An Egyptian Paprii has turned up in the British Museum which proves the historical veracity of the Hermetic Book the Kybalion.
According to the Guardian In 1962 an antiques dealer sold a large fragment of papyrus to the British Museum. Written in Demotic it was in a state of extraordinary preservation. The age of the papyrus was dated to the late Middle Kingdom or the every early New Kingdom 1600 BCE.
It has only recently been translated and what fascinated the British Museum was ancient Hebrew text קַבָּלָn (Kybalion) which is the first historical reference to the ancient Hermetic text.
The rest of the text appears to be an Ancient platonic text explaining how each object in the universe has sexual characteristics or polarity. It explains how it is possible to duplicate precious metals by invoking a the deity Nut-Rn who was the spirit of a particular stream which flowed near Hermopolis. There are a few references to the goddess Rn, in the Middle Kingdom and it is believed that the cult merged with Nut’s at the beginning of the New Kingdom.
The text reads surprisingly similar to some of the lines of the later Kybalion which suggests that it might be rooted in a much early Hermopoltic text. Indeed it would appear that book itself was alive.
“For the Kybalion [of] ḏḥwty spake and said: He [who would have] gold, needs gold. Let [him] invoke Nut-Rn. For he who can [Cast back?] the polarity of the Nut-Ron flow shalt have mastery [of all] all metals.
Have you read this far yet? The above is the sort of text that sometimes appears on the Internet. It is usually circulated across Facebook and is later seen as true. It is easily refutable by anyone with a basic knowledge of Ancient History.
Ancient Hebrew block text did not come about until the Jewish people were in Babylon. In any event the word Kybalion is not Hebrew Plato was born in 428 BCE so this could not be a platonic text. The Demotic script was not used in Egypt until 600 BCE so this fake is nearly 1000 years old Rn never existed and there was no river which past Hermopolis (other than the Nile). Of course the Kybalion is not ancient at all but was an early 20th century forgery which took in a large number of people who should have known better.
My point in posting this is to call for a better standard of historical and occult research. The Kybalion itself was one 20th century fraud. There are lots of other ones. Such historical frauds are not always deliberate. Paul Case appears to have fallen for the Kybalion, and some quite famous names fell for the “ancient” lineage claims of Madaline Montalban’s Angel Magic course.
Sometimes teachers make the mistake of calling up a dubious version of history to push their Orders, schools or ideas. For example many people believe that Wynn Westcott quit the Golden Dawn because Mathers planted some papers in a taxi cab with his name on it and got him in trouble with his employers. However this story was made up by Crowley, who may or may not have believed it.
The only way we are ever going to work out what is going on in magic is if we get some better standards of historical research. If we start actually carrying out proper historical research looking at serious academic texts.
This has a practical effect. Some of the sort of work carried out by Jake Stratton-Kent has had a direct impact on practical magic.
Otherwise we start to believe crap.
Because everyone knows that only one person can reverse the polarity on the Nut-Rn Flow
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