Perennial philosophy and Western esoteric synthesis

Manly P. Hall

1901 – 1990

Manly Palmer Hall (1901–1990) was a Canadian-born American author, mystic, and lecturer who founded the Philosophical Research Society in Los Angeles in 1934. His encyclopaedic work The Secret Teachings of All Ages (1928), produced at age twenty-seven, remains one of the most ambitious surveys of Hermetic philosophy, Kabbalah, Freemasonry, Neoplatonism, Rosicrucianism, and world mythology ever compiled; it established him as one of the most prolific and wide-ranging synthesizers of the Western esoteric tradition in the twentieth century.