Thought in Chicago and wrote under his own name and under a crowd of others: Yogi Ramacharaka, Theron Q. Dumont, Magus Incognito, and more.
One of his books under his own name, Thought Vibration, or the Law of Attraction in the Thought World (1906), appeared two years before the Kybalion. The title alone already contains half of the seven principles.
An oval portrait photograph, later tinted in colour, of a clean-shaven man in his late thirties with dark receding hair and a direct gaze. He wears a dark jacket, a high white collar and a dark bow tie.
William Walker Atkinson, c. 1900. The photograph comes from advertisements printed in the Chicago magazine Suggestion and has been tinted in colour on the Commons copy. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
Was he one of the Three Initiates, or all three of them?
Here I have to be careful, because the book never names its authors and no signed confession survives. Most historians of esotericism treat Atkinson as the author, or at least the main one, because the publisher, the vocabulary, the structure and the ideas all match his other work. Other names have been suggested as co-authors over the years, Paul Foster Case among them, but none of those suggestions rests on documents. So the honest version is this: almost certainly Atkinson, possibly with help, and certainly not three Egyptian adepts.
In my earlier post I wrote that the anonymity seemed to say “knowledge above the signature”. I still like that reading. It is just that the signature, when you look, is fairly legible.
[](#what-the-kybalion-actually-says "Jump to this heading")What the Kybalion actually says
Before we compare it with anything older, let us give the book a fair hearing in its own words. Chapter II defines the principle like this:
“THE ALL (which is the Substantial Reality underlying all the outward manifestations and appearances which we know under the terms of ‘The Material Universe’; the ‘Phenomena of Life’; ‘Matter’; ‘Energy’; and, in short, all that is apparent to our material senses) is SPIRIT which in itself is UNKNOWABLE and UNDEFINABLE, but which may be considered and thought of as AN UNIVERSAL, INFINITE, LIVING MIND.”
The universe, then, “has its existence in the Mind of THE ALL, in which Mind we ‘live and move and have our being.’”
That last phrase is not Egyptian at all. It is Paul speaking on the Areopagus in Athens, in Acts 17:28.
So far, this is a respectable idealist metaphysics: reality is grounded in mind, the world is held in a thought, and we are inside that thought. Philosophers from Plotinus to Berkeley to Hegel would recognise the family resemblance, even if each would quarrel with the details.
Then the book turns a corner.
Read on, and the principle starts to work. Chapter II promises that understanding Mentalism “enables the individual to readily grasp the laws of the Mental Universe, and to apply the same to his well-being and advancement.” It explains “why and how” energy, power and matter “are subordinate to the Mastery of Mind.” Chapter III, “Mental Transmutation”, draws the conclusion openly:
“If the Universe is Mental in its nature, then Mental Transmutation must be the art of CHANGING THE CONDITIONS OF THE UNIVERSE, along the lines of Matter, Force and mind.”
And it adds that this “is really the ‘Magic’ of which the ancient writers had so much to say.”
This is the moment where the history becomes visible. The idea that the world is mind is very old. The idea that because the world is mind, a trained individual can improve his health, fortune and circumstances by managing his mental states is the signature of American New Thought, from Phineas Quimby’s mental healing in the nineteenth century to the “law of attraction” literature of the 1900s. Atkinson had been writing exactly this for a decade.
The Kybalion gave it an Egyptian costume.
I do not say that as mockery. Costume is how ideas travel. But it matters for us, because the next question is whether the ancient Hermetica, the real ones, say anything like this.
[](#the-real-books-of-hermes "Jump to this heading")The real books of Hermes
The texts we actually have under the name of Hermes Trismegistus are a group of Greek treatises written in Roman Egypt, most likely between the first and third centuries of our era. The core collection, which modern scholars call the Corpus Hermeticum, contains seventeen treatises in the standard numbering. Alongside them we have the Asclepius, which survives complete only in Latin, the excerpts preserved by Stobaeus, and, since the discovery of the Nag Hammadi library in 1945, a few Hermetic texts in Coptic, among them part of the Asclepius and The Discourse on the Eighth and Ninth in Codex VI.
These are not handbooks. They are dialogues and revelations: Hermes teaching his son Tat, or his disciple Asclepius, or being taught himself. Their concerns are God, the cosmos, the soul, fate, rebirth and the knowledge of God, γνῶσις, which saves.
They are also, as we will see, absolutely full of Mind.
In English we have two translations that matter most here. G. R. S. Mead’s Thrice-Greatest Hermes (1906) is old, Theosophical in its sympathies and written in a deliberately archaic style, but it is public domain and faithful enough to quote. Brian Copenhaver’s Hermetica (Cambridge, 1992) is the modern scholarly standard. I quote Mead below because his text is free for anyone to read and check.
[](#mind-speaks-first "Jump to this heading")Mind speaks first
The first treatise of the Corpus is called Poimandres, Ποιμάνδρης. The name has usually been read as Greek, something like “shepherd of men”, and some scholars have proposed an Egyptian origin instead. The question is still open, and I will leave it open.
It opens with a vision. The narrator’s thoughts are raised to a great height while his bodily senses are held back, and “a Being more than vast, in size beyond all bounds” calls him by name. When he asks who it is, the being answers, in Mead’s translation:
“I am Man-Shepherd, Mind of all-masterhood; I know what thou desirest and I’m with thee everywhere.”
Mind, νοῦς, is the first speaker in the whole Hermetic collection. He shows the narrator a boundless Light, then a darkness that turns into a “Moist Nature”, and then explains:
“That Light, He said, am I, thy God, Mind, prior to Moist Nature which appeared from Darkness; the Light-Word (Logos) \[that appeared\] from Mind is Son of God.”
Here, at least, we stand on genuinely ancient ground. In the Poimandres, God is Mind. Mind exists before the material world. From Mind comes the Word, λόγος, and through the Word comes order. The first Hermetic principle is not a twentieth-century invention: the ancient Hermetica really do put Mind at the root of everything.
So the Kybalion did not make up its starting point.
What it did with that starting point is another matter.
[](#a-word-with-a-long-history "Jump to this heading")A word with a long history
It helps to remember that νοῦς was not a Hermetic invention either. Greek philosophy had been thinking with it for centuries before any Hermetic treatise was written.
In the fifth century BC, Anaxagoras taught that Mind set the whole cosmos in order and set it in motion. Plato, in the Timaeus, the dialogue that opened my post on Correspondence, describes the world as a living being with soul and intelligence. Aristotle made his unmoved mover a mind whose activity is thinking about its own thinking. Later Platonists, Plotinus above all, placed Intellect, Νοῦς, just below the One, as the realm where all the forms of things exist as thoughts.
The Hermetic authors lived inside this world of ideas. Their Mind is a Greek philosophical Mind wearing an Egyptian name, much as the _Kybalion_’s Mind is an American New Thought Mind wearing a Hermetic one.
There is a symmetry in that I find hard to resist.
A Renaissance portrait of an elderly man in profile, turned slightly to the right, wearing a rounded red cap and a wide red cloak over his shoulders against a dark background. A worn Latin inscription with his name runs along the top edge of the panel.
Portrait of Marsilio Ficino, attributed to Cristofano dell’Altissimo, c. 1552–1568. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
[](#mind-unto-hermes "Jump to this heading")Mind unto Hermes
If there is one ancient passage that comes close to “the Universe is Mental”, it is in treatise XI of the Corpus (XII in Mead’s older numbering), titled Mind unto Hermes. Here Mind teaches Hermes directly, and near the end comes this:
“Then, in this way know God; as having all things in Himself as thoughts, the whole Cosmos itself.”
God holds all things in himself as thoughts. The whole cosmos. That really is a mental universe, and an ancient one.
But read the next lines, because they show where the ancient text is going:
“If, then, thou dost not make thyself like unto God, thou canst not know Him. For like is knowable to like \[alone\]. Make, \[then,\] thyself to grow to the same stature as the Greatness which transcends all measure; leap forth from every body; transcend all Time; become Eternity; and \[thus\] shalt thou know God.”
The movement is upward and outward: away from the body, beyond time, toward God. The point of knowing that the cosmos lives in God’s mind is to become like God and to know him. Nowhere does the treatise suggest that because the cosmos is a divine thought, you may adjust it for your own benefit.
The ancient Hermetist wanted to be absorbed into the Mind.
The modern reader of the Kybalion is invited to manage it.
[](#how-hermes-came-back "Jump to this heading")How Hermes came back
How did these Greek treatises reach Chicago? By a famous road.
The Corpus Hermeticum came to Florence in a Greek manuscript bought for Cosimo de’ Medici. Around 1463 Cosimo asked Marsilio Ficino to translate it into Latin, and to do so before he finished Plato, because Hermes was believed to be the older and more venerable sage. The translation was printed in 1471 under the title Pimander. The Siena floor at the top of this post, laid in the 1480s, shows how seriously the age took him: Hermes stands at the door of a cathedral, labelled “contemporary of Moses”.
Then, in 1614, the scholar Isaac Casaubon examined the Greek closely and showed that the texts could not be older than the Christian era. Their vocabulary and ideas belonged to late antiquity, not to the age of Moses. Hermes the prophet lost his antiquity overnight, at least among scholars.
But the idea of a primordial Egyptian wisdom never quite died. It survived in Rosicrucian pamphlets, in alchemy, in eighteenth-century Freemasonry’s fondness for Egyptian imagery, and in the occult revival of the nineteenth century. When the Kybalion presents Hermes as Abraham’s teacher in 1908, it is not ignorant of history so much as choosing the older, more romantic story, the one that comes before Casaubon.
[](#what-is-hermetic-and-what-is-not "Jump to this heading")What is Hermetic, and what is not
Let me put the comparison plainly, in the manner of an inventory.
I. Mind as the source of all things. Genuinely Hermetic. The Poimandres and Mind unto Hermes say it directly, drawing on centuries of Greek philosophy.
II. The cosmos existing as thought within God. Genuinely Hermetic, in the passage of treatise XI quoted above, though expressed as theology, not as a “law”.
III. “The All” as a name for God. Partly. The Hermetica speak of God as containing and filling all things, and the word “all”, τὸ πᾶν, runs throughout them. The capitalised “THE ALL” as a technical term is the _Kybalion_’s style.
IV. Seven numbered principles. Not found in the Hermetica. The ancient texts have plenty of sevens, the seven Rulers of the Poimandres among them, but no list of seven laws.
V. The axioms printed as quotations from “The Kybalion”. Not found in any ancient source. They first appear in the 1908 book. The same goes for the saying attributed there to “one of the old Hermetic Masters”, that “He who grasps the truth of the Mental Nature of the Universe is well advanced on The Path to Mastery.” I could not find it in Mead’s translation of the Corpus or the Asclepius, and I know of no ancient source for it.
VI. Mental transmutation for well-being and advancement. New Thought. The ancient goal was the knowledge of God and the soul’s return; the modern goal includes health and success.
None of this makes the Kybalion a fraud in the vulgar sense. It is a sincere modern synthesis that borrows a genuinely Hermetic intuition and joins it to the most optimistic current in American spirituality.
It is simply not the voice of Hermes.
[](#why-the-kybalion-won-anyway "Jump to this heading")Why the Kybalion won anyway
And yet, if you ask a hundred people interested in esotericism what Hermeticism teaches, most will recite the seven principles, not the vision of the Poimandres.
There are good reasons for that. The Kybalion is short, clear and systematic. The real Hermetica are repetitive, obscure, full of cosmology nobody believes any more, and they contradict one another, because they were written by different hands over a long period. Ficino’s Hermes demanded Greek, Latin and patience. Atkinson’s Hermes asked only for an afternoon.
The modern book also offers something the ancient ones do not: a promise that the teaching works in this life. That promise is the thread that runs from the Kybalion through a century of self-help, down to the bestsellers about the “law of attraction” that most readers today will recognise.
The ancient Hermetist would probably have been puzzled by all this.
He might also have been a little flattered.
[](#the-mind-that-was-there-first "Jump to this heading")The mind that was there first
So, is the universe mental?
That is not a question a historian can answer, and I promised long ago that I did not come here to ask anyone to believe anything. What a historian can say is where the sentence comes from, and the answer has two layers that should be kept apart.
The lower layer is ancient. In Roman Egypt, people who wrote in Greek under the name of Hermes imagined a Mind before the world, a Light that called itself God, a cosmos held inside God “as thoughts”, and a human being who could rise until he was like that Mind and knew it. That vision is beautiful, strange and old, and it owes as much to Plato as to Egypt.
The upper layer is modern. In Chicago, in 1908, a New Thought writer, almost certainly William Walker Atkinson, compressed that vision into a slogan, numbered it first among seven, and turned it into a key for opening the doors of the mind, and perhaps of the bank.
The All is Mind, then, is both: a genuinely Hermetic idea, and a sentence that no ancient Hermetist ever wrote.
Mind, in the Poimandres, was there first.
The Kybalion simply arrived later, and gave it a name that fits on a T-shirt.
--
Chamber of Reflections
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