The Secret Teachings of All Ages

PRODUCTION NOTES: I worked on this massive project in stages from 2001 to June 2004. This was necessary because of the poor quality of the optical character recognition original: "OCR"; technology used to convert images of text into searchable data, which resulted from the very small font and large sections of italicized text. These issues required me to retype many parts of the text by hand. To illustrate the scale of this project, the proofreading file alone is 2 megabytes—roughly eight times the size of a standard 200-page book. The raw image files totaled 63 megabytes, which I have compressed to about 11 megabytes. The thumbnail images alone take up 1 megabyte, which is usually my entire graphics budget for a standard book.

While the book itself is no longer protected by copyright in the United States because the registration was not formally renewed, many of the large color illustrations that appear at the beginning of each chapter in the printed edition were registered and renewed separately. Therefore, those color images are omitted from this electronic text. However, all of the black-and-white illustrations are included here. Please note that many of these images are quite large to preserve their detail, so I have provided thumbnail versions for every image in the book. In the original printed book, all illustration captions were in italics; I have changed them to standard text here to make them easier to read.

--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, Insects, Animals, Reptiles and Birds (Part Two)
Flowers, Plants, Fruits, and Trees
Stones, Metals and Gems
Ceremonial Magic and Sorcery
The Elements and Their Inhabitants
Hermetic Pharmacology, Chemistry, and Therapeutics
The Kabbalah original: "Qabbalah", the Secret Doctrine of Israel

For once, here is a book that truly lives up to its title. Hall self-published this massive volume in 1928. It consists of about 200 large-format pages printed in small type; it is literally his great work original: "magnum opus". Each of the nearly 50 chapters is so packed with information that it is the equivalent of an entire short book. If you read this work in its entirety, you will be well-prepared to explore subjects such as the Kabbalah original: "Qabbala"; a school of Jewish mysticism, Alchemy, Tarot, Ceremonial Magic, Neo-Platonic Philosophy, Mystery Religions, and the history of Rosicrucianism and Freemasonry. Although there are some questionable and controversial sections—such as the outdated material on Islam, the portion regarding the Bacon-Shakespeare hypothesis The theory that Francis Bacon was the true author of William Shakespeare’s plays, and Hall's conspiracy theory of history as being driven by an elite group of immortal masters—these are far outweighed by the comprehensive information provided on other subjects.

For many years, this book was only available in a large-format edition...