The Secret Teachings of All Ages

What It Is

Published privately in 1928 by subscription, under a title that tells you the ambition: An Encyclopedic Outline of Masonic, Hermetic, Qabbalistic and Rosicrucian Symbolical Philosophy. Manly Palmer Hall was twenty-seven, self-taught, and lecturing in Los Angeles. The result was a folio nearly nineteen inches tall, with fifty-four colour plates commissioned from J. Augustus Knapp.

Inside are chapters on the ancient Mysteries, Pythagorean number, the Qabbalah, alchemy, Freemasonry, the tarot, Rosicrucianism, the cryptograms some believed were hidden in the Shakespeare folios, and the symbolism of flowers, stones and colours. There is no argument running through it. It is a compendium, and it means to hold everything Western esotericism believed itself to contain. It has never been out of print.

Why It Matters

It is the most influential work of twentieth-century American esotericism, and for a great many people it has been the door into the subject.

It is also an artefact of a particular American moment: the 1920s, when Masonry was at its height, self-education was a serious ambition, and a young man with a library card and no credentials could set out to summarise the wisdom of the world and find several thousand people willing to pay for it in advance.

Its lasting practical value has little to do with belief. It is the best single index of the symbolic vocabulary of Western art and literature there is. If you want to know what an alchemical engraving thought it was doing, Hall will tell you what the tradition said, at length, with the plate in front of you.

What he will not tell you is what is true. This is not scholarship. Hall wrote before the academic study of Western esotericism existed; he takes his sources at their own valuation, repeats claims of Egyptian and Atlantean origin that no evidence supports, and rarely marks the line between what a tradition asserted about itself and what happened. The great chain he traces, an unbroken wisdom handed from Egypt to Greece to the Masons, is the tradition's self-portrait rather than its history. His instinct is always synthesis: he finds every system saying the same thing, which is beautiful, and which flattens the real differences between them.

Hall is an unreliable historian and an excellent guide to what the tradition believed about itself, and the second job is the one nobody else has done this well.

Before You Read

Long, ornate and dense. The prose is 1920s high style and it does not hurry. Reduced-format editions run past 700 pages.

Do not read it front to back. It is an encyclopedia, and treating it as a narrative is the surest way to abandon it in week two. Open it at whatever you already half know, and follow what catches you.

The illustrations are not ornament. They are half of what the book is, and an edition that cuts them is cutting the argument.

Which Edition to Read

• The Tarcher and Penguin Reader's Edition, 2003 — recommended. The unabridged text, in type you can actually read, in a single volume you can hold. For a first encounter this is the sensible purchase by a wide margin. The cost: it reproduces only a portion of the illustrations, and the illustrations are what the book is famous for. You are trading the plates for legibility. View on Amazon →
• The Philosophical Research Society reduced-size edition. From the institution Hall founded, and the most faithful reading copy: the full illustration programme, the original layout, the book as a book rather than as a paperback of a book. The cost: more expensive, heavier, harder to find.
• The TASCHEN facsimile. Reproduced at the original folio size from the 1928 edition, in cooperation with Hall's archives. This is the object as he intended it, and it is magnificent. The cost: enormous, expensive, and nobody has ever read it in an armchair.

Take the Tarcher to read, the PRS edition if the plates are why you came, the TASCHEN if you want the thing itself. Worth knowing before you spend anything: the 1928 copyright was never renewed, so the complete text is in the public domain and good scans are free online.

Getting the Most From This Book

Read it against a serious modern history of the same material. Antoine Faivre and Wouter Hanegraaff built an academic field out of studying what Hall was doing, and they show you the difference between what a tradition claimed and what can be shown.

Spend real time on the plates. They are not skimmable, and they are the best of it.

There are two ways to waste this book, and they are mirror images. One is to take it as history. The other is to throw it away because it is not. Both cost you the same thing: the most complete account ever assembled of what the Western esoteric tradition thought it knew.