Modern systems
Modern systems
Books written in the last hundred and twenty years that borrow Hermetic language without being Hermetic texts. Kept apart from the tradition, and read with the same method: dated, sourced, and with what they do not settle.
Some of the most-read books on Hermetic-sounding ideas were written in the last hundred and twenty years and are not Hermetic texts. They are kept here, apart from the tradition, and read with the same method as everything else on this site.
Why a separate place
The Texts hold what the tradition actually transmitted: Greek treatises from Roman Egypt, the Arabic tablet, the Latin Asclepius. A system written in 2003 that borrows the vocabulary of fields and correspondences is a different kind of object. Filing the two together tells the reader they are the same kind of thing, which is exactly the confusion this site exists to undo.
This is not a demotion. Modern is not an insult; fake ancient is. A system can be recent and useful at once, and several things in this section are.
What is here
- Reality Transurfing (2003): Vadim Zeland’s system, dated, with each concept on its own page, the volumes, how it sits beside the law of attraction, what to do with it and what can be established about the author.
Does Transurfing belong next to Hermeticism at all?
It shares one thing with the tradition and almost nothing else. The shared thing is real: the idea that attention and inner state bear on what happens next, which the Emerald Tablet states as an instruction and never explains. What it does not share is a line of descent. No Hermetic text stands behind it. Its actual ancestors are datable and closer to hand: the occult egregore of nineteenth-century France, Castaneda in Russian translation, the American law of attraction, which it inverts, and popular accounts of many-worlds physics.
So the two do not contradict each other. They sit in different places on the same question, and the honest thing is to say which place.
Kept in the Texts on purpose
The Kybalion (1908) is also modern, and it stays in the Texts because it presents itself as a Hermetic text. That claim can only be tested against the texts it claims to transmit, so that is where it is read.
How everything here is read
The same four lines as everywhere else: what it claims, where the idea comes from, what you can check yourself, and what it does not settle. The last line is the one book sellers leave out.
Fair questions
Is Reality Transurfing Hermetic?
No, and it does not claim to be. It shares with the tradition the idea that inner state bears on outcomes, but no Hermetic text stands behind it. Its datable ancestors are the occult egregore, Castaneda in Russian translation, the law of attraction and popular many-worlds physics.
Why is the Kybalion not in this section?
Because it presents itself as a Hermetic text, and that claim can only be tested against the texts it says it transmits. It is dated to 1908 on its own page in the Texts.
Sources & further reading
- The dating of each system and the sources behind it are on each entry’s own page.