Atkinson was a prolific writer whose books achieved wide circulation among New Thought devotees and occult practitioners. He published under several pen names, including Magus Incognito, Theodore Sheldon, Theron Q. Dumont, Swami Panchadasi, Yogi Ramacharaka, Swami Bhakta Vishita, and probably other names not identified. He is also popularly held to be one (if not all) of the Three Initiates who anonymously authored
The Kybalion.
Titles written under the name William Walker Atkinson These 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.. Although most of the Atkinson titles were published by Atkinson's own Advanced Thought Publishing Company in Chicago, with English distribution by L. N. Fowler of London, England, at least a few of his books in the "New Psychology" series were published by
Elizabeth Towne in Mount Holyoke, Massachusetts, and offered for sale in her New Thought magazine
The Nautilus. One such title, for which Atkinson is credited as the author, with the copyright internally assigned to Towne, is
The Psychology of Salesmanship, published in 1912. The probable reason that Atkinson made an assignment of copyright to Towne is that his "New Psychology" books had initially been serialized in Towne's magazine, where he was a freelance writer from 1912 at least through 1914.
Titles written under pseudonyms These 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.
Yogi Ramacharaka titles When Atkinson wrote under the pseudonym Yogi Ramacharaka, 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 text books. Ramacharaka's
Advanced Course in Yoga Philosophy and Oriental Occultism remains popular in some circles. 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.
Swami Bhakta Vishita titles Atkinson's second Hindu-sounding pseudonym, Swami Bhakta Vishita, billed as "The Hindoo Master" did not write on the topic of Hinduism. His best-known titles were "The Development of Seership: The Science of Knowing the Future; Hindoo and Oriental Methods" (1915), "Genuine Mediumship, or Invisible Powers", and "Can We Talk to Spirit Friends?" Atkinson produced more than two dozen Swami Bhakta Vishita books, plus a half-dozen saddle-stitched paper pamphlets under the Vishita name. All of them dealt with clairvoyance, mediumship, and the afterlife. Like Ramacharaka, Vishita was listed as a regular contributor to Atkinson's
Advanced Thought magazine, but his books were published by the Advanced Thought Publishing Company, not by the Yogi Publication Society, which handled the Ramacharaka titles.
Swami Panchadasi titles The work that Atkinson produced under his third Hindu-sounding pseudonym, Swami Panchadasi, failed to capture a wide general audience. The subject matter, clairvoyance and occult powers, was not authentically Hindu, either.
Theron Q. Dumont titles As 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. The Atkinson titles released under the Dumont name were primarily concerned with self-improvement and the development of mental will power and self-confidence. Among them were
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, The Human Machine', Mastermind''.
Theodore Sheldon titles The health and healing book,
Vim Culture has often been attributed to William Walker Atkinson. Theodore Sheldon does not appear to be the same person as T. J. Shelton, who (like Atkinson) wrote on subjects related to health and healing for
The Nautilus magazine and was also one of several honorary presidents of the International New Thought Alliance. Discovery of a 1925 letter from Theodore Sheldon to Florence Sabin of Johns Hopkins University provides evidence of Theodore Sheldon's existence as an actual person, apart from William Walker Atkinson. The original copy of this letter was located in Florence Sabin's university archives and makes reference to Ms. Sabin as Theodore Sheldon's childhood teacher from "the banks of Lake Geneva," which is important biographical data about an otherwise unknown writer. While it's possible that Atkinson could have been a ghost writer or contributor to Sheldon's work, the personal nature of Sheldon's correspondence with Florence Sabin would have been very difficult for Atkinson to fabricate, suggesting that Theodore Sheldon was more than an Atkinson pen name.
Magus Incognito titles The Secret Doctrines of the Rosicrucians by Magus Incognito consisted of a nearly verbatim republication of portions of
The Arcane Teachings, an anonymous work attributed to Atkinson (see below).
Three Initiates Ostensibly written by "Three Initiates,"
The Kybalion was published by the Yogi Publication Society.
Titles Atkinson co-authored With Edward Beals, which may have been another pseudonym, 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 and
Regenerative Power or Vital Rejuvenation. Due to the lack of information on Edward Beals, many believe this is also a pseudonym. With fellow Chicago resident
L. W. de Laurence, he co-authored
Psychomancy and Crystal Gazing. L. W. de Laurence was a publisher and author of numerous books on "occult" subjects, which had influence in several African and Caribbean countries; some of his works are banned in Jamaica.
The 'Arcane Teaching' Books A series named
The Arcane Teaching is also attributed to Atkinson. Significant portions of material from
The Arcane Teaching 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 Teaching, 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 Teaching (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 Teaching, 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 asterisk (*) are the volumes that had appeared together as
The Arcane Teaching 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 Teaching 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.
Other likely pseudonyms Because Atkinson ran his own publishing companies, Advanced Thought Publishing and the Yogi Publication Society, and is known to have used an unusually large number of pseudonyms, other authors published by those companies may also have been his pseudonyms: • A. Gould and Dr. Franklin L. Dubois (who co-wrote
The Science of Sex Regeneration ); • Frederick Vollrath (who contributed articles on the subject of "Mental Physical-Culture" to Atkinson's
Advanced Thought magazine); • O. Hashnu Hara. Although is hard to find concrete evidence, the first clue is always the impossibility to find information about the writer, other than the fact that he wrote books published by Atkinson. Books under this name include
Practical Yoga,
Concentration, and
Mental Alchemy, all books with titles similar to other Atkinson's books. ==Bibliographies==