Master of the Mysteries. Louis Sahagun

ceremonies or mythic water sprites, he concluded abruptly with the same sign-off: “Well, that’s about all for today, folks.”

      Hall also drew audiences on visits to the Bay Area, where he took out large advertisements in the San Francisco Examiner trumpeting upcoming talks by the “author, lecturer and world traveler” on such subjects as “the occult anatomy of man” and “the tree of the universe.”

      At 24, Hall was living up to the fundamental Masonic codes he summarized in a note he penned in ink (in apparent violation of Max Heindel’s warning) that remains one of the few generous samples of his handwriting beyond his characteristic sign-off: Sincerely Yours, Manly P. Hall. “To learn is to live, to study is to grow, and growth is the measurement of life,” he wrote. “The mind must be taught to think, the heart to feel, and the hands to labor. When these have been educated to their highest points, then is the time to offer them to the service of their fellow man, not before.”

      Between public appearances Hall was working at a furious pace, researching his massive survey of myths, magic and symbols, which he promised would be “the most elaborate and most beautiful volume ever printed on the West Coast.”[1] He dictated portions of the book four hours each day to a stenographer at the southwest Los Angeles home of Mr. and Mrs. Young. After the manuscript was about two-thirds done, he started looking for a publisher.[2]

      Hall took his rough draft to H.S. Crocker Co. in San Francisco, which made him an offer. If Hall could secure the interest of book designer John Henry Nash, who once worked as a printer to the Vatican, the Crocker Co. would publish the effort. Nash was persuaded to sign onto the project. Hall wrote the closing chapters of the book while the first were on the press.[3]

      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. While others in his domain tended to build walls around their narrow fields of expertise, Hall’s book tried to embrace the whole of esotericism.

      Seven years in the making at the staggering production cost of $150,000—much of it raised through advance sales—Hall completed his Encyclopedic Outline of Masonic, Hermetic, Qabbalistic and Rosicrucian Symbolical Philosophy, also known as The Secret Teachings of All Ages and The Big Book, before his 28th birthday.

      Magnificently illustrated with 54 original full-color plates of ancient and medieval emblems and figures by noted illustrator J. Augustus Knapp and two hundred black-and-white illustrations borrowed from rare occult works, the 14 ½-pound book resembled the old volumes on esoteric arts and sciences that he’d been collecting for more than a decade.

      Within its massive 13-inch by 19-inch covers Hall had assembled an impressive collection of esoteric lore drawing from more than six hundred sources. It remains a veritable “open sesame” into the world of occult traditions. The human body in symbolism; the Pythagorean theory of music; ceremonial magic; talismanic jewels; the significance of the Egyptian scarab; the practice of alchemy, and Hebrew mysticism were just some of the subjects explored in Hall’s tightly written essays.

      Hall dedicated Secret Teachings 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.”[4]

      Legendary publishing magnate William Randolph Hearst wrote Hall to tell him that he had discovered the only typographical error in the book: in the index, Madame Helena Blavatsky’s first name was misspelled Helen.

      The first two editions of the book totaling 1,100 copies sold out in advance at a cost of about $100 per copy. Subsequent editions sold for $75 on terms of $15 down and $15 a month. Its instant success catapulted Hall into the national spotlight. “Into this volume has been compressed the quintessence of a colossal learning,” said George Barron, curator of San Francisco’s de Young Museum of fine arts. “It is a living human document pulsating with mental and spiritual vibrations of a profound thinker. It takes all knowledge for its province, and reduces whole libraries to the compass of a single tome.”

      A special edition bound in full vellum and stamped in gold was presented to the Crown Prince of Sweden at a ceremony held in the Mayflower Hotel, Washington, D.C., on October 15, 1928. Among the celebrities who signed the event registry were U.S. General of the Armies John Pershing; the charge d’affair of France; the secretaries of the German and Japanese embassies, and the grand master of masons in the District of Columbia. [5]

      Hall personally presented a copy of the first edition to his old friend, Sidney J. Brownson, who was by then a fragile and ailing man in his eighties. “Toward the end of his life, the book must have seemed large and heavy,” Hall recalled in an essay decades later. “But he toted it about with great joy.”[6] Brownson was 88 when he died in his garden in his sleep with a copy of the Hindu holy book Bhagavad-Gita on his chest and a small New Testament in his hip pocket.

      Eighty years later, with more than a million copies sold, The Secret Teachings of All Ages remains one of the most popular introductions to esoteric traditions.[7]

      Hall’s life would never be the same. Overnight, he went from being just another earnest 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. His presence at a dinner gathering or civic event inspired awe.

      But he didn’t bask in the attention for long. A year later, he published his Lectures in Ancient Philosophy: An Introduction to the Study and Application of Rational Procedures, which features a frontispiece portrait of Hall wearing a cape and striking a Byronic pose that was photographed by noted Hollywood cameraman William Mortensen. In 471 pages drawn from lectures delivered in San Francisco and Los Angeles, it amounted to a literary complement to his Secret Teachings of All Ages. There are the familiar voices from the pagan metaphysical pantheon, but also those of psychologist Sigmund Freud, botanist Luther Burbank, educator Samuel Johnson and the so-called “Plato of Masonry,” Albert Pike.

      The book opens with a discourse on space, form and potential that sounds surprisingly similar to Big Bang creation scenarios offered by modern cosmologists. It’s all reflected in the simplest of symbols: dot, line and circle. Think of a blank piece of paper, he says, as that space which contains all existence in a potential state. The universe issued forth out of that indefinable fullness as a state of universal intelligence, or unity, comparable to a dot, much as an oak tree emerges from an acorn. The conscious activity of that emergence is reflected in the line. “The center and the circumference are thus blended in the connecting line—conscious activity or intelligence,” he writes. [8]

      Continuing that analogy, a human being’s greatest potential is realized by applying intelligence, emotion and purpose in a manner least prone to error or illusion: philosophy. It follows that the highest form of consciousness, enlightenment, is born of a highly disciplined mind.

      The same principles applied to the average modern family, where young persons were being raised with all the comforts, but little discipline, Hall said. The hope of achieving strength in character and success later in life, he argued, was remote “without having first experienced any snappy toeing of the mark at home.” [9]

      In a passage titled “Symbolism, the Universal Language” he writes: “Confront the untrained mind with some symbol or fable, and it will construct a confused and meaningless explanation, usually