Lux Esoterica (Nifiluz)

New Thought Magazine, edited by Benjamin Orange Flower and William Walker Atkinson -- the periodical of the movement that, a century before "The Secret," was articulating the principle that mind shapes matter In 2006, a film and book called The Secret swept the world. Endorsed by Oprah Winfrey, translated into dozens of languages, and eventually selling more than thirty million copies, it presented one central idea: that thoughts attract circumstances, that the universe responds to the frequency of your mental state, and that by focusing on what you want with sufficient clarity and faith, you can draw it into your life. The response was predictable and divided. Millions found the teaching transformative. Critics pointed out that it risked blaming victims for their own suffering -- that cancer patients, the poor, and the abused were hardly suffering from insufficient positive thinking. Philosophers noted that it misrepresented quantum physics. And esotericists observed,...

There is a tradition of knowledge so old that its origins are lost in the pre-dawn of recorded history, attributed to a figure who may be myth or may be memory: Hermes Trismegistus — Hermes the Thrice-Great — the legendary sage of ancient Egypt whom the Greeks identified with their messenger god Hermes and the Egyptians with their god of wisdom, Thoth. The texts attributed to him — the Hermetica , the Emerald Tablet , and the body of wisdom that flows from them — form the backbone of the Western esoteric tradition, influencing alchemy, astrology, Kabbalah, Renaissance magic, Rosicrucianism, Freemasonry, and the modern New Age movement. At the core of the Hermetic tradition is a set of principles so compact and so profound that they were kept as secret teachings for centuries, transmitted only to initiated students. In 1908, an anonymous work called The Kybalion , attributed to "Three Initiates," gathered these principles into a single accessible text — and in doing so, gave...