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Kybalion: a Study of the Hermetic Philosophy of Ancient Egypt and Greece by Three Initiates 1908

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Kybalion: a Study of the Hermetic Philosophy of Ancient Egypt and Greece by Three Initiates. Yoga Publication Society (1908) Hard cover with no dust jacket. Assumed first printing. No later printings listed. There is light cover wear. Gilt lettering and decoration on spine and front cover slightly faded, more so on the spine. The top of the spine is bumped. There is separation in the binding inside both the back and front covers. Previous owners private library sticker is inside the front cover. There is a bookseller's pencil price inside the front cover. Ownership name and address embossed on title page. The tanning on the copyright page is due to lighting, not to the color of the page. Otherwise, there are no previous owner markings. In spite of the separation inside the binding, the binding is tight with no looseness to the pages. Pages, lightly tanned, are flat without creases. Not ex-library, not remaindered, not a facsimile reprint. Photos available on request. For sale by Jon Wobber, bookseller since 1978. BH21a

"The "Three Initiates" who authored The Kybalion chose to remain anonymous. As a result, a great deal of speculation has been made about who actually wrote the book. The most common proposal is that The Kybalion was authored by William Walker Atkinson, either alone or with others, such as Paul Foster Case and Elias Gewurz. Atkinson was known to use many pseudonyms, and to self-publish his works. A common theory is that Atkinson co-wrote the book with Paul Foster Case and Michael Whitty. This theory is often held by members of Builders of the Adytum (B.O.T.A.), the Mystery School later founded by Case, though the group doesn't publicly make this claim itself. This story appears to have originated with a B.O.T.A. splinter group, the Fraternity of the Hidden Light.

Other names speculatively mentioned as co-authors of The Kybalion include Harriet Case (Paul Foster Case's wife at the time), Mabel Collins (a prominent Theosophical writer), Claude Bragdon (an architect, Theosophist, and writer on "mystic geometry"), and Claude Alexander (a well-known stage magician, mentalist, proponent of crystal gazing, and New Thought author). Ann Davies, who succeeded Paul Foster Case as head of the B.O.T.A., is often mentioned as a possible Kybalion contributor, but she was born in 1912—four years after the book's first publication.

The introduction for a 2011 edition of The Kybalion published by Tarcher/Penguin presents an argument that William Walker Atkinson was the sole author of the work, including evidence such as the 1912 edition of Who's Who in America, which attributes Atkinson as the author, and a 1917 French language edition of The Kybalion in which the translator's introduction attributes the work to "the American psychic master W.W. Atkinson."[22]

However The Kybalion and the Arcane Teachings have strong contradictions and even attacks between some of their core teachings, and this added to both having been published in a very close period of time (first edition of The Arcane Teachings years before 1909, second edition in 1909 and third edition in 1911) make the hypothesis of Atkinson's authorship of the Kybalion very inconsistent."- Wikipedia