ESOTERIC LIBRARY
A Library for the Seekers of Hidden Truth
Book
Manly P. Hall was in his early twenties when Macoy Publishing brought out The Lost Keys of Masonry in 1923, and the book already carries the voice that made his name: ceremonial, certain, and full of old materials read as one continuous teaching. It is a mystical interpretation of the craft degrees, addressed to the mason who suspects the lodge is pointing at something and wants the pointer followed.
Hall's reading runs through the symbol system step by step. The candidate arrives as the rough ashlar; the quarries are the field of human opportunity, the cosmic substances from which a man must gather the stones of his own temple; and the Temple of Solomon itself is the Solar Man, built, as the old story has it, with the help of Chiram, the universal agent. Hall cites the Talmud's account of Schamir and gives the Emerald Tablet of Hermes its own place in the text, treating the craft's legends as a concealed curriculum of regeneration rather than as doubtful history. The lodge, finally, is the universe, and the brotherhood is everything that exists in any of nature's planes.
The prose is the book's other attraction: invocatory, musical, written to be read aloud in the same room as the ritual it interprets. Readers coming from Hall's later encyclopedia will find here, in embryo, the synthesis he spent a lifetime enlarging, and masons will find an early classic of the mystical school of masonic interpretation, reprinted and argued over ever since. It is a young man's book in the best sense: nothing hedged, everything meant.
Reading guide
Manly P. Hall was born on 18 March 1901 in Peterborough, Ontario, and The Lost Keys of Freemasonry, or The Secret of Hiram Abiff appeared while he was still a very young man: Macoy Publishing and Masonic Supply Co. of New York brought it out in 1923, when he was twenty-two. A century later it has never left print, which tells you how completely it answered something. It was written five years before the encyclopedic work that made his name, and it already contains the whole intuition he spent a lifetime developing — that behind the rituals of the lodges stands a single, patient instruction about the making of a soul.
The book is short and it is built like its subject. A prologue set "in the fields of chaos" gives way to chapters on the Candidate, the Entered Apprentice, the Fellow Craft and the Master Mason: the three craft degrees read as one continuous transformation, and Hiram Abiff — the builder murdered and sought in the degree drama — read as the archetype of the buried divine self each candidate comes to raise in himself. The lost Word of the title is not a password. Hall's Masonic ritual, he says, is "not a ceremony, but a life to be lived." An addendum on the Emerald Tablet of Hermes ties the whole reading back to the older hermetic current.
Read it slowly, and read it as interpretation: this is what one modern mystic found in the Craft, not an account of what the degrees officially contain. It pairs naturally with C. W. Leadbeater's The Hidden Life in Freemasonry on this same open shelf — two clairvoyant temperaments, a generation apart, describing the same inner architecture. And when the short book leaves you wanting the long one, its author's encyclopedic Secret Teachings of All Ages is waiting a shelf over.
Essays from the reading room that share this book's ground.
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