The Idea of a Secret Tradition

Every large book has a sentence that holds it together, and The Secret Teachings of All Ages states its own near the end of the Introduction. Hall writes: “The book to which this is the introduction 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)

The sentence makes three claims, and it helps to separate them. The first is that there is one doctrine: not many wisdoms, but a single teaching about the inner life, the same in every age. The second is that it has been transmitted: handed down, intact, by a line of initiates from the beginning of the world to the present. The third is that it has been concealed: hidden in symbols, myths and rites, so that the many see only the surface while the few who hold the keys see what lies beneath. Each claim has its own history, and each can be weighed on its own. This essay, the second in a series of thirteen on Hall’s book, takes them in turn: what Hall says, where the idea came from, what the historical record shows, and what the traditions themselves taught about secrecy.

Two doctrines§

Hall begins his account of the Mysteries with a division of humanity. There are, he says, few mature minds and many immature ones, and the religions of antiquity were divided to meet the needs of both: “To the discerning few were revealed the esoteric, or spiritual, teachings, while the unqualified many received only the literal, or exoteric, interpretations.” For the many there were the temples, the gods and the public sacrifices; for the few there were the Mysteries, schools of philosophers and mystics who met in secret and were admitted by strange and sometimes cruel rites. And this was not, in Hall’s view, a feature of one people only: “Every pagan nation had (and has) not only its state religion, but another into which the philosophic elect alone have gained entrance.” (Hall 1928, The Ancient Mysteries and Secret Societies, first page)

From this division follows his account of the origin of philosophy. Greek thought, he says, did not begin in Greece: it was learned by Thales, Pythagoras and Plato in the temples of Egypt and the East, and “philosophy emerged from the religious Mysteries of antiquity, not being separated from religion until after the decay of the Mysteries.” The Mysteries guarded their knowledge under oaths of secrecy, Hall explains, and so the philosophers who learned from them never named their source. They taught instead in figures, and “Symbolism is the language of the Mysteries” (Hall 1928, Introduction, p. 20). Whoever would recover the secret doctrine must look for it not in books but in the symbols where it was first hidden: in the measurements of the pyramids, the myths of the gods, the emblems of the alchemists and the rituals of the Freemasons. The rest of the book is that search.

Hall’s account of the Mysteries themselves, in the chapters that follow, ranges from the Druids of Britain and the rites of Mithras to the Gnostics, the cult of Serapis and the Norse Mysteries of Odin. Each is read in the same way: beneath the local names and rites lies the same story of a dying and rising god, the same trials of the candidate, the same teaching of the soul’s regeneration. Later essays in this series will look at the Greek and Egyptian Mysteries in detail. Here it is the pattern that matters, for the pattern is the claim.

What the ancient Mysteries were§

There were Mysteries in the ancient world, and they were secret. The best known were those of Demeter and Persephone at Eleusis, near Athens, celebrated for perhaps a thousand years before they were suppressed at the end of the fourth century of our era. There were Mysteries of Dionysus, of the Great Gods of Samothrace, of the Mother of the Gods, of Isis, and of Mithras. They had in common a rite of initiation, open only to those who had been prepared and purified, and a vow not to reveal what was done or shown. That vow was kept remarkably well. Tens of thousands of people were initiated at Eleusis over the centuries, and not one of them, so far as we know, wrote down plainly what happened in the hall of initiation.

What we can say about them comes from hints, from the hostile accounts of later Christian writers, from inscriptions, and from archaeology, and it points in a different direction from Hall’s. The Mysteries seem to have offered not a doctrine but an experience: a sacred drama, things shown and things done, a passage through fear and darkness into light, and the hope of a better lot after death. A fragment ascribed to Aristotle, preserved by a later writer, says that those being initiated were not meant to learn something but to undergo something, and to be put into a certain state of mind. There is little sign that the Mysteries taught a philosophy, or that the different cults shared one teaching, or that their priests formed a single brotherhood across the ancient world. Each was rooted in its own place, its own gods and its own calendar.

The rites of Mithras are a case in point. Hall follows the scholarship of his day in treating them as the ancient religion of Persia carried west by Roman soldiers, and he repeats the claim that the first Christians in Rome worshipped in Mithraic temples. Most historians now think that the Roman Mysteries of Mithras, with their cave-temples and their seven grades of initiation, were largely a creation of the Roman empire itself, of the first and second centuries of our era, which borrowed a Persian name and some Persian ideas. There is no evidence that Christians used their temples.

It is true, on the other hand, that philosophers borrowed the language of the Mysteries, and here Hall is pointing at something real. In the Phaedo, Plato’s Socrates says, in the reader’s translation, that “The founders of the mysteries would appear to have had a real meaning, and were not talking nonsense when they intimated in a figure long ago that he who passes unsanctified and uninitiated into the world below will lie in a slough, but that he who arrives there after initiation and purification will dwell with the gods.” (Plato 1892, 69c) And in the Symposium the wise woman Diotima, teaching Socrates the ascent of love, speaks of initiation in two stages: “These are the lesser mysteries of love, into which even you, Socrates, may enter; to the greater and more hidden ones which are the crown of these, and to which, if you pursue them in a right spirit, they will lead, I know not whether you will be able to attain.” (Plato 1871, 209e–210a)

But look at what Plato does with the language. Socrates goes on, in the Phaedo, to say that the true initiates are the true philosophers: that the purification the Mysteries enacted in ritual, philosophy achieves in the soul. The initiation that matters is not a secret rite but the long discipline of thought and virtue. Plato takes the vocabulary of the Mysteries and makes it a figure for something open to anyone willing to undertake it. That is very nearly the opposite of Hall’s reading, in which philosophy is the public shadow of a secret rite.

Where the idea came from§

If the ancient Mysteries did not hand down a single secret doctrine, where did the idea come from? It has a history, and it can be traced.

Its first form is ancient. The Neoplatonists of late antiquity, who saw themselves as the heirs of Pythagoras and Plato, liked to speak of a golden chain of teachers, each receiving the wisdom from the one before, and they read the old poets, the oracles and the rites as veiled expressions of Platonic philosophy. They were not historians, and did not claim to be. They were philosophers defending a world that Christianity was replacing, and the chain was a way of saying that their wisdom was older and deeper than their rivals’.

Its second form belongs to the Renaissance. In 1463 the Florentine scholar Marsilio Ficino set aside his translation of Plato to translate a newly arrived manuscript of the Greek writings ascribed to Hermes Trismegistus. Ficino believed Hermes to be an Egyptian sage of the time of Moses, and in the preface to his translation he set out a succession of ancient theologians through whom one wisdom had passed: Hermes, then Orpheus, then Aglaophemus, then Pythagoras, then Philolaus, and at last Plato. This was the ancient theology, the prisca theologia, and it allowed the scholars of Florence to believe that pagan philosophy and Christian revelation were two streams from one source. In 1540 Agostino Steuco gave the idea the name that has lasted, the perennial philosophy. Then, in 1614, the scholar Isaac Casaubon showed from their language and their ideas that the Hermetic writings could not be older than the first centuries of the Christian era. The chain lost its first link, though it took a long time for its admirers to notice.

Its third form is the one Hall knew best. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the Freemasons, the Rosicrucian revivalists and the occultists gave the idea a new shape: the secret doctrine was now carried by a hidden brotherhood of adepts, who appeared in history from time to time to guide it. Helena Blavatsky’s Theosophy made the brotherhood into a hierarchy of Masters dwelling in Tibet, and her Secret Doctrine of 1888 is the most direct ancestor of Hall’s book, down to its title. Albert Pike’s Masonic reading of the Mysteries, which Hall quotes with admiration, supplied the rest.

Hall’s last chapter gives this third form its fullest expression. “The initiates of the various Mystery schools of past ages form a veritable golden chain of supermen and superwomen connecting heaven and earth.” (Hall 1928, The Mysteries and Their Emissaries, p. 197) He names the persecuted links in the chain: Pythagoras, Hypatia, the last Grand Master of the Templars, Savonarola, Galileo, Giordano Bruno, Roger and Francis Bacon, Dante, Cagliostro and the Comte de Saint-Germain. The list is moving, and some of its suffering is real. Hypatia, the mathematician and Platonist of Alexandria, was murdered by a Christian mob in the year 415, and Bruno was burned in Rome in 1600. But the chain that joins them is Hall’s, not history’s. He says that Pythagoras was crucified, which no ancient source says; the ancient lives give several different accounts of his death. He says that Hypatia’s writings perished when the Muslims burned the library of Alexandria, a story that first appears centuries after the conquest and that historians do not accept. He calls her enemy, Bishop Cyril, the founder of the doctrine of the Trinity, which had been defined by councils long before Cyril’s time. These are not small slips, and they show how the idea works: once one assumes a single chain of initiates, each figure is read into it, and the evidence is made to fit.

A secret tradition and a perennial philosophy§

It is worth separating Hall’s idea from a neighbour that is often confused with it. The perennial philosophy, in its modern form, does not need a secret. When Aldous Huxley gathered sayings of the mystics in his book of that name in 1945, he did not argue that the Upaniṣads, Meister Eckhart and the Sufis had received a doctrine from a common brotherhood. He argued that men and women in many places, without knowing of one another, had discovered the same things in the depths of contemplation: that there is a divine ground of all being, that it can be known, and that to know it is the end of human life. On that view the agreement of the mystics is evidence of a reality found independently, as many travellers who never met might describe the same mountain.

Hall’s view is different. The agreement he finds is the trace of a transmission: the same symbols, handed down. The two views lead to very different kinds of evidence. The first looks for convergence among contemplatives who did not know one another; the second looks for lines of descent between symbols and rites, and is easily satisfied by resemblances. The historians who study what is now called Western esotericism have noticed that the idea of a secret tradition, carried by a chain of initiates and found in agreement beneath all the religions, is itself one of the defining features of the currents they study. In other words, the secret tradition is real as an idea, with a history of its own from the Neoplatonists to Theosophy; what the evidence does not support is the claim that the idea describes what actually happened.

Neither view, it should be said, is the one this site follows. The perennial philosophy is a hypothesis about the traditions that wise people have accepted and others have rejected, and the essays here try to leave it open, looking for real convergences without collapsing the traditions into one another. But on the narrower question of a secret chain of initiates handed down from the beginning of the world, the historical record is clear enough to say that it did not happen in the way Hall believed.

Secrecy in the traditions themselves§

None of this means that the great traditions had no secrets. Many did, and what they said about them is more interesting than Hall’s account.

The very word upaniṣad has often been explained as a secret teaching, a doctrine given privately by a teacher to a student who has been tested and found ready, and the Upaniṣads themselves warn against giving their teaching to the unprepared. The rabbis of the Mishnah ruled that the account of creation should not be expounded before two students, nor the chariot of Ezekiel before one, unless he was wise and understood of himself, as our Kabbalah series described. In the Gospels Jesus tells his disciples that to them is given the mystery of the kingdom of God, while to those outside everything comes in parables, and Paul writes to the Corinthians that he has fed them with milk, not with meat, because they were not yet able to bear it. The Sufis distinguished between the outward and the inward meaning of the Qurʾān, and many teachers kept their deepest instruction for their closest disciples.

And yet, read closely, these traditions say something rather different from Hall about what the secret is and why it is kept. They do not usually say that a body of information is being withheld from the many by a learned few. They say that certain teachings can harm those who are not ready for them, and that some knowledge cannot be handed over at all, because it is not information but transformation. The rabbis feared for the student who looked into the chariot without the strength to bear it. Paul’s milk and meat are a matter of growth, not rank. The Upaniṣads give their teaching privately because it is meant to be realised, not merely repeated. The secret, in this sense, guards itself: it cannot be stolen, because it cannot be possessed by anyone who has not become able to receive it.

The Kena Upaniṣad puts the point in a riddle. Of the highest reality, which the Upaniṣads call Brahman, the teacher says: “He who thinks he knows It not, knows It. He who thinks he knows It, knows It not.” (Paramananda 1919, Kena II.3) No society of initiates could keep such a secret, and none could give it away. Whoever claims to possess it has, by that very claim, shown that they do not. The knowledge the contemplatives speak of is not a doctrine that can be passed down a chain, however golden. It is a change in the knower, and each must undergo it for themselves.

There is also a strong current in the traditions that resists secrecy altogether. As the Buddha lay dying, according to the early texts, he told his attendant Ānanda that he had taught the Dhamma without making any distinction between an inner and an outer teaching, and that he had kept nothing back in a closed fist, as some teachers did. Kabīr sang of God in the marketplace, in the language of weavers and potters, and mocked the pandits and the mullahs who made God a matter of learning and ritual. Many contemplatives in every tradition have said that the deepest knowledge is the most open of all, nearer than one’s own breath, hidden only by our failure to look.

What Hall saw§

A fair reading of Hall should end with what he saw truly. His history is mostly wrong, and his chain of initiates is a story that the evidence does not bear. But he was right that the religions of antiquity had depths that their public forms did not show, right that many of the greatest minds of the ancient world spoke of initiation and purification as the way to wisdom, and right that symbols can carry meanings that words cannot. And beneath his talk of a learned elite there runs another note, which is closer to the traditions themselves.

Describing what the Mysteries taught at their best, Hall says that they taught a person to be patient in adversity, courageous in danger and true in temptation, and “to view a worthy life as the most acceptable sacrifice to God, and his body as an altar sacred to the Deity.” (Hall 1928, The Ancient Mysteries and Secret Societies, first page) The sentence has no secret in it. It could stand in the Bhagavad Gītā, in the letters of Paul or in the counsels of the desert fathers, and it is the kind of teaching that every tradition gives openly to anyone who will hear.

Perhaps that is the best way to read the idea of a secret tradition. Not as a history of hidden brotherhoods, but as a confused and moving witness to something the traditions themselves affirm: that the deepest wisdom is not written on the surface of the world, that it must be sought, and that it is found only by those who are changed in the seeking. What is hidden is not hidden by anyone. It is hidden by its nature, and revealed by the same.

The next essay turns from the idea to the oldest and most famous of the Mysteries Hall describes: the rites of Eleusis, the Orphic and Dionysian cults, and what the ancient sources really say about them.