After his book The Secret Teachings of All Ages was published,
“Hall’s life would never be the same,” noted a biographer. “Overnight,
he went from being just another ernest young preacher in the City of
Angels to becoming an icon of the increasingly influential metaphysical
movement sweeping the country in the 1920s. His book challenged
assumptions about society’s spiritual roots and made people look at them
in new ways.
Hall dedicated The Secret Teachings of All Ages 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.
The result was a gorgeous, dreamlike book of mysterious symbols,
concise essays and colorful renderings of mythical beasts rising out of
the sea, and angelic beings with lions’ heads presiding over somber
initiation rites in torch-lit temples of ancestral civilizations that
had mastered latent powers beyond the reach of modern man
Manly Palmer Hall (March 18, 1901 – August 29, 1990) was a
Canadian-born author and mystic. He is perhaps most famous for his work
The Secret Teachings of All Ages: An Encyclopedic Outline of Masonic,
Hermetic, Qabbalistic and Rosicrucian Symbolical Philosophy, which is
widely regarded as his magnum opus, and which he published at the age of
25 (or 27, 1928)
He has been widely recognized as a leading scholar in the fields of religion, mythology, mysticism, and the occult.
Carl Jung, when writing Psychology and Alchemy, borrowed material from Hall’s private collection.
In 1934, Hall founded the Philosophical Research Society (PRS) in Los
Angeles, California, dedicating it to an idealistic approach to the
solution of human problems. The PRS claims to be non-sectarian and
entirely free from educational, political, or ecclesiastical control,
and the Society’s programs stress the need for the integration of
philosophy, religion, and science into one system of instruction. The
PRS Library, a public facility devoted to source materials in obscure
fields, has many rare and scarce items now impossible to obtain
elsewhere.
In 1973 (47 years after writing The Secret Teachings of All Ages),
Hall was recognized as a 33º Mason (the highest honor conferred by the
Supreme Council of the Scottish Rite), at a ceremony held at PRS on
December 8th, despite never being initiated into the physical craft.
In his over 70-year career, Hall delivered approximately 8,000
lectures in the United States and abroad, authored over 150 books and
essays, and wrote countless magazine articles.
Manly Hall - Opening the Doors to the Invisible
Manly P. Hall lecture from a series of lectures about "Occult Anatomy".