Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill: The Esoteric Roots

The New Thought Roots of Think and Grow Rich

Napoleon Hill's Think and Grow Rich, published in 1937, is the bestselling self-help book of the 20th century, with over 100 million copies sold. Yet most of its readers, drawn in by the business and success framing, are unaware that nearly every concept in the book has a direct antecedent in the New Thought movement of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

New Thought was a metaphysical movement that arose in the United States in the 1880s and 1890s, partly through the influence of Phineas Parkhurst Quimby (who influenced Mary Baker Eddy before she founded Christian Science), and partly through the transcendentalist heritage of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Its core teaching was that mind is causative: that the quality and direction of thought, sustained with sufficient intensity and faith, shapes the conditions of the outer world. Disease could be healed by right thought; poverty could be dissolved by right thought; success could be attracted by right thought.

The major New Thought texts that directly preceded and influenced Hill include Ralph Waldo Trine's In Tune with the Infinite (1897), which described the individual mind's participation in a universal divine mind; Wallace Wattles' The Science of Getting Rich (1910), which presented a rigorous practical method for mental manifestation (see Thalira's deep review at /blogs/quantum-codex/science-getting-rich-wattles); and Charles Haanel's The Master Key System (1912-1917), which laid out a systematic twenty-four-week course in New Thought practice. Hill absorbed all of these and reorganized their content into a narrative framework built around his claimed interviews with successful businessmen.

Hill's genius, if it deserves that term, was marketing. The metaphysical principles of New Thought were well-established by the time he wrote. His innovation was framing them as the secret knowledge of American business titans, translating "the universal mind" into "Infinite Intelligence," "mental cause" into "definite chief aim," and "spiritual law" into "the thirteen principles." The esoteric became the practical; the divine became the corporate. The coating was so successful that most readers never noticed what was underneath it.

The Thirteen Steps as an Esoteric Map

Hill structures Think and Grow Rich around thirteen principles, which he presents as steps in a practical system. Read through the lens of esoteric tradition, these thirteen steps are a complete map of consciousness development from the initial act of intention-setting through to the activation of the intuitive faculty.

The first step, Desire, corresponds to the esoteric principle that all creation begins with want, not vague wishing but burning, specific wanting. Hill's insistence on a definite amount, a specific deadline, and a plan for giving something in exchange mirrors magical instruction: a magical working without a clearly specified aim is not a working at all.

The second step, Faith, is the conviction that the desired outcome is already real in the mental/causal realm and is being drawn into physical manifestation. This is not belief as intellectual assent; it is the felt certainty that a Hermetic practitioner calls assumption of the wish fulfilled. Hill's description of faith as "a state of mind which may be induced, or created, by affirmation or repeated instructions to the subconscious mind" is a precise description of what ritual and ceremony accomplish in magical practice.

The third step, Autosuggestion, is the deliberate programming of the subconscious mind through repeated affirmations, particularly those delivered with emotional intensity while in a relaxed or semi-somnolent state. This corresponds directly to self-hypnosis, yogic japa (the repetition of mantras or divine names), and the use of affirmations in New Thought prayer treatment. Hill is describing a cross-cultural technology of consciousness.

Steps four through six, Specialized Knowledge, Imagination, and Organized Planning, are the practical outer expression of the inner work. They correspond to the esoteric teacher's instruction that spiritual development must be grounded in practical activity: inner realization without outer expression remains in the sphere of fantasy.

Step seven, Decision, is one of Hill's most practically useful concepts. He notes that successful people decide quickly and change their minds slowly; unsuccessful people decide slowly and change their minds quickly. This is the esoteric principle of the committed will: the magical working that wavers between activation and cancellation produces nothing, while the one that is committed fully produces results regardless of whether they are understood in advance.

Steps eight through eleven, Persistence, the Mastermind, Sexual Transmutation, and the Subconscious Mind, are where the esoteric content of the book reaches its peak. These are addressed separately below.

Steps twelve and thirteen, the Brain and the Sixth Sense, form the culmination of the system. Hill describes the brain as a broadcasting and receiving station for thought vibrations (anticipating the neuroscience of brain rhythms by several decades in metaphorical if not technical accuracy). The Sixth Sense is the faculty that becomes accessible after the previous twelve steps have been genuinely worked.

Infinite Intelligence: The Universal Mind

Throughout Think and Grow Rich, Hill refers to "Infinite Intelligence" as the source of the intuitive flashes, creative ideas, and hunches that appear to extraordinary achievers at critical moments. He is deliberate about not calling this God: he recognizes that different readers have different religious frameworks, and he wants the principle to be accessible across all of them.

Infinite Intelligence is Hill's version of what Emerson called the Over-Soul, what Trine called "the Infinite" in In Tune with the Infinite, what Haanel called "Universal Mind," and what Wattles called "thinking stuff." All of these are translations of the same metaphysical concept: that individual human consciousness participates in a larger field of consciousness that is the source of all creative power, intuition, and guidance.

In Hermetic terms, this is the principle of Mentalism: the All-Mind from which individual minds emerge and in which they remain embedded, connected to one another and to the source of all intelligence. This is not a metaphor. The most serious students of New Thought, from Emerson through Trine through Wattles, meant this literally: there is an infinite consciousness that pervades all things, and the individual mind that aligns itself with this consciousness gains access to its limitless resources.

Hill's most explicit statement of this comes near the end of the book, in the chapter on the Sixth Sense: "There comes to your aid, and to do your bidding, with the development of the sixth sense, a 'guardian angel' who will open to you at all times the door to the Temple of Wisdom." This is unambiguously the language of esoteric tradition: the higher self, the Holy Guardian Angel of Hermetic and Kabbalistic practice, the inner teacher of the Gnostic tradition.

The Mastermind: Group Consciousness and Esoteric Alliance

One of Hill's most original and genuinely valuable contributions to the New Thought tradition is his articulation of the Mastermind principle. He defines it as "coordination of knowledge and effort, in a spirit of harmony, between two or more people, for the attainment of a definite purpose." He identifies two dimensions of the Mastermind alliance: the economic dimension (shared knowledge and resources) and the psychic dimension (what he calls the "third mind" that emerges when two minds are in genuine harmony).

The psychic dimension of the Mastermind is the genuinely esoteric claim. Hill argues that when two or more minds are coordinated in harmony toward a definite purpose, something new comes into being between them, a mind that is not the sum of the individual minds but their creative product, greater than any of them alone. This is not ordinary teamwork; it requires genuine harmony, meaning alignment at the feeling level, not just intellectual agreement.

This principle has direct parallels across the world's esoteric traditions. The Mystery School, from Eleusis to the Pythagorean community to the Rosicrucian Brotherhood, operated on the premise that initiates working together in genuine harmony activate a collective field of consciousness that amplifies the development of each individual. The magical lodge operates on the same principle: the coordinated working of a group, properly aligned in intention and feeling, produces results available to no single practitioner working alone.

Sexual Transmutation: The Alchemical Chapter

Chapter 11 of Think and Grow Rich is the chapter Hill calls "The Mystery of Sex: Transmutation." It is the most esoteric chapter in the book and the one most frequently excised from abridged editions. Hill himself notes that it will be misunderstood by most readers, and that the capacity to benefit from its teaching requires a degree of emotional maturity that many people have not yet developed.

The core teaching is simple: sexual energy is the most powerful motivating force in the human system, and this energy, like all energy, can be redirected. When sexual desire is sublimated, not suppressed, but consciously channeled toward creative, intellectual, and spiritual work, it becomes fuel for extraordinary achievement. Hill lists ten categories of mind-stimulants, of which sexual energy is described as the most powerful, and argues that the men of greatest creative achievement in history have been men of intense sexual nature who learned to transmute that energy.

The alchemical parallels are exact. Alchemy's central metaphor, the transformation of base metals into gold through a process of dissolution, purification, and recombination, is precisely what Hill is describing: the transformation of the densest, most urgently physical of human drives into the subtlest, most spiritual of faculties. The sexual force in yogic Tantra is called kundalini; in Hermetic practice, it is the mercury that must be fixed; in Taoist inner alchemy, it is jing (vital essence) that must be refined into qi (energy) and then into shen (spirit). All of these traditions describe the same essential transformation.

Mitch Horowitz, the PEN award-winning historian of American occultism and New Thought, has written directly on this topic in The Power of Sex Transmutation, exploring both Hill's original teaching and its roots in older esoteric traditions. Horowitz notes that Hill's teaching is not about celibacy but about consciousness: the practitioner who can feel the full intensity of sexual energy and deliberately direct it toward their creative work has access to a fuel source that most people dissipate without even noticing.

The Invisible Counselors: Ceremonial Imagination

In Chapter 13, Hill describes a practice he developed over many years that he calls the "Invisible Counselors." He selected nine historical figures whose qualities he admired: Emerson, Paine, Edison, Darwin, Lincoln, Burbank, Napoleon, Ford, and Carnegie. Each night before sleep, he would convene a council of these nine figures in his imagination, appointing himself as the chairman, and would bring specific problems for their consideration.

Hill describes the practice with a mixture of fascination and caution. He notes that over time the imagined figures took on a quality of independence, speaking in ways he had not planned and sometimes surprising him with their responses. He became concerned that the figures were becoming "disturbingly real" and suspended the practice for several months, before resuming it with what he describes as better control.

This description is structurally identical to two well-documented esoteric practices. The first is C.G. Jung's technique of active imagination, developed between 1913 and 1917 and described in detail in his posthumously published Red Book: the deliberate engagement with autonomous figures from the unconscious, allowing them to speak and act while the conscious ego witnesses without being overwhelmed. The second is the ceremonial magical practice of evocation: the summoning of intelligences (whether understood as internal psychological structures or external entities depends on the magical school) for consultation and cooperation.

Hill was not ignorant of these parallels. His later involvement with the Royal Fraternity of Master Metaphysicians, a New Thought organization that explicitly incorporated elements from ceremonial magic and spiritualism, shows that he was aware of and interested in the broader esoteric context of his practices. The business language in which he wrapped these practices for Think and Grow Rich was a deliberate decision to make esoteric methods accessible to an audience that would have rejected them in their original form.

The Sixth Sense and the Inner Faculty

The Sixth Sense is the culmination of Hill's thirteen-step system, and it is the section he treats with the most circumspection. He writes: "I shall not attempt to describe it, except to say that it appears to be a mixture of both the mental and the spiritual. It is a point of contact between the finite mind of man and Infinite Intelligence."

He describes the Sixth Sense as the faculty through which Infinite Intelligence communicates with the individual: through hunches, warnings, creative ideas that arrive fully formed, and a quality of knowing that does not derive from sensory experience or logical inference. He argues that this faculty becomes accessible only after the previous twelve steps have been genuinely worked, that it is not a starting point but a result of the whole system.

In esoteric terms, this is the faculty variously called intuition, the higher mind, buddhi in yogic philosophy, nous in the Neoplatonic tradition, and the faculty of direct knowing in Hermetic thought. It is the faculty that the inner alchemy of the whole tradition is designed to activate. The twelve preceding steps, desire, faith, autosuggestion, specialized knowledge, imagination, planning, decision, persistence, mastermind, sexual transmutation, subconscious mind, brain, are the purification and preparation through which this faculty becomes available.

Hill is explicit that this is not a metaphor: "Through the faculty of the sixth sense, you will be warned of impending dangers in time to avoid them, and notified of opportunities in time to embrace them." This is the description of a working faculty, not a literary device. And Hill's framing of it as the product of a systematic process, rather than an arbitrary gift, is one of the most practically useful aspects of his teaching.

A Critical Reading: Hill's Fabrications and What Remains

Any honest engagement with Think and Grow Rich requires acknowledging the substantial evidence that Napoleon Hill fabricated key elements of his biography and business credentials. Investigative reporting has established that his claimed interviews with Andrew Carnegie are likely invented or greatly embellished, that his reported relationships with presidents are largely fictional, and that his later career included what can only be described as confidence schemes targeting vulnerable people.

These facts matter and should be held clearly. Hill was not what he claimed to be. His personal integrity was seriously compromised by systematic dishonesty about his own credentials and experience.

And yet: the philosophical content of Think and Grow Rich does not depend on Hill's biography. The principles he describes, mental causation, the power of sustained intention, the role of the subconscious in manifesting outcomes, the creative power of sexual energy consciously directed, the emergence of group consciousness in genuinely harmonized alliances, are principles drawn from traditions that predate Hill by centuries and that have independent validity. Hill popularized and packaged them; he did not originate them, and his personal failures do not invalidate what the traditions themselves demonstrate.

Mitch Horowitz makes this point precisely in The Miracle Club and his various essays on New Thought: the test of a principle is not the character of its most famous popularizer but whether the principle works. Horowitz applies the principles rigorously and personally, and argues for their genuine efficacy on the basis of the broader tradition from which they come rather than from Hill's personal authority.

For the serious practitioner, the recommendation is to read Think and Grow Rich as a flawed but valuable introduction to New Thought principles, to read Hill's source texts directly (Emerson, Wattles, Trine, Haanel) for the principles in clearer form, and to engage with Horowitz's scholarly work for a rigorous contemporary assessment. The tradition is real and worth engaging; the messenger needs to be read critically.

About the Book

Think and Grow Rich

by Napoleon Hill (revised edition)

Tarcher/Penguin | ASIN: 1585424331

The revised edition of Hill's 1937 classic, with the original text updated for contemporary readers. For esoteric study, reading this alongside the original 1937 text (freely available online) and Mitch Horowitz's commentary provides the fullest picture.

View on Amazon