Manly P. Hall

The teaching

Taught from his own books, above all The Secret Teachings of All Ages (1928) and The Lost Keys of Freemasonry (1923).

One philosophy under many veils

Hall teaches that the great schools of the ancient world, the mysteries of Egypt, Greece, Persia and India, the Pythagoreans and the Platonists, and after them the Qabalists, the alchemists and the Rosicrucians, taught at heart one philosophy, and that the myths and symbols of every people are its veils. The student's task is to read through the symbol to the principle beneath it. Philosophy, in his use, keeps its old meaning: not a profession or a school subject, but a way of life whose end is the regeneration of the one who lives it.

The little world

The ground of that philosophy is the old doctrine of the microcosm. A human being is the universe in small: the body answers to the earth, the soul to the moving powers of the heavens, the spirit to the central fire, the sun behind the sun. Everything above has its likeness below, and so the student studies the universe to know the self and the self to know the universe. The twelve signs laid on the members of the body, which the astrotheology art's branch The zodiac on the body teaches, are one of the oldest pictures of it.

How a symbol teaches

A symbol, in his teaching, conceals and reveals at once. It hides its meaning from the careless, who see only the figure, and offers it to the earnest, who can read it on several levels: the sun is a god in the myth, the heart in the body, the spirit in the soul and the one life in the universe. The ancients taught in symbols, he holds, because a symbol grows with its reader and no definition can exhaust it. The great plates of his folio are lessons of this kind, each gathering the forms one idea has taken among many peoples.

Initiation as a second birth

In the ancient mysteries, as he tells them, the candidate was led through a death in ritual: laid in darkness or in a tomb, tried by earth, water, air and fire, and brought back into the light as one born again. The rite pictured what philosophy is meant to do in a life, the death of the lower self and the birth of the higher. No ceremony, he holds, can give that change to anyone; the rite only shows the road, and the change is made by the one who walks it.

The lost keys of the lodge

His reading of Freemasonry makes the lodge a school of the soul. The temple the Mason builds is his own body and character, raised as Solomon's was raised, without the sound of iron tools, by the slow and silent shaping of a life. The degrees are stages of an inner work, and a Mason is one who lives them, not one who has merely passed through them; the keys are called lost because the forms are kept and the life within them forgotten.

The legend of the master builder is the centre of it. Hiram Abiff is the higher nature in the human being, the spirit that builds, and his three murderers are the powers that slay it: in one of Hall's readings ignorance, superstition and fear, in another the three parts of the unawakened personality. The lost word is the divine life itself, which each must find by raising the murdered builder within. In one much quoted passage he calls the life force the Mason must learn to rule by the old name of Lucifer, the light-bearer; he means the energy of life, which can build or destroy, and nothing of the devil.

The secret destiny of America

His book on America tells that a hidden order of philosophers, working through the ages, chose the new world as the place for a democratic commonwealth of the wise, that Francis Bacon's New Atlantis was its plan, and that the unfinished pyramid crowned with an eye on the Great Seal is the emblem of that unfinished work. That is his telling. The seal was drawn up by committees of Congress from emblems in the art of their day, and no hidden order appears in the records of the founding.

The disciplines of the philosopher

His lessons give the student daily disciplines. Concentration holds the mind on one simple thing until it stays there. Meditation turns a principle over until it opens. Each night before sleep the student reviews the day backwards, from the last event to the first, as the Pythagoreans did, weighing each act without excuse and without despair. Beside these stand the old rules of the schools: study, silence about one's own progress, moderation in all things and service, for the philosopher's knowledge is proved by the quality of his life.