E-Book Overview
The Secret Teachings of All Ages is perhaps the most comprehensive and complete esoteric encyclopedia ever written. The sheer scope and ambition of this book are stunning. In this book Manly P. Hall has successfully distilled the essence of more arcane subjects than one would think possible. He covers Rosicrucianism and other secret societies, alchemy, cryptology, Kabbalah, Tarot, pyramids, the Zodiac, Pythagorean philosophy, Masonry, gemology, Nicholas Flammel, the identity of William Shakespeare, The Life and Teachings of Thoth Hermes Trismegistus, The Qabbalah, The Hiramic Legend, The Tree of the Sephiroth, Mystic Christianity, and there are more than 200 illustrations included here. This is essential reading for anyone wishing to explore esoteric knowledge.
E-Book Content
THE SECRET TEACHINGS OF ALL AGES by Manly P. Hall [1928, copyright not renewed] Contents Start Reading For once, a book which really lives up to its title. Hall self-published this massive tome in 1928, consisting of about 200 legal-sized pages in 8 point type; it is literally his magnum opus. Each of the nearly 50 chapters is so dense with information that it is the equivalent of an entire short book. If you read this book in its entirety you will be in a good position to dive into subjects such as the Qabbala, Alchemy, Tarot, Ceremonial Magic, Neo-Platonic Philosophy, Mystery Religions, and the theory of Rosicrucianism and Freemasonry. Although there are some questionable and controversial parts of the book, such as the outdated material on Islam, the portion on the Bacon-Shakespeare hypothesis, and Hall's conspiracy theory of history as driven by an elite cabal of roving immortals, they are far out-weighed by the comprehensive information here on other subjects. For many years this book was only available in a large format edition which was hard to obtain and very expensive. However, an affordable paperback version has finally been released (see sidebar). PRODUCTION NOTES: I worked on this huge project episodically from 2001 to June 2004. This because of the poor OCR quality, which was due to the miniscule type and large blocks of italics; this necessitated retyping many parts of the text manually. To give an idea of how massive this project was, the proof file for this is 2 megabytes, about 8 times the size of a normal 200 page book. The raw graphics files are 63 megabytes, which I've processed down to about 11 megabytes. The thumbnails alone are 1 megabyte, which is about my graphics budget for a regular book. While the book itself is not covered by copyright in the US due to lack of formal renewal, many of the large color illustrations that front each chapter in the paper edition did have registrations and renewals entered for them. So these are omitted from this etext. However, all of the black and white illustrations are included here. Note that many of the graphics had to be quite large because of the amount of detail, so I have thumbnailed every image in the book. In the book all of the illustration captions are in italics; I have reversed this in the etext for legibility. --John Bruno Hare, June 11, 2004. Title Page Preface Table of Contents Introduction The Ancient Mysteries and Secret Societies Which Have Influenced Modern Masonic Symbolism The Ancient Mysteries and Secret Societies, Part Two The Ancient Mysteries and Secret Societies, Part Three Atlantis and the Gods of Antiquity The Life and Teachings of Thoth Hermes Trismegistus The Initiation of the Pyramid Isis, the Virgin of the World The Sun, A Universal Deity The Zodiac and Its Signs The Bembine Table of Isis Wonders of Antiquity The Life and Philosophy of Pythagoras Pythagorean Mathematics The Human Body in Symbolism The Hiramic Legend The Pythagorean Theory of Music and Color Fishes, Insects, Animals, Reptiles and Birds (Part One) Fishes, Ins