ESOTERIC LIBRARY
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The Secret Teachings of All Ages is the book that gave the esoteric tradition its one-volume reference shelf. Manly P. Hall compiled it while still in his twenties, and it first appeared in 1928: an encyclopedic survey of the mystery schools, secret societies and symbolic doctrines of the Western world, from the ancient rites and the Pythagorean numbers to the Qabalah, alchemy, the Tarot and the symbolism of the masonic lodge. Page after page carries its apparatus of plates and figures, more than fifteen hundred of them across some seven hundred pages, so the book reads as a guided tour conducted by a curator who has actually walked the collections.
Hall's method is synthetic. He presents each system in its own terms, names its classical sources, and steps back before arguing with any of it, which is why the book has served so many kinds of reader at once. Chapters on the Hermetic sciences sit beside studies of the Fraternity of the Rose Cross; the index can send a reader from the Garden of Eden to Atlantis, or from Pythagoras to the form of creation, and the routes hold. It remains the classic single-volume gateway to the Western esoteric tradition, the book later writers in the field quietly assume their readers have opened.
New readers should expect breadth rather than instruction: this is a map of the territory, drawn before the modern scholarly era, and valued as much for its engravings and its patient summarizing as for any single claim. Students of symbolism and of the history of ideas will find the plates alone worth the visit; seekers will find the syllabus of nearly everything that came after.
Reading guide
The full title announces the scale of the thing: An Encyclopedic Outline of Masonic, Hermetic, Qabbalistic and Rosicrucian Symbolical Philosophy. Manly P. Hall was twenty-seven when it appeared in 1928, printed in San Francisco for its subscribers by the H. S. Crocker Company, with the painter J. Augustus Knapp supplying the full-colour plates and the black-and-white drawings that give the book its unmistakable look. Hall had spent the preceding years lecturing, collecting and synthesizing; the Outline was the work those years were for, and nothing he wrote afterwards quite escaped its shadow.
Its scope is the whole hidden-truth literature of the West, read as one continuous symbolic philosophy. The ancient mystery rites of Egypt and Greece; the Hermetic corpus and the Emerald Tablet; the Qabalah and its Tree; alchemy, in both its laboratory and its spiritual senses; the Rosicrucian manifestos and the symbols of the Masonic degrees; the tarot; the emblems of the Renaissance; even the cryptography and the Bacon–Shakespeare controversies of the Elizabethan age. Hall's premise, stated at the outset, is that a secret doctrine concerning the inner mysteries of life is consistently concealed within the emblematic figures, allegories and rituals of the ancients, and the book is his map of where it hides.
A note on the text you are reading: our copy is the 2003 Jeremy P. Tarcher/Penguin Reader's Edition — the standard trade paperback prepared for modern readers. It is not the rare 1928 subscribers' printing, and page references you may meet elsewhere will not always line up with ours.
Hall spent the 1920s assembling exactly this material; the alchemical manuscripts he collected, some of them now digitized for the archive, are on this shelf as Alchemical Manuscripts, Box 40. Read the Outline the way its author built it: a section at a time, with a notebook, letting the symbols answer each other across the chapters.
Essays from the reading room that share this book's ground.
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