The Book and Its Author

Few books announce themselves as this one does. The Secret Teachings of All Ages is a folio, larger than most atlases, set in two columns of small type, with full-page plates in colour and hundreds of engravings: the zodiac of Dendera, the Tree of the sefirot, alchemists in their laboratories, the Great Pyramid in section, the rose and cross of the Rosicrucians. Its subtitle promises an encyclopedic outline of Masonic, Hermetic, Qabbalistic and Rosicrucian symbolical philosophy. It was printed in San Francisco in 1928, paid for in advance by its readers, and written by a man of twenty-seven who had no university degree and no position in any school or church that the learned world would have recognised.

Nearly a century later it is still in print, in later editions, and it has introduced several generations of readers to subjects that they would otherwise have met, if at all, only in scattered and difficult books. It is also, by any historian’s standards, a deeply unreliable guide to the history it describes. Both things are true, and this series sets out to hold them together. Over thirteen essays it will take the book’s themes one at a time, from the Mysteries of Greece to the Apocalypse of John, and in each case set what Hall says beside what the historical record shows and what the traditions themselves taught. This first essay is about the book and its author.

A lecturer in Los Angeles§

Manly Palmer Hall was born in 1901 in Peterborough, Ontario. His parents separated early, and he was raised largely by his grandmother; he had little formal schooling, and what he knew he taught himself, mostly from books. As a young man he came to Los Angeles, which in the years after the First World War was a gathering place for every kind of new religious movement, from Theosophists and Rosicrucians to New Thought churches and Hindu teachers newly arrived from India. He began to lecture there around 1920, and was soon speaking to large audiences on reincarnation, astrology, the Mysteries and the wisdom of the ancients. For a time in his early twenties he served as minister of a small liberal congregation, the Church of the People. He was, by all accounts, a gifted speaker: tall, grave, unhurried, and able to hold a hall for hours without notes.

The Secret Teachings was the work of these years. In his preface, dated 28 May 1928, Hall says that he began collecting material in 1921, that the plan of the book took shape three years later, and that the “Work upon the text of this volume was begun the first day of January, 1926”, continuing almost without a break for more than two years (Hall 1928, Preface). He dictated the whole manuscript to an assistant. Translators were engaged for the German, Latin, Italian, French and Spanish sources, a rabbi edited the Hebrew, and an editor was hired to bring, as Hall puts it, literary order out of literary chaos. The illustrator J. Augustus Knapp painted the colour plates, and the leading fine printer of the West Coast, John Henry Nash, designed the book.

None of this could have been paid for by a young lecturer. Hall sold the book by subscription to the people who came to hear him, and the preface records the result with evident pride: the first edition of 550 copies was fully subscribed a year before the manuscript went to the printer, and two further editions, of 550 and 200 copies, were sold before the finished volumes arrived. The book was, in other words, a community’s book before it was a public one. Its first readers were the audience of a Los Angeles lecture hall who had paid in advance, on trust, for a book that did not yet exist.

Hall lived for another sixty-two years. In 1934 he founded the Philosophical Research Society in Los Angeles, with a library and a lecture hall, and he taught there until the end of his life. He wrote more than a hundred books and gave thousands of lectures, and he became, for many Americans, the best-known voice of what he called the ancient wisdom. One detail of his life matters for reading the book. Although The Secret Teachings is full of Freemasonry, and has been treasured by Masons ever since, Hall was not a Mason when he wrote it. He was initiated only in 1954, more than a quarter of a century later, and was honoured with the order’s thirty-third degree in 1973. He died in Los Angeles in 1990.

The book outlived the subscription list. It was reprinted many times, first in further large editions and then, from 1945, in a reduced facsimile that made it affordable; later editions reset the text in smaller formats, and in recent decades it has been issued in a popular reader’s edition and translated into several languages. Few books of its kind have been read so widely, or for so long.

What is in it§

The book has an introduction, a conclusion and some forty-eight chapters between them, and its range is astonishing. It opens with three chapters on the ancient Mysteries and secret societies, from the Druids and Mithras to Eleusis and the Orphic rites, and goes on to Atlantis and the dying gods, Hermes Trismegistus, the Great Pyramid, Isis, the sun as a universal deity and the zodiac. Three chapters on Pythagoras follow, on his life, his mathematics and his theory of music and colour. Then come the symbolism of the human body, the Masonic legend of Hiram, a long survey of the symbolism of animals, plants and stones, ceremonial magic, the spirits of the elements and Hermetic medicine. Four chapters treat the Qabbalah, one the Tarot, one the tabernacle of Moses. There are three on the Rosicrucians and five on alchemy, then chapters on Bacon and Shakespeare, ciphers, Freemasonry, mystic Christianity, the cross, the Apocalypse, Islam and the symbolism of the American peoples, and a last chapter on the adepts whom Hall believed to have guided the history of the West. A bibliography and a long index close the volume.

The pictures are as important as the text. Besides Knapp’s colour plates, painted for the book, Hall reproduced hundreds of engravings from rare books of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries: the alchemical emblems of Michael Maier, the cosmic diagrams of Robert Fludd and Athanasius Kircher, the great plates of Heinrich Khunrath’s Amphitheatre of Eternal Wisdom, one of which, the entrance to the house of the Mysteries, stands at the end of the book. For many readers these were the first images of the Western esoteric tradition they had ever seen, and the book’s visual world has shaped how that tradition has been imagined ever since.

What the book claims§

The preface is modest, at least in tone. Hall writes: “I make no claim for either the infallibility or the originality of any statement herein contained.” He has studied the fragmentary writings of the ancients enough, he says, to know that dogmatic statements about them are foolhardy. “Having no particular ism of my own to promulgate”, he has not, he says, twisted the old writings to fit his own notions. And he describes his method in a phrase that every reader of the book should keep in mind: he has tried to work by “presenting the material as far as possible in the spirit rather than the letter of the original authors” (Hall 1928, Preface). He also explains that he removed all footnotes, for clarity, and worked his quotations and references into the text.

The claim of the book itself is anything but modest. It comes at the end of the long introduction, after a survey of the schools of philosophy from Thales to Bergson. Philosophy, Hall argues, was not invented by the Greeks: “philosophy emerged from the religious Mysteries of antiquity”, from the initiatory schools of Egypt, Chaldea and India, and only separated from religion when the Mysteries decayed. The Mysteries guarded their knowledge in symbols, because “Symbolism is the language of the Mysteries”. And then the thesis of the whole work: the book is dedicated to the proposition that “concealed within the emblematic figures, allegories, and rituals of the ancients is a secret doctrine concerning the inner mysteries of life, which doctrine has been preserved in toto among a small band of initiated minds since the beginning of the world” (Hall 1928, Introduction, p. 20).

Everything that follows hangs on this proposition. The chapters on the Mysteries of Greece and Egypt, on Pythagoras and the Qabbalah, on the Tarot and alchemy, the Rosicrucians and Freemasonry, are not offered as separate histories but as so many windows onto the same hidden doctrine. Each tradition, on this view, is a dialect of one original language; each symbol, read rightly, says the same thing; and the reader who learns the language of symbols can recover the wisdom that the initiates of every age preserved.

The conclusion of the book draws the practical consequence. Modern civilisation, Hall writes, has given itself to commerce and machinery and has lost the philosophic life, and the remedy is a revival of the ancient schools: “The great philosophic institutions of the past must rise again” (Hall 1928, Conclusion, p. 202). What he means by philosophy is not an academic subject but a way of living. “He alone can become a philosopher in the highest sense who lives the philosophic life.” Right action, right feeling and right thinking come before right knowing, and “none can attain to the highest in the science of knowing until first he has attained to the highest in the science of living” (Hall 1928, Conclusion, p. 202).

Where the book came from§

Hall did not invent the idea of a single hidden wisdom. He inherited it, and the preface itself tells us from whom. Among the libraries he thanks are those of the Scottish Rite of Freemasonry in San Francisco and Los Angeles and the Krotona Theosophical Library at Ojai; among the people, the widow of Max Heindel, founder of a Rosicrucian Fellowship in California. These were his teachers, at least through their books.

The most important of them was Theosophy. Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, who founded the Theosophical Society in New York in 1875, had taught in The Secret Doctrine of 1888 that all religions descend from an ancient wisdom preserved by a brotherhood of adepts, and that symbols and myths hold its keys. Behind Blavatsky lay the French occultist Éliphas Lévi and the nineteenth-century revival of magic and Hermeticism that the last essay of the Kabbalah series described; behind them, the Renaissance scholars of Florence, who believed they had recovered an ancient theology passed from Moses and Hermes to Plato. Freemasonry contributed its own version, above all in Albert Pike’s Morals and Dogma of 1871, which read the degrees of the Scottish Rite as a summary of the ancient Mysteries. Hall gathered all these streams into one book and gave them a beauty and order that none of his predecessors had managed.

His sources show the same inheritance. The book quotes a vast range of authors, ancient and modern, but its learning is mostly second-hand: the ancients are often reached through eighteenth- and nineteenth-century compilers, such as Jacob Bryant’s Analysis of Ancient Mythology, Thomas Taylor’s translations of the Neoplatonists, and the works of earlier occult writers, and Hall rarely distinguishes between an ancient source and a modern guess about it. The removal of footnotes, which he explains as a kindness to the reader, also makes it very hard to tell where a claim comes from.

How to read Hall§

The history of religions has studied the ancient Mysteries, the Hermetic writings, the Kabbalah, alchemy and the Rosicrucians intensively since Hall wrote, and on many points its findings are now secure. Most of them tell against his central claim. The Hermetic writings, as a later essay will show, are Greek texts of the first centuries of the Christian era, not the wisdom of the most ancient Egypt. The Kabbalah, as the series that has just ended described, took shape in twelfth- and thirteenth-century Provence and Spain. The Rosicrucian brotherhood seems to have begun as a set of anonymous pamphlets in seventeenth-century Germany, and modern Freemasonry with the founding of a grand lodge in London in 1717. None of these traditions, so far as the evidence shows, received a doctrine handed down intact from the beginning of the world. They borrowed from one another, often by misreading, and each changed what it borrowed.

This does not make Hall’s book worthless. Since the 1990s, historians have studied what is now called Western esotericism as a field of its own: the long tradition, from the Renaissance to the present, of people who believed in hidden correspondences, secret wisdom and inner transformation. In that field The Secret Teachings is a classic, not as an authority on the ancient world but as a document of how the twentieth century imagined it. Read in this way, the book is a map of an important current of modern spirituality, and its author one of the current’s great gatherers.

There are also places where the book’s age shows in ways that need to be named. Hall writes, as many writers of his generation did, of primitive peoples and savages, and treats non-European cultures as raw material for his symbolism. His chapter on Islam reflects the prejudices of the sources he used, and his chapter on the symbolism of the American peoples would not be written in the same way today. This series will leave both chapters aside: the second because this site does not write about Indigenous traditions, and the first because Islam deserves to be read from its own sources, as the essays on Sufism elsewhere on the site have tried to do. The book’s later chapters on the authorship of Shakespeare and on the immortal adepts who guide history belong to the same world of speculation and will be treated with the same care.

The rule this series follows is therefore simple. Hall is a source, not an authority. Each essay will say what Hall says, in his own words where possible, and mark each of his claims as his. Where historians disagree with him, it will say so plainly and without ridicule. And it will turn, wherever it can, to the texts of the traditions themselves, which are more interesting than any summary of them, and which this site’s Library and reader make available.

The quotations in this series§

One further note concerns the text. Only the first edition of 1928 is in the public domain in the United States; the revised editions published later are not, and this series quotes none of them. The 1928 text survives in two independent forms: a careful transcription made for the online library sacred-texts.com in the early 2000s, and a library scan of a reduced facsimile of the first edition, printed in 1945 from photographs of the original pages. Every quotation of Hall in these essays has been checked against both, so that a reader can trust that the words are his. Where the two copies cannot be reconciled, Hall is paraphrased instead.

Hall and unitive knowledge§

Why read Hall on a site devoted to unitive knowledge? Partly because so many readers have come to the contemplative traditions through his book, and deserve to know what it gets right and what it does not. But partly because, at its best, the book is reaching for the same thing that this site studies. Its conclusion describes the human condition as a fragmentation, and its goal as a return to wholeness: “Through the labyrinth of diversity only the illumined mind can, and must, lead the soul into the perfect light of unity.” (Hall 1928, Conclusion, p. 203) The sentence could stand, with small changes, in Plotinus or the Upaniṣads.

The differences matter as much as the resemblance. Hall’s path to unity runs through what he calls the rational intellect, trained and refined until it rises to the divine. Many of the contemplatives this site reads would say instead that the last step is beyond the intellect altogether, a knowing by unknowing, a darkness or a silence in which the mind lets go. And Hall’s method, which finds one doctrine beneath every symbol, is the opposite of the method this site has tried to follow, which looks for real convergences between traditions while refusing to collapse them into one another. To read Hall well is to keep both in view: the longing for unity that drives the book, and the care for difference that the book too often lacks.

His emphasis on the philosophic life, on the other hand, is one that modern scholarship has come to share. The historian Pierre Hadot, writing half a century after Hall and without any interest in secret doctrines, argued that ancient philosophy was above all a way of life: a set of spiritual exercises aimed at the transformation of the person, not merely a body of theories. Hall reached the same conclusion by a very different road. The secret teachings he believed in may never have existed; but the claim that wisdom is something one lives before it is something one knows is among the oldest and best attested teachings of the traditions he loved.

The series ahead§

The essays that follow take the book’s great themes in turn. The second asks about the idea of a secret tradition itself, and the perennial philosophy that descends from it. Then come the Mysteries of Greece; Egypt and Hermes; Pythagoras and the mathematics of the soul; Plato and the philosopher’s ascent; the Qabalah, read beside the Kabbalah series that has just ended; the Tarot; alchemy; the Rosicrucians; Freemasonry and its lost word; and Hall’s remarkable chapter on the Apocalypse of John. The last essay asks what The Secret Teachings gives its readers, and what it withholds.

Hall ends his preface with a few lines of John Bunyan, about a book that grew in the writing until it reached the size the reader sees. His own book grew from a young man’s hunger to know everything that had ever been thought about the hidden meaning of things. That hunger is not the same as wisdom, as Hall himself knew. But it is where many of the seekers this site writes about began.