Three Initiates

Three Initiates is not a person. It is the name on The Kybalion, published in Chicago in 1908, which sets out seven hermetic principles and presents them as an ancient Egyptian teaching handed down in secret. Scholars of the period attribute the book to William Walker Atkinson, a lawyer turned New Thought publisher who wrote under a shelf of pen names, possibly with a collaborator or two. The content belongs to the New Thought movement of its own decade rather than to Egypt, and the Hermetic writings it claims descent from are Greek texts of the early Christian centuries. It has stayed in print ever since and shaped a great deal of later occult and self-help writing.