William Walker Atkinson (December 5, 1862 – November 22, 1932) was an American attorney, publisher, author, and pioneer of the New Thought movement. He is the presumed author of the pseudonymous works attributed to Theron Q. Dumont and Yogi Ramacharaka.Demetres P. Tryphonopoulos, The Celestial Tradition, p. 66, Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1992
He wrote an estimated 100 books, all in the last 30 years of his life. He was mentioned in past editions of Who's Who in America, in Religious Leaders of America, and in similar publications. His works have remained in print more or less continuously since 1900.Works by Atkinson, William Walker 1862–1932 (WorldCat).Works by Ramacharaka Yogi 1862–1932 (WorldCat).
Family and early career
William Walker Atkinson was born in Baltimore, Maryland, on December 5, 1862,"William Walker Atkinson." Encyclopedia of Occultism and Parapsychology, 5th ed. Gale Group, 2001. to Emma and William Atkinson. He began his working life as a grocer at 15 years old. He married Margret Foster Black of Beverly, New Jersey, in October 1889, and they had two children. Their first child 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 1900 he found it with suggestive therapeutics, later attributing the restoration of his health, mental vigor and material prosperity to the application of the principles of New Thought.
New Thought magazine In December, 1901 he assumed editorship of 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 with article after article flowing from his pen. Meanwhile, he also founded his own Success Circle and briefly ran his Atkinson School of Mental Science. Both were located in the same building as the Psychic Research Company and New Thought Publishing Company.The “Chicago School of Psychology” and Hypnotic Magazine: Suggestive Therapeutics, Public Psychologies, and New Thought Pluralism, 1895–1910
Publishing career and use of pseudonyms Atkinson wrote under many pseudonyms and false personas. His work was released by a series of publishing houses with shared addresses, and these personas wrote for a series of magazines with a shared roster of authors, all edited by Atkinson. His pseudonymous authors acted first as contributors to the periodicals and were then spun off into their own book-writing careers, with most of their books being released by Atkinson's own publishing houses
The magazine Advanced Thought, billed as A Journal of The New Thought, Practical Psychology, Yogi Philosophy, Constructive Occultism, Metaphysical Healing, Etc. was edited by Atkinson, and advertised articles by Atkinson and Theron Q. Dumont—the latter two were later credited to Atkinson—and had the same address as The Yogi Publishing Society, which published the works attributed to Yogi Ramacharaka. Advanced Thought carried articles by Swami Bhakta Vishita, but when it came time for Vishita's writings to be collected in book form, they were not published by the Yogi Publishing Society. Instead they were published by The Advanced Thought Publishing Co., the same house that brought out the Theron Q. Dumont books and published Advanced Thought.
He was responsible for helping to publish the magazines Suggestion (1900–1901), New Thought (1901–1905) and Advanced Thought (1906–1916). Atkinson was a past president of the International New Thought Alliance.A history of the new thought movement by Horatio. W. Dresser - 1919. Chapter 10 - International New Thought Alliance
False personas In the 1890s, Atkinson became interested in Hinduism. After 1900, he promoted yoga and Oriental occultism in the West.
Atkinson claimed to have an Indian co-author, which was common among the New Thought and New Age writers of his era, who often embraced a vaguely exotic theme of "orientalism" in their writings and credited Hindus, Buddhists, or Sikhs with possession of special knowledge and secret techniques of clairvoyance, spiritual development, sexual energy, health, or longevity.
Atkinson started writing a series of books under the name Yogi Ramacharaka in 1903, ultimately releasing more than a dozen 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.
Atkinson created two more Indian personas, Swami Bhakta Vishita and Swami Panchadasi. Neither of these identities wrote on Hinduism, instead focusing on divination and mediumship, including "oriental" forms of clairvoyance and seership. Of the two, Swami Bhakta Vishita was more popular, and with more than 30 titles to his credit, he eventually outsold the Yogi Ramacharaka persona.
During the 1910s, Atkinson created another persona, 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.
Dual career and later years
In 1903, the same year that he began his writing career as Yogi Ramacharaka, Atkinson was admitted to the Bar of Illinois.
In addition to writing and publishing a steady stream of books and pamphlets, Atkinson started writing articles for Elizabeth Towne's New Thought magazine Nautilus, as early as November 1912, while from 1916 to 1919, he simultaneously edited his own journal Advanced Thought. During this same period he also found time to assume the role of the honorary president of the International New Thought Alliance.
Among the last collaborators with whom Atkinson may have been associated was the mentalist C. Alexander, "The Crystal Seer," whose New Thought booklet of affirmative prayer, 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, Vishita, and Atkinson's possible collaborator, the cult leader and self styled spiritual authority on occultism, L. W. de Laurence.1919, Advanced Thought and Yogi Publication Society fraud file
Death Atkinson died November 22, 1932, in Los Angeles, California, at the age of 69.
Writings 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.
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 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