Quick Answer
This is Hall advising students rather than compiling material, and it is where he is at his best. The history in it is unreliable, as it is everywhere in his work. The counsel is excellent: that wanting powers disqualifies you, that passive psychic practice is dangerous, that study without service is pointless, and that most people arriving at this material want the wrong thing. Almost nobody else in the field says any of that.
Key Takeaways
- Hall in advisory mode is better than Hall compiling, and this book is the first kind.
- His history is not reliable. He worked from nineteenth-century sources that were wrong and passed their errors on faithfully.
- Wanting powers disqualifies you is his consistent position across sixty years, and it is the field's most needed correction.
- He was firmly against passive psychism, which put him at odds with much of his own readership.
- The library outlasts the books. The institution he built is his most durable achievement.
🕑 15 min read
What This Book Is
Talks to Students on Occult Philosophy is a Philosophical Research Society volume collecting lectures Hall gave to people studying esoteric philosophy under his direction.
It is not one of his surveys. There is no compendium of symbols, no comparative table of mystery traditions, no illustrated compilation of doctrines. It is a teacher addressing students about how to conduct their study: what the work requires of a person, what to avoid, why most people approaching this material are approaching it wrongly, and what the purpose of the whole thing is.
That is a much smaller book than his famous ones and a considerably more useful one.
On Hall's output: he produced around a hundred and fifty books and thousands of lectures over sixty years, and the quality varies enormously. The rule of thumb that works is: when he is compiling and asserting, be careful; when he is advising a student about conduct, listen. This volume is the second kind.
Who Hall Was
Manly Palmer Hall was born in Peterborough, Ontario, in 1901, and came to the United States as a young man. He had no formal education beyond secondary school and no academic training of any kind.
He began lecturing in Los Angeles in his early twenties, at a moment when southern California was becoming the centre of American alternative religion, and he never stopped. In 1934 he founded the Philosophical Research Society, which gave him a hall, a press and eventually a library.
He lectured for sixty years, wrote continuously, and died in 1990.
What is remarkable about him is the self-education. A young man with no institutional support read his way through the Western esoteric corpus, the Greek philosophers, the Hermetic literature, comparative religion and a great deal else, and made himself the most widely read expositor of that material in the English-speaking world. The erudition is real. What he lacked entirely was anybody to tell him when his sources were wrong.
The Book That Made Him
The Secret Teachings of All Ages appeared in 1928, when Hall was twenty-seven. It is an enormous illustrated folio surveying the Western esoteric tradition: the Mysteries, Pythagoras, alchemy, the Qabbalah, Rosicrucianism, Freemasonry, symbolism, and a great deal more, with colour plates commissioned for it.
It was produced by subscription, at considerable expense, and it made his name permanently. It has never been out of print.
As an object it is genuinely magnificent, and it introduced several generations to the existence of this material. As a source it should not be used, for reasons the next section sets out.
It is also, considered as an achievement, extraordinary in a way that has nothing to do with its accuracy. A twenty-seven-year-old with no degree assembled and published that. The energy is not in question.
The Problem With His History
This has to be stated plainly because Hall is still cited as an authority by people who do not know better.
His historical claims are unreliable. Not occasionally, but structurally, and the reason is his sources.
Hall built on the nineteenth-century esoteric literature: Blavatsky and the Theosophical writers, the Victorian Masonic historians, Godfrey Higgins and the antiquarians of that school, and the general body of writing that assumed a continuous transmission of wisdom from Egypt through Greece into the Renaissance and onward into the modern fraternal orders.
Almost all of that has been dismantled. The Egyptian initiation ceremonies described in that literature are inventions of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The continuity between the ancient Mysteries and Freemasonry does not exist; Masonry's documented origins are in the Scottish and English stonemasons' lodges of the late medieval and early modern period. The Rosicrucian manifestos of the early seventeenth century were not the announcement of an ancient order. The Hermetic texts were dated to late antiquity by Isaac Casaubon in 1614, not to the age of Moses.
Hall repeats all of it, in good faith, with the confidence of a man who has read widely and has no way to know that his authorities were unreliable.
The practical rule for reading him: treat every historical assertion as a claim about what the tradition believes about itself, which is genuinely interesting, and never as a claim about what happened.
This is worth separating carefully, because dismissing Hall entirely is as much a mistake as citing him. What a tradition believes about its own origins is real data about that tradition, even when the beliefs are false. Hall is an excellent guide to the self-understanding of Western esotericism in the twentieth century. He is a bad guide to the ancient world. Both statements are true and the second does not cancel the first.
Wanting Powers Disqualifies You
Now the part of Hall that is genuinely valuable, and it is what this book is about.
He held, consistently and across his whole career, that the desire for abilities is disqualifying. Not dangerous, not premature: disqualifying. The person who comes to this material wanting to develop powers, to produce phenomena, to know things others do not, or to acquire standing, has by that wanting demonstrated the condition the work is supposed to address.
His reasoning was ethical and practical together. Ethically, capability without character is simply a more effective version of whatever the person already is. Practically, he observed over decades that people who chased abilities did not get them and did get worse.
Note how directly this cuts against his own market. Hall was writing for and lecturing to an audience substantially composed of people who wanted exactly what he was telling them not to want, and he told them anyway, for sixty years, and it does not appear to have cost him.
The same position appears in the Arbatel, four centuries earlier, in almost the same terms: seek nothing, be honest, do your work, and receive what is given. Whether Hall took it from there or arrived independently, it is one of the very few propositions the Western esoteric tradition has held steadily.
Against Passive Psychism
The second consistent theme is a firm hostility to mediumship and passive psychic practice, and it is worth explaining because it is easily mistaken for prudishness.
Hall distinguished between the active development of the mind and the passive opening of a person to influences they do not control. The first he regarded as the tradition's actual work. The second he regarded as an inversion of it: a surrender of the faculties rather than their training.
His practical objections were specific. That such practices attract people who are already unstable. That they reward suggestibility. That the material produced is unreliable and cannot be checked. That the practitioner becomes dependent on the phenomena. And that the psychological consequences for vulnerable people are real and bad.
Given that he was writing in the middle decades of the twentieth century, for an audience saturated in spiritualist practice, this was not a safe position. It aligns him with the older tradition, which was consistently wary of the same things, and against most of what was popular around him.
Worth taking seriously today. Hall's warnings were made in the era of the séance room and they apply straightforwardly to the modern versions: channelling, automatic practice, and any method that involves suspending your own judgement in favour of an incoming source. His position, which is also the traditional one, is that a practice which reduces your discrimination is the wrong direction regardless of what it produces. If you are drawn to that material, this is the counter-argument, from someone entirely inside the field.
What He Asks of a Student
The book spends considerable time on qualifications, and Hall's list is notably unglamorous.
Emotional stability. A settled ordinary life. Some capacity for sustained study. Honesty, including about one's own motives. Patience with slow progress. A willingness to be uncertain. And ordinary competence at the business of living, which he treats as a precondition rather than a distraction.
That last point recurs and it is sharper than it sounds. Hall's view was that a person who cannot manage their finances, their relationships and their obligations is not ready to study anything else, and that esoteric interest in such a person is often an escape from the difficulty rather than a step beyond it.
He is also clear that most people who come to this material are not qualified in this sense, and that saying so is a kindness rather than gatekeeping.
Study Is for Service
The third theme is the purpose, and Hall is unambiguous.
The point of study is to become useful. Knowledge that terminates in the knower has been wasted. The tradition's function, on his account, is to produce people capable of contributing something to the world they are in, and any programme of study that produces only a well-informed private individual has failed.
He is caustic about collectors: people who accumulate books, systems, initiations and vocabulary, and whose lives are otherwise unchanged. He observed that this is the most common outcome of esoteric interest and that it is nearly invisible to the person concerned, because the accumulation feels like progress.
The test he proposes is simple and uncomfortable: what has anyone else got out of your study.
The One Stream
Underneath everything Hall wrote is a single organising assumption: that the traditions are one thing.
Egyptian religion, the Greek Mysteries, Pythagorean philosophy, Neoplatonism, Hermeticism, the Qabbalah, alchemy, Rosicrucianism and Freemasonry are presented as successive expressions of a continuous wisdom, transmitted through initiated lineages, adapting its outward forms to each age.
This is the perennialist assumption in its American esoteric form, and it is what allows him to move between traditions so freely.
Historically it does not hold. These are distinct developments with distinct origins, and the connections between them are largely the product of later people looking backward and finding what they expected. The Renaissance believed the Hermetic texts were ancient Egyptian; they were not. Eighteenth-century Masons believed they descended from the Mysteries; they did not.
What can be said in its defence is weaker and still real. There has been genuine transmission at various points, ideas did move between traditions, and the family resemblances among contemplative systems are not nothing. The mistake is not noticing resemblance; it is converting resemblance into descent.
The Society and the Library
Hall's most durable achievement is not a book.
The Philosophical Research Society, founded in Los Angeles in 1934, gave him a permanent base: a lecture hall where he spoke for decades, a press that kept his work and other material in print, and a library.
The library is the thing. Hall collected rare and obscure esoteric material over a lifetime, at a period when a great deal of it was being dispersed and lost, and the collection preserved and made accessible a body of work that might otherwise have vanished into private hands.
For anyone who has used a specialist library, this is not a small contribution. Scholarship in this field depends on such collections existing, and the people who assemble them rarely get the credit that the people who write the books do.
The Freemasonry Question
A biographical detail that is worth knowing and is often left out.
Hall wrote extensively and influentially about Freemasonry, its symbolism and its supposed ancient descent, and his Masonic books have been widely read inside the fraternity.
He was not a Mason when he wrote them. He was initiated in the 1950s, decades into his career, and later received an honorary thirty-third degree in the Scottish Rite.
Some Masons noted the sequence. The interpretations that shaped how many members understood their own symbolism were produced by an outsider working from published sources, and were then, in effect, adopted by the institution he had been writing about.
This is not a scandal and it is a good illustration of how these traditions actually work. A confident outsider's synthesis becomes the insider's self-understanding, and within a generation it is difficult to tell which came first.
The End of His Life
Hall died in 1990, and the circumstances were disputed.
Questions were raised about his final years, about his condition, and about people who had become close to him and had acquired influence over his affairs. There was an investigation. Accounts of what happened differ substantially and no settled public conclusion emerged.
This article does not attempt to adjudicate it, and readers who encounter confident versions in either direction should know that the matter is genuinely contested and that the confident versions come from interested parties.
What can be said without controversy is that an elderly man of considerable reputation and modest practical capability, at the head of an institution with assets, became vulnerable in the way such people do, and that the end of his life was not peaceful.
What Survives the Criticism
Set aside the history, which is wrong, and the synthesis, which does not hold. What is left is worth having.
Hall was a genuinely gifted explainer. He could take a difficult body of material and make it comprehensible without making it stupid, which is a rare skill and the reason he had an audience for sixty years.
He was consistently and unfashionably ethical. He told his readers not to want what they came wanting, warned them off practices that would have made them worse, insisted that character precedes capability, and defined the purpose of the whole enterprise as usefulness to others. In a field with a poor record on all four counts, that is not a small thing.
And he was not exploitative. There is no evidence he used his position to extract money, sex or obedience from students, which distinguishes him from a depressing number of his contemporaries and successors.
A man can be unreliable about the ancient world and sound about how to conduct yourself. Hall was both, and the second is what this particular book contains.
Who Should Read It
Read it if you are drawn to esoteric study and want an experienced teacher's account of what it requires and where it goes wrong. That is what this book is for and it does it well.
Read it before the compilations, not after, because the advisory material will tell you how to read the rest of him.
Read it if you have been accumulating books and systems for some years and have started to suspect that the accumulation is the activity. Hall's chapters on collectors are aimed precisely at that condition and they are uncomfortable in the right way.
Read it alongside his other student-directed work, which is consistent in outlook and covers overlapping ground.
Do not read it as history. Do not take any factual claim about the ancient world from it without checking. And do not read it expecting a method, because his answer to what to do is the traditional one, which is to become the sort of person the knowledge would be safe with, and that is not a technique.
The most useful thing Hall says, and he said it for sixty years to an audience that mostly did not want to hear it, is that the wanting is the problem. People arrive at this material because they want capability, or certainty, or standing, or an explanation that makes their difficulty someone else's fault, and the wanting is the exact condition the tradition exists to address. His answer was not to suppress the want but to notice it, name it honestly, and understand that no amount of study will satisfy it, because it is not a hunger for knowledge. That diagnosis is worth more than the whole of the history he got wrong.
Sixty years of telling students not to want what they came for.
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Frequently Asked Questions
What is Talks to Students on Occult Philosophy?
A Philosophical Research Society volume collecting lectures Manly P. Hall gave to students of esoteric philosophy. Unlike his large compilations, it is advisory: it addresses how to study, what qualifications the work requires, and what a student should avoid rather than surveying doctrines.
Who was Manly P. Hall?
A Canadian-born writer and lecturer, 1901 to 1990, who published The Secret Teachings of All Ages at twenty-seven, founded the Philosophical Research Society in Los Angeles in 1934, and produced around a hundred and fifty books and thousands of lectures over six decades.
Is Hall a reliable historian?
No, and this needs saying clearly. He was a self-taught compiler working from nineteenth-century esoteric sources that were themselves unreliable, and he transmitted their claims about Egyptian initiation, Atlantis, secret societies and continuous transmission as established fact. Read him for orientation, never for history.
What does he say about seeking powers?
That it disqualifies you. Hall was consistent across sixty years that the desire for abilities, phenomena or status is the surest indication that a person is not ready, and that the tradition's function is to develop character rather than to confer capabilities.
Why is he sceptical of psychic development?
He regarded passive psychism and mediumship as genuinely dangerous, involving the surrender of control rather than its development, and as attracting unstable people to practices likely to make them worse. His position was unusually firm for a writer in this field and it was consistent throughout his career.
What does he think study is for?
Service. Hall repeatedly framed esoteric study as an obligation toward other people rather than a private enrichment, and treated the student who accumulates knowledge without applying it to anything as having missed the purpose entirely.
What is his view of the traditions?
That they form one continuous stream: Egyptian, Greek, Hermetic, Rosicrucian and Masonic material as expressions of a single transmitted wisdom. That synthesis is the organising idea of his whole output and it is not supported by the historical record.
What was the Philosophical Research Society?
The institution Hall founded in Los Angeles in 1934, comprising a lecture hall, a publishing operation and a substantial library of rare esoteric material. It is his most durable achievement, and the library preserved and made accessible a body of work that might otherwise have scattered.
Was Hall a Freemason?
Eventually. He wrote extensively about Freemasonry well before he joined it, becoming a Mason in the 1950s and later receiving an honorary thirty-third degree. Some Masons noted the sequence, since his Masonic interpretations were written by someone outside the fraternity at the time.
How did he die?
He died in 1990, and the circumstances were disputed and investigated, with questions raised about his final years and about people around him at the end. The matter did not result in a settled public conclusion, and accounts of it differ substantially.
Is this book worth reading?
Yes, and more than most of his output. It is Hall giving direct advice rather than compiling material, which is where he is strongest, and the advice about premature practice and about motive is the corrective this field most needs and least often supplies.
Where should I start with Hall?
With this kind of advisory volume rather than with The Secret Teachings of All Ages, which is magnificent as an object and misleading as a source. Read the student-directed material first, then use the large compilations as a picture of what the tradition believes about itself.
Answer his question
Hall's test for a student takes one sentence and it is not comfortable. What has anyone else got out of your study? Not what you have understood, not what you have read, not how your view of the world has changed. What has anyone else got. He asked that of his students for sixty years, on the grounds that knowledge which terminates in the knower has been wasted, and it remains the fastest available way to find out whether you have been learning something or collecting it.
Sources & References
- Hall, M. P. Talks to Students on Occult Philosophy. Philosophical Research Society.
- Hall, M. P. (1928). The Secret Teachings of All Ages.
- Hall, M. P. Self-Unfoldment by Disciplines of Realization and other student-directed volumes.
- Records and holdings of the Philosophical Research Society, Los Angeles, founded 1934.
- Casaubon, I. (1614), the dating of the Hermetic corpus to late antiquity.
- Scholarship on the documented origins of Freemasonry in the Scottish and English operative lodges.
- Contemporary reporting on the disputed circumstances of Hall's death in 1990.