In 1928 the San Francisco publisher H. S. Crocker issued a large, expensive book called The Secret Teachings of All Ages. Its author was Manly P. Hall, then only twenty-seven, who went on to found the Philosophical Research Society in Los Angeles. The book was an encyclopedic survey of Masonic, Hermetic, Kabbalistic and Rosicrucian symbolism, and it became one of the most influential books of twentieth-century occultism. It was issued in limited, boxed editions, and what many readers remember best is the set of full-color plates painted for it by John Augustus Knapp.
Who was J. Augustus Knapp?
Knapp (1853–1938) was an American painter and illustrator who had earlier illustrated John Uri Lloyd's strange novel Etidorhpa (1895). For Hall he painted pictures of Pythagoras, Hermes, Isis, the Kabbalah, the Rosicrucians and the symbols of Freemasonry in a clear, jewel-colored style that made abstract doctrine visible. Several plates carry his signature and the date 1926.
The book
Hall was a young lecturer in Los Angeles, and he raised the money for the book by selling subscriptions in advance, which is why the first printing is called the Subscribers’ edition. Its plates mattered as much as its text: Hall wanted readers to see the Egyptian, Greek and Kabbalistic ideas the way an initiate might picture them. The result is an influential visual vocabulary for twentieth-century occult art.
The plates
We have written about the stories behind these paintings:
- Pythagoras
- Hermes Trismegistus
- The Saitic Isis
- Abraxas
- The Hand of the Mysteries
- The Atlantean Temple
- The Jewel of the Rose Croix
- Yggdrasil
- The Ancient of Ancients
- The Grand Man of the Zohar
- The Supreme Symbol
Each of these essays covers what the symbol meant in its own tradition, which can differ from Hall's interpretation, so you can see both the history and how a twentieth-century occultist read it.
Little-known facts
- The 1928 book came in five boxed editions printed at once. In a 1986 letter Hall listed them as the Subscribers’ (550 copies), King Solomon (600), Rosicrucian (100), Theosophical (200) and a Fifth edition of about 350.
- In the same letter Hall wrote that, so far as he knew, no mint copy of the original edition survived.
- Hall was twenty-seven when the book came out and was not yet a Freemason. He was initiated in 1954.
- Knapp and Hall made a tarot deck together too, the Knapp-Hall deck of 1929.
- Knapp’s earlier job, illustrating John Uri Lloyd’s novel Etidorhpa, hides a joke: the title is the Greek goddess Aphrodite’s name spelled backward.
Knapp's plates appear on our: