Philosophy

The ideas behind the Hermetic tradition, traced to their real sources: who wrote what, when, and how old texts were reinvented along the way.

• The I Ching: How a Bronze Age Oracle Became a Book of Philosophy It began as a diviner's handbook of omens and verdicts. Centuries of commentary, and a false attribution to Confucius, made it a cosmos.
• The Kybalion Is Not Ancient: The Real Story of the Seven Principles The famous seven Hermetic principles were published in Chicago in 1908, almost certainly by one prolific New Thought writer.
• Who Was Hermes Trismegistus? A fused Greek and Egyptian god, a pen name in Roman Egypt, and a Renaissance mirage that one scholar dismantled in 1614.
• The Emerald Tablet: A Dozen Lines That Shaped Alchemy Alchemy's most quoted text first appears in Arabic, and its famous line about above and below originally said something else.