Fake vs. Real Hermetic Texts

[Chakravarti]

What I'm about to say will shock you: The most popular hermetic books are fake. They are 20th century New Age inventions.

You can tell whether a hermetic text is real by checking its original language. If it was written in some older language and translated into English, it is real. However, if you can only find it in English or some other modern language but claims to come from ancient sources, it is fake.

These two books are extremely popular and what most people associate with hermeticism, but they are fake:

• The Kybalion
• The Emerald Tablets of Thoth the Atlantean

The Kybalion claims to be the ancient philosophy of Greece and Egypt. But it was first written in 1908. Some of its concepts are influenced by esoteric knowledge, but it has a self-help theme overall which is characteristic of the New Thought movement. It is extremely similar to the book The Arcane Teaching by William Walker Atkinson, which is evidence that both were written by the same author. And yes, W.W. Atkinson was known to use many pseudonyms, like Theron Q. Dumont, Yogi Ramacharaka, Magus incognito and others, depending on the subject he was writing about. Sometimes he pretended to be a Hindu Yogi so he could write about Yoga (or his interpretation/corruption of it), sometimes a French seduction master so he could write about the power of mind, and sometimes a Rosicrucian or Hermetic initiate.

The Emerald Tablets is a classical channeled text. The author claims he channeled some ancient Atlantean tablets from Thoth and translated them.

Both have three similarities:

1. They were written in English with no original text in ancient languages found
2. Their teachings have many similarities with and were influenced by Theosophy, New Thought and other 19th-20th Century movements, but not with ancient teachings.
3. They are heavily watered down.

There may be other fake texts I'm not aware of.

Now, what about the real ones? The main authentic hermetic collection is The Corpus Hermeticum. The best translation is Brian P. Copenhaver's, which you can find in his book Hermetica, together with the Asclepius, another authentic text.

There are several others, which include the fragments of Stobaeus and other recently discovered texts in the Nag Hammadi library. There is also the Emerald Tablet (not to be confused with the Emerald Tablets above, in fact the author of the fake text named it after the Emerald Tablet so it can appear legitimate).

You can tell these are real because they were translated from Greek or Latin or Arabic (which was a translation from Greek or Latin) and are cryptic and complex and require you to think, compared to the watered down New Age texts above.

Finally, there's a book which is based on selections from real texts, but is heavily watered down:

• The Hermetica by Timothy Freke

Only read it if you are new and want a basic introduction to hermetic philosophy. But it offers nothing more.