The Secret Teachings of All Ages: A Guide to Manly P. Hall’s Classic

The Secret Teachings of All Ages is the book I would hand to anyone who suspects that scripture, myth and the old philosophies were saying far more than they were ever taught. Manly P. Hall published it in 1928, a vast illustrated folio that gathers the symbols of Egypt, Greece, Israel, the alchemists, the Rosicrucians and the Freemasons into a single sweep, and asks one question of all of them: what were these people really trying to say?

I was raised as a Jehovah’s Witness and later schooled in the Baptist church, and I was taught to read the Bible as a record of events and nothing more. At eighteen I walked away from the church, and I stayed away for about twenty-five years. When the biggest crisis of my life brought me back to scripture, it was Neville Goddard who showed me that God is not a distant figure but my own awareness, the I AM. Hall’s great book is one of the places where that discovery finds its long ancestry.

Here is the conviction this whole page rests on. The sacred stories of the world were never meant to be filed as history. The sages who shaped them chose myth, number and image deliberately, because a symbol can carry a truth safely through centuries that would have burned a plain statement. Our task is to unwrap what they folded inside. And what we find there, again and again, is a description of ourselves, and the first stirring of a power that has been lying asleep in us.

If you still hold the Bible as sacred but feel worn out by the way it was taught to you, or by the hypocrisy you have seen in religious institutions, this is written for you. It is not an attack on anyone’s faith. I honour every reader who takes these books literally, yet the two readings are not equals: the literal reading is the first rung of the ladder, and it gives way to the inner reading, as the elder serves the younger.

What is The Secret Teachings of All Ages?

The full title runs to a small paragraph, but the book is known everywhere by its first words. It is an encyclopaedia of what Hall called symbolical philosophy: the idea that the religions, mysteries and philosophies of the ancient world shared a hidden doctrine, expressed not in argument but in emblem, ritual and story. Across roughly fifty chapters he moves from the Mysteries of Egypt and Greece to Hermes, Pythagoras, the Qabbalah, alchemy, the Rose Cross, Freemasonry and the inner meaning of Christian symbols.

Hall was candid about what the book was for. In his Preface he writes:

“Its true purpose is to introduce the mind of the reader to a hypothesis of living wholly beyond the pale of materialistic theology, philosophy, or science.”

That sentence is worth reading twice. Hall was not offering a new creed or a history textbook. He was offering a way of living, one that looks past the surface of things toward the principle beneath them. And he knew that what he had to show would not arrive looking grand. In the same Preface he observes that “the ageless truths of life, like many of the earth’s greatest thinkers, have usually been clothed in shabby garments.” The treasure, in other words, is usually hidden in the most ordinary wrapping, which is exactly how the parables of scripture work.

Who was Manly P. Hall?

Manly Palmer Hall was born on 18 March 1901 in Peterborough, Ontario, Canada, and died on 29 August 1990. He was a writer, lecturer and mystic who spent most of his long working life in Los Angeles. He was only 27 when The Secret Teachings of All Ages appeared in 1928, and it remains by some distance his best known work (Wikipedia).

In 1934 Hall founded the Philosophical Research Society in Los Angeles, an institution devoted to the study of philosophy, comparative religion and esoteric thought, and he ran it until his death (Discover Los Angeles). The Society still stands on Los Feliz Boulevard.

It helps to be clear about what kind of writer Hall was. He was not an academic historian, and he did not pretend to be one. He was a gatherer and an interpreter, drawing on older writers, travellers’ reports and the commentators of earlier centuries, then reading all of it through his own conviction that every tradition guards the same secret. His conclusions are best treated as testimony from a gifted student of symbol, not as settled scholarship. Read that way, the book is a feast.

How the book was made

The first edition was a large folio, sold by subscription before it was printed. Hall records in his Preface that “The subscription list for the first edition of 550 copies was entirely closed a year before the manuscript was placed in the printer’s hands.” For a young author with an unfashionable subject, that is a remarkable vote of confidence from his readers.

The book’s colour plates were painted by the illustrator J. Augustus Knapp, whom Hall thanks by name in the Preface, alongside a great many black and white drawings and reproductions of older engravings. The images are not decoration. Hall’s whole argument is that the ancients taught in pictures, so the pictures carry much of the teaching. If you ever have the chance to turn the pages of an illustrated edition, take it: the book was designed to be looked at as much as read.

A chapter guide to The Secret Teachings of All Ages

The chapters do not form one tightly argued thesis, and you do not have to read them in order. They fall naturally into six families. I have grouped them below using Hall’s own chapter titles, and linked a few of the chapters most useful for readers of scripture. I have left a handful of chapters out of this map, as they matter less for the inner reading of the Bible.

1. The Mysteries and the ancient world

The Introduction sets out Hall’s whole thesis, and then come The Ancient Mysteries and Secret Societies Which Have Influenced Modern Masonic Symbolism and its Parts Two and Three, Atlantis and the Gods of Antiquity, The Initiation of the Pyramid, Isis, the Virgin of the World, Wonders of Antiquity and, near the end of the book, The Mysteries and Their Emissaries. This is the foundation: the schools of initiation that, in Hall’s view, taught the soul’s journey through ritual drama.

2. Hermes, the heavens and sacred number

The Life and Teachings of Thoth Hermes Trismegistus, The Sun, A Universal Deity, The Zodiac and Its Signs, The Bembine Table of Isis, The Life and Philosophy of Pythagoras, Pythagorean Mathematics and The Pythagorean Theory of Music and Color. Here the book turns to the idea that number, harmony and the movements of the heavens are a language for spiritual truth. If the Hermetic thread interests you, our guide to the seven Hermetic principles picks it up.

Hall’s portrait of Pythagoras is of a teacher who would not separate learning from inner discipline. In The Life and Philosophy of Pythagoras he writes:

“The study of geometry, music, and astronomy was considered essential to a rational understanding of God, man, or Nature, and no one could accompany Pythagoras as a disciple who was not thoroughly familiar with these sciences.”

Notice the order of that sentence: God, man, Nature. For the Pythagoreans, the measuring of a triangle was a step on the road to knowing the One from which all things come.

3. The symbolism of nature and the body

The Human Body in Symbolism, Fishes, Insects, Animals, Reptiles and Birds (in two parts), Flowers, Plants, Fruits, and Trees, Stones, Metals and Gems and The Elements and Their Inhabitants. These chapters read the whole natural world as a book of emblems. The serpent, the dove, the vine, the rock: the same images that fill the Bible are traced across many traditions.

4. The Qabbalah and the Hebrew mysteries

The Qabbalah, the Secret Doctrine of Israel, Fundamentals of Qabbalistic Cosmogony, The Tree of the Sephiroth, Qabbalistic Keys to the Creation of Man, The Tabernacle in the Wilderness and An Analysis of Tarot Cards. For anyone who reads scripture, this is the heart of the book, and I come back to it in the next section.

5. The Rose Cross and the alchemists

The Fraternity of the Rose Cross, Rosicrucian Doctrines and Tenets, Fifteen Rosicrucian and Qabbalistic Diagrams, Alchemy and Its Exponents, The Theory and Practice of Alchemy (in two parts), The Chemical Marriage, Bacon, Shakspere, and the Rosicrucians and The Cryptogram as a factor in Symbolic Philosophy. Here the transformation of lead into gold becomes a picture of the transformation of a human being.

6. The builders, the cross and the Apocalypse

The Hiramic Legend, Freemasonic Symbolism, Mystic Christianity, The Cross and the Crucifixion, The Mystery of the Apocalypse, The Faith of Islam and the Conclusion. In these closing chapters Hall turns his method on the symbols of the Christian West, and ends with a meditation on what philosophy is finally for.

What The Secret Teachings of All Ages reveals about reading the Bible

For me, this is where the book earns its place on the shelf. Hall’s starting point, set out in his Introduction, is that the deepest teaching was never written out plainly. He speaks of a secret doctrine, guarded since the earliest civilisations, that was hidden inside the rituals, symbols and allegories of the world’s religions and philosophies. And he explains why the sages chose to hide it in that way:

“Rejecting man-conceived dialects as inadequate and unworthy to perpetuate divine ideas, the Mysteries thus chose symbolism as a far more ingenious and ideal method of preserving their transcendental knowledge.”

Think about what that means for the way I was taught scripture. If the writers deliberately chose symbol over plain statement, then reading their stories as bare history is not a careful reading at all. It is reading the envelope and throwing away the letter.

Hall says this outright in The Tabernacle in the Wilderness, where he laments that while the greatest minds of two faiths had realised “the Bible is a book of allegories, few seem to have taken the trouble to investigate its symbols and parables.” And in The Qabbalah, the Secret Doctrine of Israel he goes further. As scripture is studied more closely, he writes, it becomes ever more apparent that the sacred books were not historical documents, and that the kings, sages, prophets and saviours long revered as once-existing personalities “are in reality only personified attributes of man himself.”

Personified attributes of man himself. Keep that phrase close, because we will meet its twin in Neville in a moment. It means that Jacob and Esau, Joseph and his brothers, Jonah and the great fish are not strangers in a distant land. They are qualities, moods and faculties within you, dressed as characters so that you can watch them act.

Hall applies the same key to alchemy. In The Theory and Practice of Alchemy he writes that “Those who rebelled against the religious limitations of their day concealed their philosophic teachings under the allegory of gold-making.” The furnace, the lead and the gold were a disguise. The real work was the refining of a human being.

Many TrueCosmic articles draw directly on Hall in exactly this spirit. Our study of biblical numbers meaning leans on his chapter on Pythagorean mathematics; alchemy in the Bible follows his reading of the Great Work; what is the Ark of the Covenant draws on his chapters on the Tabernacle and the Hiramic legend. Each one takes a single thread of Hall’s great tapestry and follows it into a single Bible story.

Hall and Neville Goddard

Let me be careful here, because this is where many writers overreach. Manly P. Hall and Neville Goddard were separate teachers with separate paths. I know of no reliable evidence that they studied together or that either shaped the other’s teaching, and I will not claim it. What I can say is that, coming from very different directions, they arrived at the same view of scripture: that it is a drama played out within the human being.

Hall reached that view as a scholar of symbols, comparing the Mysteries of many lands. Neville reached it as a teacher of one practice. And his words sit beside Hall’s like a key beside a lock:

“When you read scripture in the future, don’t think of it as records of myth or secular history, but glorious revelations of God as eternal states of consciousness, personified.” (Neville, in his lecture “A State Called Moses”)

Hall says the figures of scripture are “personified attributes of man himself”. Neville says they are “eternal states of consciousness, personified.” Two men, two vocabularies, one discovery. Neville put the cost of missing it just as plainly:

“The Bible was written by intelligent men who used solar and phallic myths to reveal psychological truths. But we have mistaken their allegory for history and, therefore, have failed to see their true message.” (Neville, in his lecture “Questions and Answers 1948 Lessons”)

Where they differ is just as instructive. Hall gives you the map of the whole territory: Egypt, Greece, the Qabbalah, the alchemists. Neville hands you one tool and tells you to use it tonight. He taught that “there isn’t a thing here that wasn’t first imagined; so you can see that imagining creates reality.” (Neville, in his lecture “Believe It In”). The secret doctrine Hall spent a lifetime cataloguing becomes, in Neville’s hands, a practice you can carry into your own bedroom.

I know the danger of the map without the tool. Numerology was one of the dead-end alleyways I wandered down in my own search, long before I settled on the one principle I now live by, the I AM. Hall himself saw that trap. In Pythagorean Mathematics he warns:

“The original Pythagorean system of numerical philosophy contains nothing to justify the practice now in vogue of changing the given name or surname in the hope of improving the temperament or financial condition by altering the name vibrations.”

The symbols were never meant to be levers pulled from outside. They point inward, to the one who is reading them. That is why, at TrueCosmic, Neville remains the lens and Hall the ancient testimony that stands behind him. If you are new to the principle itself, begin with our guide to the Law of Assumption.

How to read it today

The Secret Teachings of All Ages is in the public domain, and you can read the whole text free of charge, chapter by chapter, on sacred-texts.com. The online text will not give you the scale of the original folio or the full glory of Knapp’s colour plates, but every word is there.

An honest note before you begin. This is a book written in the 1920s, and some of its material reflects the assumptions of its time. A few passages describe peoples and cultures in ways no careful writer would use today, and some chapters treat legends, travellers’ tales and older authorities with more confidence than modern scholarship would allow. None of that cancels the book’s value. It simply means reading Hall as you would read any great old teacher: gratefully, attentively, and with your own judgement switched on.

If you are starting out, here is the route I would suggest:

1. Read the Preface and Introduction first. They give you Hall’s purpose and his key, and everything else hangs from them.
2. Go next to the Qabbalah and the Tabernacle chapters. If you love the Bible, this is where the book will speak to you most directly.
3. Then read Pythagoras and alchemy. They show the same inner teaching in the language of number and of the furnace.
4. Finish with the Conclusion. Hall’s closing chapter gathers the whole book into a single plea for the philosophic life.

Practice, not a trick

There is one thing Hall understood about the ancient schools that is easy to miss: none of them taught a shortcut. Initiation took years. The same is true of the Law. Assumption is a practice, not a trick.

Think of a bookbinder. A great book is not made in one inspired moment. The binder folds each sheet into a signature, pierces the fold, and sews it to the spine; then takes up the next signature and sews again, the thread pulled firm each time. Some days the stitches wander and have to be unpicked. No one watching a single afternoon’s work would see a book. But signature by signature, sewn faithfully in sequence, the volume takes shape until it holds together for centuries. Your inner life is bound the same way: one faithful night after another.

And there is one mistake I would warn you against above all others: micromanaging how the result must arrive. People decide what they want and then, in the same breath, insist on exactly the route it has to take. That narrows the very intelligence that is already working on their behalf. Decide the end. Leave the road open.

How to apply it

1. Choose one story. Take a single Bible story you know well and read it slowly, asking of every character: what quality in me is this?
2. Find the symbol that is yours. As Hall would say, look past the shabby garment. Name the state you are in right now, and the state you want to occupy instead.
3. Settle the end, not the means. Decide what would be true if your wish were already fulfilled, and let go of how it must happen.
4. Enter the scene each night. In the drowsy state just before sleep, enter one short scene that implies your wish is already fulfilled. Neville’s instruction was simple: “apply the law of assumption. Assume the feeling of the wish fulfilled and let God’s law work for you.” (Neville, in his lecture “Believe In Him”). Feel it as done, and fall asleep there.

The answer you already possess

Hall’s closing chapter contains a sentence I find almost unbearably tender. He describes the human being as ignorant of the cause of life, ignorant of its purpose, ignorant of what lies beyond death, “yet possessing within himself the answer to it all.” That is the whole secret of the book in a single line, and it is the whole of Neville’s teaching too.

When my own awakening came in 2018, it did not feel like learning something new. It felt like remembering something that had always been there. That is what the secret teachings of all ages finally are: not a hoard of knowledge locked in a temple, but an answer already folded inside you, waiting to be unwrapped.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is The Secret Teachings of All Ages about?

It is Manly P. Hall’s 1928 illustrated encyclopaedia of symbolical philosophy. Across roughly fifty chapters it surveys the Mysteries of Egypt and Greece, Hermes, Pythagoras, the Qabbalah, alchemy, the Rosicrucians, Freemasonry and Christian symbolism. Its central claim is that these traditions shared a hidden doctrine, concealed in ritual, symbol and allegory, about the inner nature of the human being and its relationship to the divine.

Who was Manly P. Hall?

Manly Palmer Hall (1901 to 1990) was a Canadian-born writer, lecturer and mystic who spent most of his life in Los Angeles. He was just 27 when The Secret Teachings of All Ages was published in 1928. In 1934 he founded the Philosophical Research Society in Los Angeles, which he led until his death and which still operates today.

Is The Secret Teachings of All Ages free to read?

Yes. The book is in the public domain, and the complete text is available free of charge, chapter by chapter, on sacred-texts.com. The online version does not reproduce the scale or the full colour plates of the original folio, so many readers also enjoy an illustrated print edition, but nothing in the text itself is held back.

Is The Secret Teachings of All Ages a Christian book, and is reading it against my faith?

It is not a Christian book, though it treats Christian symbols with deep respect. Reading scripture for its inner meaning is ancient: Origen, one of the great early Church writers, taught that the Bible has a spiritual sense beneath the letter. The literal reading is the first step, and it gives way to the inner one. Realising that scripture describes your own consciousness is what sets real transformation in motion.

Where should a beginner start with The Secret Teachings of All Ages?

Begin with the Preface and the Introduction, which explain Hall’s purpose and his method. If you love the Bible, go next to the chapters on the Qabbalah and The Tabernacle in the Wilderness. Then read the chapters on Pythagoras and alchemy, and finish with the Conclusion. You do not need to read the book in order, and you do not need to read it all at once.

Conclusion: why The Secret Teachings of All Ages still matters

The Secret Teachings of All Ages endures because it asks the right question of every sacred story: not “did this happen?” but “what does this mean, and where does it live in me?” Hall gathered the testimony of the ancient world to show that the sages always taught in symbols, and Neville showed how to turn that insight into a nightly practice.

So whatever you are carrying today, know that the way through it is not somewhere out there in the world. It is already within you, and so is the very power that brought the stars and the seas into being. That power answers to you. Nobody can switch it on in your place; you are the one who must take it up. And the moment you do, there is no difficulty, no circumstance and no verdict of the world that can stand against it. Fear not.