Stylometry test
Who wrote The Kybalion?
William Walker Atkinson wrote The Kybalion, as far as word patterns can show. Measured against 33 names, the whole book sits closest to his signed books, and no second writer appears.
Whole book shown. Pick a part and it is measured live against every name.
The whole book, 34,108 words
- 1W. W. AtkinsonHis pen name0.79
- 2Yogi RamacharakaHis pen name0.80
- 3Swami PanchadasiHis pen name0.91
- 4H. P. BlavatskyControl0.95
- 5Swami Bhakta VishitaHis pen name0.97
- 6Claude BragdonProposed author1.00
- 7Thomas BurgoyneProposed source1.00
- 8Annie BesantControl1.02
- 9Elias GewurzProposed author1.03
Nearest: Atkinson’s signed books at 0.79. Nearest other writer: H. P. Blavatsky at 0.95. At 5,000 words the method put 80 percent of hidden Atkinson passages on an Atkinson name, and 3 percent of other writers’ passages there by mistake.
Table view
| Word | This text per 1,000 | Average | This text SD | Name SD |
|---|
Can it recognise a hidden writer?
We tested the method on books with known authors first
86%
84 of 98 known books traced to the right writer with the book itself held out of that writer’s profile. Picking at random among 29 writers would land about 3.5% of the time.
Burrows’s Delta ignores what a book is about and counts the small words nobody thinks about while writing: the, of, upon, which, but. We used 249 of them. Each writer gets an average rate for each word, and a text’s distance from that writer is the mean gap across all 249, in standard deviations. Lower means closer.
That setting was fixed by this test alone, before The Kybalion was measured. On 5,000 word blocks the score drops to 69%, and 4 of 77 books by other writers were wrongly placed on one of his names, so it is a good instrument with a real error rate. He himself came back on 19 of 21 books.
Hide every book under a name and see where they go
This is the hardest version. We removed a whole pen name from the test, so its books could reach him only through his other names. The last two rows are his anonymous occult titles, the nearest thing in the set to The Kybalion, and they were never part of any profile.
| Name hidden | Books back on him | 5,000 word blocks | Note |
|---|---|---|---|
| W. W. Atkinson | 13 of 13 | 58 of 81 | Four other names left to find him on |
| Yogi Ramacharaka | 3 of 4 | 18 of 28 | Mystic Christianity went to Manly P. Hall |
| Swami Panchadasi | 2 of 2 | 11 of 11 | |
| Theron Q. Dumont | 0 of 1 | 0 of 8 | The Power of Concentration went to Wallace Wattles |
| Swami Bhakta Vishita | 1 of 1 | 8 of 8 | |
| Magus Incognito, Secret Doctrine of the Rosicrucians | 1 of 1 | 5 of 8 | Written 1918, never in a profile |
| Unsigned, The Arcane Formulas | 1 of 1 | 3 of 3 | Unsigned, 1909, never in a profile |
How much text it needs
Short passages are where this method falls apart, and every chapter of The Kybalion is short. Random passages from held-out books gave these rates.
| Words | His passage found | Other writer misplaced on him |
|---|---|---|
| 500 | 3% | 1% |
| 1,000 | 23% | 3% |
| 1,500 | 38% | 2% |
| 2,000 | 46% | 3% |
| 3,000 | 70% | 3% |
| 5,000 | 80% | 3% |
The Kybalion result
The whole book lands on Atkinson under every setting
The nearest names are W. W. Atkinson at 0.79 and Yogi Ramacharaka at 0.80. The nearest outsider is Blavatsky at 0.95. One of his names came first at all 9 settings we tried, from 100 words to 500, for the whole book and for the commentary alone.
All six 5,000 word blocks of the book land on one of his names, the same size of block the method was tested on. A separate test on character sequences, which shares no features with Delta and scored 84% on the known books, puts his names in the top four places with Ramacharaka first.
Closed tests always name somebody, so we also ran an open one, the impostors method. It drops half the words and half the rival writers at random, a thousand times over, with every profile capped to the same size so his long shelf gives him no edge. He wins 88% of rounds. Blavatsky, next, wins 29%. Across 2,744 pairs of different writers, 99 in 100 scored under 44%.
The third check is the plainest. The commentary has 245 runs of six words found in his books and in nobody else’s here, about 27 per 100,000 words of his. Troward, next, has 14 and a rate of 7.8. Adam Pearson reports that Philip Deslippe got a matching result from text comparison software for the 2011 Definitive Edition. We have not seen that output, and our numbers were produced separately.
The record agrees. Atkinson’s Who’s Who entries from 1912 on name The Kybalion among his anonymous works, and the Yogi Publication Society, which issued his Ramacharaka books, published it.
Chapter by chapter, half the chapters miss, as they should
Only 8 of 16 parts land on one of his names, and 4 land on Paul Foster Case. That looked like a lead, so we cut undisputed books into passages of the same 16 lengths. His own books scored a median of 8 of 16, with a wide spread from 1 to 15. Books by other writers scored a median of 0, and none of 380 runs reached 8. Case is also where his own passages stray most, taking 15.6% of them.
Then we pooled the suspect chapters. Together the four Case chapters (8,797 words) land on him, with Case in place 8. All eight misses together (15,418 words) land on Ramacharaka, with Case in place 23. A second writer should grow clearer with more text, and this one vanishes.
| Part | Title | Words | Nearest name | Distance | Nearest of his names | Nearest outsider |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Intro | Introduction | 1,241 | Manly P. Hall | 1.94 | Yogi Ramacharaka, 1.95 | Manly P. Hall, 1.94 |
| I | The Hermetic Philosophy | 1,560 | Manly P. Hall | 1.63 | Yogi Ramacharaka, 1.66 | Manly P. Hall, 1.63 |
| II | The Seven Hermetic Principles | 2,603 | Paul Foster Case | 1.52 | W. W. Atkinson, 1.64 | Paul Foster Case, 1.52 |
| III | Mental Transmutation | 1,265 | W. W. Atkinson | 1.72 | W. W. Atkinson, 1.72 | Manly P. Hall, 1.74 |
| IV | The All | 1,800 | Henry Wood | 2.04 | Yogi Ramacharaka, 2.07 | Henry Wood, 2.04 |
| V | The Mental Universe | 2,020 | Thomas Troward | 1.54 | Yogi Ramacharaka, 1.63 | Thomas Troward, 1.54 |
| VI | The Divine Paradox | 3,001 | Yogi Ramacharaka | 1.59 | Yogi Ramacharaka, 1.59 | Elias Gewurz, 1.65 |
| VII | "The All" in All | 2,655 | Paul Foster Case | 1.64 | Yogi Ramacharaka, 1.70 | Paul Foster Case, 1.64 |
| VIII | Planes of Correspondence | 3,782 | W. W. Atkinson | 1.38 | W. W. Atkinson, 1.38 | Paul Foster Case, 1.39 |
| IX | Vibration | 1,778 | Paul Foster Case | 1.52 | W. W. Atkinson, 1.53 | Paul Foster Case, 1.52 |
| X | Polarity | 1,663 | W. W. Atkinson | 2.00 | W. W. Atkinson, 2.00 | Florence Huntley, 2.01 |
| XI | Rhythm | 2,024 | W. W. Atkinson | 1.41 | W. W. Atkinson, 1.41 | Manly P. Hall, 1.46 |
| XII | Causation | 2,120 | W. W. Atkinson | 1.55 | W. W. Atkinson, 1.55 | Annie Besant, 1.61 |
| XIII | Gender | 1,630 | W. W. Atkinson | 1.43 | W. W. Atkinson, 1.43 | Thomas Burgoyne, 1.44 |
| XIV | Mental Gender | 3,174 | W. W. Atkinson | 1.30 | W. W. Atkinson, 1.30 | Dion Fortune, 1.45 |
| XV | Hermetic Axioms | 1,761 | Paul Foster Case | 1.70 | Yogi Ramacharaka, 1.74 | Paul Foster Case, 1.70 |
The same poem under three bylines
One find came from the phrase search. Three books credited to three different authors stop at the same lines of verse to make the same point, about the few who kept an old teaching alive. Nuggets of the New Thought and Mystic Christianity name the poet, Edward Carpenter. The Kybalion only says “the poet.” A shared quotation shows a shared habit of reading and proves nothing alone, but it is hard to call it chance.
“O, let not the flame die out! Cherished age after age in its dark cavern”The Kybalion, Three Initiates, 1908
“O, let not the flame die out! Cherished age after age in its dark caverns”Nuggets of the New Thought, William Walker Atkinson
“Oh, let not the flame die out! Cherished age after age in its dark caverns”Mystic Christianity, Yogi Ramacharaka, 1907
Axioms against commentary
The axioms are a different voice, and too short to name
“Everything flows, out and in; everything has its tides”The Kybalion, Chapter XI
“"I" am a Centre of Influence and Power.”Raja Yoga, Yogi Ramacharaka, a mantram from Lesson I
We pulled every line the book signs “The Kybalion”: 39 quotations, 32 once repeats are dropped, 870 words. They read nothing like the commentary around them. First and second person pronouns fall from 16.0 per 1,000 words to 3.4, and “everything” climbs from 1.0 to 12.6. Old forms like cometh and hath are almost all here.
Delta puts them nearest Case at 2.07, with his names at 2.32. We would not build on that. Random 870 word samples of the commentary, which is his by every test above, land on one of his names only 5% of the time, and the axioms sit inside the normal spread of those samples. His own Raja Yoga mantrams, 1,047 words nobody disputes, also land nearest Case when that book is held out, so a raised, aphoristic voice seems to pull toward Case, at least in this set.
So the axioms remain open. This test cannot show that Atkinson composed them, and it cannot show anyone else did. Pearson’s survey traces their ideas to earlier books by Anna Kingsford and Edward Maitland, Thomas Burgoyne and Florence Huntley, which would explain a borrowed voice. The book’s claim to quote an ancient text has no support in that survey.
Who else has been proposed
Every candidate we could find, and how each did
Most of these names come from Adam Pearson’s 2024 survey of twelve proposals, and the case for or against each on dates and places is his unless noted. Rank is out of 33 names on the whole book, where 1 is closest and his names hold five of the places. The last column is the share of impostor rounds won. The difference between a rank of 6 and a rank of 20 means little, because the whole group sits well behind him.
| Candidate | Why named | Text tested | Rank | Distance | Rounds won |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Paul Foster Case | Three associates said he told them he helped | An Introduction to the Study of the Tarot, 1920 | 23 | 1.23 | 0% |
| Claude Bragdon | Theosophist architect, busy on a church in Rochester in 1907 | Three books, 1910 to 1918 | 6 | 1.00 | 19% |
| Elias Gewurz | Published by the same house later, but in Australia in 1907 | Three books, 1918 to 1922 | 9 | 1.03 | 16% |
| Manly P. Hall | Born in 1901, a small child when the book appeared | Three books, 1922 to 1928 | 11 | 1.09 | 2% |
| Dion Fortune | Aged 17 and in England in 1907 | The Machinery of the Mind, 1922 | 19 | 1.14 | 1% |
| Marie Corelli | Novelist suggested by Art Kunkin in 1997, in England in 1907 | Two novels and a book of essays | 30 | 1.44 | 0% |
| Mabel Collins | Named with Case by a Brazilian Ramacharaka study circle, in London in 1907 | Four books, 1887 to 1908 | 33 | 1.53 | 0% |
| Sydney Flower | Our addition: owned the magazine Atkinson edited | Four books, 1896 to 1921 | 28 | 1.33 | 0% |
| L. W. de Laurence | Our addition: Chicago occult publisher | Four books, 1905 to 1909, borrowing likely | 17 | 1.14 | 0% |
| Michael Whitty | Named by Pat Zalewski in 1996, in Australia until after 1908 | Too little text: 2,899 words signed in Azoth, under our 10,000 floor | None | None | None |
| Claude Alexander Conlin | Stage mentalist, in San Francisco in 1907 | No clean text found | None | None | None |
| Harriet Case | Case’s first wife, named by some BOTA members | No writing found | None | None | None |
| Ann Davies | Born in 1912, after the book appeared | Not tested | None | None | None |
Case is the serious one. Three people close to him said he told them he worked on the book, and his biographer Paul Clark reports a diary entry on the title, which Pearson could not verify. Mitch Horowitz judges a collaboration unlikely, since Case was 24 in 1908 and new to Chicago. Word patterns can only speak to writing. If Case talked ideas over with him, nothing here would show it.
We added Sydney Flower and L. W. de Laurence ourselves, as Chicago figures close to the trade. We found nobody who has proposed either one. Flower owned the New Thought magazine that William Walker Atkinson edited, and de Laurence was a Chicago occult publisher. De Laurence is a weak test subject: his Illustrated Key to the Tarot is a near copy of A. E. Waite, so we left it out, and his other books may hold borrowed prose too.
Limits
What this test cannot tell you
- It measures who put the words down. An editor who changed a little, or a friend who supplied ideas, leaves no mark it can read.
- It can only compare writers in the room. The open test helps, but a writer who is absent and sounds like him would not be caught.
- Shared subject can fool it. Function words resist this, yet Blavatsky’s place as nearest outsider may owe something to the shared occult register.
- Case’s ranked profile rests on one book of 19,899 words from 1920. Adding 36,907 words of his lesson course, whose date we could not confirm, moves him from rank 23 to rank 9 at 1.06, still far behind Atkinson’s 0.79.
- Under 5,000 words the error rate climbs fast, as the table above shows. Single chapters are weak evidence in either direction, and the axioms are weaker still.
- The test misses too. The Power of Concentration, credited to Atkinson as Theron Q. Dumont, landed on Wallace Wattles, and we cannot say if that is a miss or a sign the book is not all his.
- Atkinson reused his own material, which flatters the held-out scores a little. Much of the older text is machine read from scans, so a few words are wrong.
- The pasted text mode shows a likeness. Your essay landing on Troward means your small words resemble his, and it means nothing more.
Questions
Three Initiates, one writer?
Was The Kybalion written by one person?
The word patterns fit one writer. All six 5,000 word blocks land on one of his names, and the chapters that stray return to him when pooled. His Who’s Who entries also claim it. An editor or a friend who supplied ideas would leave no trace, so sole authorship stays likely and unproven.
Who were the Three Initiates?
Nobody has shown that three people existed. Philip Deslippe argues the name was one man’s nod to Hermes the thrice great, and Mitch Horowitz reads the evidence the same way. Paul Foster Case is the only other name with testimony behind it, and that testimony came from his own circle.
Could Paul Foster Case have helped write it?
He could have talked with the author, but his hand does not show in the writing. Case ranks 23 of 33 names on the whole book and won 0% of open test rounds. Four chapters land on him, yet Atkinson’s own books stray to Case more than to anyone, and those four chapters pooled land on Atkinson.
What is Burrows’s Delta?
It is a distance between writing styles, published by John Burrows in 2002. Take the most common words, turn each writer’s rate into a z score, and average the gaps between a text and a writer. The smallest number marks the closest style. It says nothing about what a text means.
Does this prove the axioms came from an ancient book?
No. At 870 words the axioms are too short for this test to name anyone, and it cannot date a text at all. Researchers trace their ideas to nineteenth century books. The test only shows they read differently from the commentary around them.
How much text should I paste into the tool?
At least 1,500 words, and 5,000 if you can. In our test a hidden passage of his at 1,500 words was found 38% of the time, against 80% at 5,000. Your text is measured in your browser and never leaves it.
Sources
What we read and measured
- Three Initiates, The Kybalion, Chicago, 1908, measured from the Gutenberg text of the 1912 printing.
- Atkinson’s Who’s Who in America entries: archive.org scan.
- Adam J. Pearson, “Three Initiates” Unveiled, Light in Extension, 2024, for the twelve candidates, the Deslippe report and the sources of the axioms.
- Mitch Horowitz, The Kybalion Without Tears, on Atkinson’s sole authorship and on Case.
- Paul Foster Case and The Kybalion, Wikipedia, for Case’s dates, Whitty and the attribution.
- John Burrows, “Delta”: a Measure of Stylistic Difference and a Guide to Likely Authorship, Literary and Linguistic Computing 17(3), 2002.
- Moshe Koppel and Yaron Winter, Determining if Two Documents Are Written by the Same Author, JASIST 65(1), 2014, for the impostors method.
- Maciej Eder, Short Samples in Authorship Attribution, 2017, on the sample sizes the field works with.
- L. W. de Laurence, Wikipedia, on his Tarot book and Waite.
- Comparison texts: Project Gutenberg and archive.org, with Azoth issues from IAPSOP. Atkinson’s pen names follow the bibliography on our Atkinson page.