Reading the Secret Teachings
Who Manly P. Hall was, what he set out to gather in 1928, and how this series reads him.
The Idea of a Secret Tradition
Hall’s claim of one hidden wisdom beneath the religions, set beside the perennial philosophy and the historians’ account.
The Mysteries of Greece
Eleusis and the Orphic and Dionysian rites: what the ancient sources say and what Hall adds.
Egypt and Hermes
Hermes Trismegistus, the Hermetic writings and the Emerald Tablet, and how late-antique Greek texts came to be taken for ancient Egyptian wisdom.
Pythagoras and the Mathematics of the Soul
Number as the key to the cosmos and the harmony of the spheres, and Hall’s picture of a Pythagorean school of initiation.
Plato and the Philosopher’s Ascent
Plato as heir to the mysteries, read through the cave, the Symposium and the Phaedo.
The Qabalah, in Hall and in History
Hall’s account of Jewish mysticism beside our Kabbalah series, and where the Hermetic Qabalah of the occultists parted from the Jewish tradition.
The Tarot
Hall’s treatment of the cards as a book of ancient wisdom, and their actual history from Italian card game to occult tool.
Alchemy
The Great Work as an allegory of the soul, and the difference between the spiritual alchemists and the laboratory chemists.
The Rosicrucians
The manifestos of the early 1600s and the brotherhood that may never have existed, and what Hall and later movements made of them.
Freemasonry and the Lost Word
Hiram Abiff, the building symbolism and the idea of initiation: how the lodge carries the language of the mysteries.
The Apocalypse as Initiation
Revelation read as a drama of the soul, beside the Christian mystical tradition and the historical reading of the text.
What the Secret Teachings Gives and Withholds
What the book gets right, what scholarship corrects, and what a seeker of unitive knowledge can take from it.