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William Walker Atkinson (December 5, 1862 - November 22, 1932) was a very important and influential American figure in the early days of the New Thought Movement. He was an attorney, merchant, and author, as well as an occultist and an American pioneer of New Thought, which is in fact the title of a magazine he edited at one time. He is also known to have been the author of the pseudonymous works attributed to Theron Q. Dumont and Yogi Ramacharaka. Atkinson's 1906 book Thought Vibration or the Law of Attraction in the Thought World,[1] is associated with the thinking behind the recent phenomena surrounding the 2006 movie, The Secret. Due in part to his intense personal secrecy and exstensive use of pseudonyms, he is now largely forgotten, despite having obtained mention in past editions of Who's Who in America, Religious Leaders of America, and several similar publications. LifeWilliam Walker Atkinson was born in Baltimore, Maryland on December 5, 1862, to William and Emma Atkinson, both of whom were also born in Maryland. He began his working life as a grocer at 15 years old, probably helping his father. He married Margret Foster Black of Beverley, New Jersey, on October 1889 and they had two children. The first probably died young. The second later married and had two daughters. Atkinson pursued a business career from 1882 onwards and in 1894 he was admitted as an attorney to the Bar of Pennsylvania. While he gained much material success in his profession as a lawyer, the stress and over-strain eventually took its toll, and during this time he experienced a complete physical and mental breakdown, and financial disaster. He looked for healing and in the late 1880's he found it with New Thought. From mental and physical wreck and financial ruin, he wrought perfect health, mental vigor and material prosperity, which he attributed to the application of the principles of New Thought. Some time after his healing, Atkinson began to write articles on the truths he felt he had discovered, which were then known as Mental Science. In 1889, an article by him entitled "A Mental Science Catechism," appeared in Charles Fillmore's new periodical, Modern Thought. By the early 1890's Chicago had become a major centre for New Thought, mainly through the work of Emma Curtis Hopkins, and Atkinson decided to move there. Once in the city, he became an active promoter of the movement as an editor and author. He was responsible for publishing the magazines Suggestion (1900-1901), New Thought (1901-1905) and Advanced Thought (1906). Throughout his subsequent career, Atkinson wrote and published under his own name and many pseudonyms, which were linked together by a series of publishing houses with shared addresses and a series of magazines with a shared roster of authors. One key to unravelling this tangled web of pseudonyms is found in "Advanced Thought" magazine, billed as "A Journal of The New Thought, Practical Psychology, Yogi Philosophy, Constructive Occultism, Metaphysical Healing, Etc." This magazine, edited by Atkinson in 1906, advertised articles by Atkinson, Yogi Ramacharaka, and Theron Q. Dumont -- the latter two being pseudonyms of Atkinson -- and it also had the same address as The Yogi Publishing Society, which published the works attributed to Yogi Ramacharaka. In 1900 Atkinson worked as an associate editor of Suggestion, a New Thought Journal, and wrote his probable first book, Thought-Force in Business and Everyday Life, being a series of lessons in personal magnetism, psychic influence, thought-force, concentration, will-power, and practical mental science. He then met Sydney Flower, a well-known New Thought publisher and businessman and teamed up with him. In December, 1901 he assumed editorship of Flower's popular New Thought magazine, a post which he held until 1905. During these years he built for himself an enduring place in the hearts of its readers. Article after article flowed from his pen. Meanwhile he also founded his own Psychic Club and the so-called "Atkinson School of Mental Science". Both were located in the same building as Flower's Psychic Research and New Thought Publishing Company. In the 1890s, Atkinson had become interested in Hinduism and after 1900 he devoted a great deal of effort to the diffusion of yoga and Oriental occultism in the West. It is unclear at this late date whether he actually ever converted to any form of Hindu religion, or merely wished to write on the subject. If he did convert, he left no records of the event. According to unverifiable sources, while Atkinson was in Chicago at the World's Columbian Exposition in 1893, he met one Baba Bharata, a pupil of the late Indian mystic Yogi Ramacharaka (1799 - c.1893). As the story goes, Bharata had become acquainted with Atkinson's writings after arriving in America, the two men shared similar ideas, and so they decided to collaborate. While performing his New Thought editor job, it is claimed, Atkinson co-wrote with Bharata a series of books which they attributed to Bharata's teacher, Yogi Ramacharaka. This story cannot be verified and -- like the "official" biography that falsely claims Atkinson was an "English author" -- it may be a fabrication. No record exists in India of a Yogi Ramacharaka, nor is there evidence in America of the immigration of a Baba Bharata. Furthermore, although Atkinson may have travelled to Chicago to visit the 1892 - 1893 World's Columbian Exposition, he is only known to have taken up residence in Chicago around 1900 and to have passed the Illinois Bar Examination in 1903. In any case, with or without a co-author, Atkinson started writing a series of books under the name Yogi Ramacharaka in 1903, ultimately publishing about 13 titles under this pseudonym. The Ramacharaka books were published by the Yogi Publication Society in Chicago and reached more people than Atkinson's New Thought works did. In fact, all his books on yoga are still in print today. In 1903, the same year that he began his writing career as Yogi Ramacharaka, Atkinson was admitted to the Bar of Illinois. Perhaps it was a desire to protect his ongoing career as a lawyer that led him to adopt so many pseudonyms -- but if so, he left no written account documenting such a motivation. During the 1910s, Atkinson put his attention into another pseudonym, that of Theron Q. Dumont. This entity was supposed to be French, and his works, written in English and published in Chicago, combined an interest in New Thought with ideas about the training of the will, memory enhancement, and personal magnetism. Beginning in 1916, Atkinson started writing articles for Elizabeth Towne's New Thought magazine The Nautilus, and from 1916 to 1919 he edited the journal Advanced Thought. During this period he was for a time the honorary president of the International New Thought Alliance. Among the last collaborators with whom he may have been associated was the mentalist C. Alexander, whose New Thought booklet,"Personal Lessons, Codes, and Instructions for Members of the Crystal Silence League", published in Los Angeles during the 1920s, contained on its last page an advertisement for an extensive list of books by Atkinson, Dumont, Ramacharaka, and Atkinson's collabrator, the occultist L. W. de Laurence. Atkinson died November 22, 1932 in Los Angeles, California at the age of 70, after 50 years of simultaneously successful careers in business, writing, and the law. Many mysteries still surround Atkinson's life, including the fact that a certificate of copyright issued three years after his death is said to have been signed by the author himself. WritingAtkinson was a prolific writer, and his many books on New Thought achieved wide circulation among New Thought devotees and practitioners. He published under several pen names, including Magus Incognito, Theodore Sheldon, Theron Q. Dumont, Swami Panchadasi, Yogi Ramacharaka, and probably other names not identified at present. He is also popularly held to be one (if not all) of the Three Initiates who anonymously authored The Kybalion, which certainly resembles Atkinson's other writings in style and subject matter. Atkinson's two co-authors in the latter venture, if they even existed, are unknown, but speculation often includes names like Mabel Collins, Michael Whitty, Paul Foster Case, and Harriett Case. A major collection of Atkinson's works is among the holdings of a Brazilian organization called Circulo de Estudos Ramacháraca. According to this group, Atkinson has been identified as the author or co-author (with individuals such as Edward E. Beals and Lauron William de Laurence) of 105 separate titles. These can be broken down roughly into the following groups: Titles written under the name William Walker AtkinsonThese works treat themes related to the mental world, occultism, divination, psychic reality, and mankind's nature. They constitute a basis for what Atkinson called "New Psychology" or "New Thought". Titles include Thought Vibration or the Law of Attraction in the Thought World, and Practical Psychomancy and Crystal Gazing: A Course of Lessons on the Psychic Phenomena of Distant Sensing, Clairvoyance, Psychometry, Crystal Gazing, etc. Titles written under pseudonymsThese include Atkinson's teachings on Yoga and Oriental philosophy, as well as New Thought and occult titles. They were written in such a way as to form a course of practical instruction. Ramacharaka titlesWhen Atkinson wrote under the pseudonym Yogi Ramachakara, he claimed to be a Hindu. As Ramacharaka, he helped to popularize Eastern concepts in America, with Yoga and a broadly-interpreted Hinduism being particular areas of focus. The works of Yogi Ramacharaka were published over the course of nearly ten years beginning in 1903. Some were originally issued as a series of lectures delivered at the frequency of one lesson per month. Additional material was issued at each interval in the form of supplementary textbooks. Ramacharaka's Advanced Course in Yoga Philosophy and Oriental Occultism remains widely respected as an excellent primer for the Western layman, despite the fact that it was 100 years old in 2004 and is understandably dated in some respects. According to Atkinson's publisher, the Yogi Publication Society, some of these titles were inspired by a student of the "real" Yogi Ramacharaka, Baba Bharata, although there is no historical record that either of these individuals ever existed. In reply to inquiries about Yogi Ramacharaka, this official information was provided by the Yogi Publication Society:
Note that in at least one point, this "official" account is false: William Walker Atkinson was an American, not "an English author" and L. N. Fowler, an occult publishing house, was the British publisher of books that Atkinson had published under various of his own imprints in Chicago. The Three InitiatesOstensibly written by "Three Initiates," The Kybalion was published by the Yogi Publication Society. But who were these three initiates? According to Rey Delupos,
Whether or not any of the above has a basis in fact, The Kybalion bears notable structural resemblances to The Arcane Teachings, an anonymous set of six books attributed to Atkinson. A full descritpion of the similarities between the two works can be found on the Kybalion page. Theron Q. Dumont titlesAs Theron Q. Dumont, Atkinson stated on the title pages of his works that he was an "Instructor on the Art and Science of Personal Magnetism, Paris, France" -- a claim manifestly untrue, as he was an American living in the United States. His titles under this name were primarily concerned with self-improvement and the development of mental will power and self-confidence. Among them are Practical Memory Training, The Art and Science of Personal Magnetism, The Power of Concentration, and The Advanced Course in Personal Magnetism: The Secrets of Mental Fascination. Magus Incognito titlesThe Secret Doctrines of the Rosicrucians by Magus Incognito consists of a nearly verbatim republication of portions of The Arcane Teachings, an anonymous work attribued to Atkinson (see below). Swami Panchadasi titlesDespite the popularity of his Yogi Ramacharaka series, the work that Atkinson produced under his second Hindu-sounding pseudonym, Swami Panchadasi, failed to capture a wide general audience. The subject matter, Clairvoyance and Occult Powers, was not authentically Hindu, either. Titles Atkinson co-authoredWith Edward Beals, Atkinson wrote the so-called "Personal Power Books" -- a group of 12 titles on humanity's internal powers and how to use them. Titles include Faith Power: Your Inspirational Forces. Titles written anonymously but attributed to AtkinsonA series named The Arcane Teachings is also attributed to Atkinson. Perhaps significantly, the doctrine behind The Arcane Teachings is remarkably similar to the philosophy in The Kybalion (another title attributed to Atkinson), and significant portions of material from The Arcane Teachings were later re-worked, appearing nearly verbatim in The Secret Doctrines of the Rosicrucians by Magus Incognito (yet another Atkinson alias). Nothing is known of the first edition of The Arcane Teachings, which apparently consisted of a single volume of the same name. The second edition was expanded to include three 'supplementary teachings' in pamphlet form. The four titles in this edition were: The Arcane Teachings (hardback), The Arcane Formulas, or Mental Alchemy (pamphlet), The Mystery of Sex, or Sex Polarity (pamphlet), and Vril, or Vital Magnetism (pamphlet). This edition was published by A. C. McClurg -- the same publisher who brought out the Tarzan the Ape-Man series by Edgar Rice Burroughs -- under the "Arcane Book Concern" imprint, and the name of the publisher, A. C. McClurg, doesn't actually appear anywhere upon the books in this edition. The series bears a 1909 copyright mark, listing the copyright holder as "Arcane Book Concern". There also appears to have been a pamphlet entitled Free Sample Lesson which was published under the "Arcane Book Concern" imprint, indicating that it may have appeared concurrently with this edition. The third edition split the main title, The Arcane Teachings, into three smaller volumes, bringing the total number of books in the series to six. This edition consisted of the following titles (the three titles marked with an asterix (*) are the volumes that had appeared together as The Arcane Teachings in the previous edition): The One and the Many* (hardback), Cosmic Law* (hardback), The Psychic Planes* (hardback), The Arcane Formulas, or Mental Alchemy (binding unknown), The Mystery of Sex, or Sex Polarity (binding unknown), and Vril, or Vital Magnetism (binding unknown). The third edition of The Arcane Teachings was published by A. C. McClurg under its own name in 1911. The books in this series bear the original 1909 copyright, plus a 1911 copyright listing "Library Shelf" as the new copyright holder. A search of the Library of Congress' web site has revealed that none of The Arcane Teachings reside in its current collection. Other likely pseudonymsBecause Atkinson ran his own publishing companies, Advanced Thought Publishing and Yogi Publication Society, and is known to have used an unusually large number of pseudonyms, it is easy to speculate that several more of the suthors published by those companies were also his pseudonyms. Since no documentation on the lives of these writers has been found that indicates that they had an independent existence from Atkinson, it is reasonable to list them here, without stating for a surety that they were Atkinson's pen-names. The works of these possibly pseudonymous identities were all published by Atkinson's companies: Swami Bhakta Vishita (who wrote books on yoga and spiritualism), the team of A. Gould and Dr. Franklin L. Dubois (who wrote The Science of Sex Regeneration circa 1912), and Frederick Vollrath (who contributed articles on "Mental Physical-Culture" to Advanced Thought magazine. BibliographiesFor ease of study, this bibliography of the works of William Walker Atkinson is divided into sections based on the name Atkinson chose to place on the title page of each work cited. Bibliography of Atkinson writing as W. W. Atkinson
Bibliography of Atkinson writing as Yogi Ramacharaka
Bibliography of Atkinson writing as Three Initiates
Bibliography of Atkinson writing as Theron Q. Dumont
Bibliography of Atkinson writing as Magus Incognito
Bibliography of Atkinson writing as Swami Panchadasi
Bibliography of Atkinson writing with co-authors
Bibliography of anonymous works attributed to Atkinson
References
External links
This biographical information was gathered from the Swami_Panchadasi page, courtesy of the Wikipedia project. BooksClairvoyance and Occult Powers |
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