Where Do the World's Symbolic Systems Come From? Hermeticism, Kabbalah, Chakras, the Gunas, the Maya Tzolk'in, the Celtic Tree Calendar and Human Design

Checking “ancient wisdom”

Spiritual and self-help content often describes a system as “a secret handed down for thousands of years.” Trace the history of these systems, though, and you often find older original traditions mixed with interpretations created in modern times. Telling them apart lets you engage with each system more accurately — and more respectfully.

Hermeticism and the “seven universal laws”

• Original tradition: the Corpus Hermeticum is a body of Greek texts from Egypt, roughly 2nd–3rd century CE, dealing with the relationship between God, the cosmos and humanity (Copenhaver, 1992). It strongly influenced Renaissance European thought.
• Modern interpretation: the seven laws — “mentalism, correspondence, vibration…” — come from The Kybalion, published in the United States in 1908 under the name “Three Initiates.” It is a book strongly coloured by the early-20th-century New Thought movement; the ancient Hermetic texts contain no such list.

Kabbalah and the Tree of Life

• Original tradition: Kabbalah is a Jewish mystical tradition. After early texts such as the Sefer Yetzirah, it was systematised with the appearance of the Zohar in 13th-century Spain. The Tree of Life, made of ten sefirot, expresses how divine attributes flow into the world (Scholem, 1941).
• Modern interpretation: 19th-century Western occult societies created “Hermetic Qabalah,” linking the Tree of Life to tarot and astrology. It is a separate tradition from Jewish Kabbalah.

Chakras: when did seven become the standard?

• Original tradition: chakras are centres of bodily energy described in Indian tantric texts. The number and placement vary between texts; some traditions speak of four, six or more.
• Modern interpretation: today’s familiar seven chakras with rainbow colours spread in the West after John Woodroffe (writing as Arthur Avalon) translated and introduced the 16th-century text Ṣaṭ-cakra-nirūpaṇa in The Serpent Power (1919); the colour scheme was added later by the New Age movement. No anatomical structures corresponding to chakras have been found.

The three gunas

• Original tradition: Indian Sāṃkhya philosophy holds that all phenomena are made of three qualities — sattva (clarity, balance), rajas (movement, passion) and tamas (heaviness, inertia). The Bhagavad Gītā discusses them in detail in chapter 14.
• How to use it: as a language for reflection, naming your current state of mind by the three qualities. It is not a tool for sorting people into fixed types.

The Maya Tzolk’in and “In Lak’ech”

• Original tradition: the Tzolk’in is a 260-day ritual calendar combining 13 numbers with 20 day names. In K’iche’ Maya communities of highland Guatemala, “daykeepers” still keep this calendar today (Tedlock, 1982).
• Modern interpretation: the “13 Moon” calendar and the system known as “Dreamspell” are modern creations by José Argüelles in the 1980s (Argüelles, 1987) and do not match the traditional Maya day count. “In Lak’ech” (“you are my other me”) spread through the Chicano movement via Luis Valdez’s poetry in the early 1970s; evidence that it comes from Classic Maya texts is weak.

Celtic tree astrology

• Original tradition: Ogham is a real script used in Ireland around the 4th–6th centuries. Medieval texts associated its letters with tree names.
• Modern interpretation: the “Celtic tree calendar” that assigns a tree sign by birthday began with Robert Graves’s The White Goddess (1948). There is no historical evidence that the ancient Celts used such an astrological calendar.

Human Design

• Origin: a system created in 1987 by Alan Krakower (Ra Uru Hu), based on a revelation he said he received. It combines the I Ching, astrology, Kabbalah and chakras to sort people into types such as Generators and Projectors (Bunnell & Ra Uru Hu, 2011).
• Evidence: no research has tested its type classification or the effects of its “strategies.” It helps to know it is a modern composite system.

About the Enneagram

The Enneagram’s wings and instinctual subtypes are covered, along with the state of the research, in the explainer on OIYO’s Enneagram test.

Summary at a glance

System	Original tradition	Added in modern times
Hermeticism	Corpus Hermeticum (2nd–3rd c.)	”Seven laws” from The Kybalion (1908)
Kabbalah	Jewish mysticism, Zohar (13th c.)	Hermetic Qabalah (19th-c. occultism)
Chakras	Tantric texts, varying numbers	Seven-chakra standard (1919), rainbow colours
Gunas	Sāṃkhya philosophy, Bhagavad Gītā	Use as a language for reflection
Maya Tzolk’in	260-day ritual calendar (still in use)	“13 Moons” and Dreamspell (1980s)
Celtic trees	The Ogham script	Tree astrology calendar (1948)
Human Design	—	A composite system created in 1987

Being old does not make something true, and being new does not make it worthless. But knowing where something comes from is the first step in respecting each tradition.

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References

• Copenhaver, B. P. (1992). Hermetica: The Greek Corpus Hermeticum and the Latin Asclepius. Cambridge University Press.
• Three Initiates (1908). The Kybalion. Yogi Publication Society.
• Scholem, G. (1941). Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism. Schocken.
• Woodroffe, J. [Arthur Avalon] (1919). The Serpent Power. Luzac.
• Bhagavad Gītā, ch. 14.
• Tedlock, B. (1982). Time and the Highland Maya. University of New Mexico Press.
• Argüelles, J. (1987). The Mayan Factor: Path Beyond Technology. Bear & Company.
• Graves, R. (1948). The White Goddess. Faber & Faber.
• Bunnell, L., & Ra Uru Hu (2011). The Definitive Book of Human Design: The Science of Differentiation. HDC Publishing.