The Canon / Pillars / Ceremonial Magic & Occult
Pillars · 1928
The Secret Teachings of All Ages
Occult/Hermetic (Perennialism)The Secret Teachings of All Ages is Manly P. Hall's oversized, lavishly illustrated compendium of the Western mystery traditions, published when its author was twenty-seven. Its governing thesis is perennialist: that Hermeticism, alchemy, Kabbalah, Rosicrucianism, Freemasonry, Neoplatonism, and mystery religion are facets of one continuous tradition of hidden wisdom transmitted through initiates.
Hall's method is synthetic rather than systematic in the magical sense. He gathers disparate symbolic inheritances and harmonizes them into a single accessible reference, centering analogical correspondence and symbol as the proper language of concealed knowledge and reinforcing the "as above, so below" structure of esoteric thought.
The volume became a landmark of twentieth-century esoterica and the canonical map of Western occult traditions for general readers. Hall later founded the Philosophical Research Society as a permanent home for the library and teaching that sustained such study across the century.
In its words
Philosophy is the science of estimating values. The superiority of any state or substance over another is determined by philosophy. By assigning a position of primary importance to what remains when all that is secondary has been removed, philosophy thus becomes the true index of priority or emphasis in the realm of speculative thought.
Man's status in the natural world is determined, therefore, by the quality of his thinking. He whose mind is enslaved to his bestial instincts is philosophically not superior to the brute; he whose rational faculties ponder human affairs is a man; and he whose intellect is elevated to the consideration of divine realities is already a demigod, for his being partakes of the luminosity with which his reason has brought him into proximity.
Simple ignorance is an ever-active agent, urging the soul onward to the acquisition of knowledge. From this virginal state of unawareness grows the desire to become aware with its resultant improvement in the mental condition.
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Manly P. HallPerennial hidden wisdom
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