The Life and Philosophy of Pythagoras E-Book

Manly Palmer Hall

• Herausgeber: Edizioni Aurora Boreale
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Beschreibung

Pythagoras of Samos (Πυθαγόρας ὁ Σάμιος, c. 570 - c. 495 BC) was an ancient Ionian Greek philosopher and initiate and the eponymous founder of Pythagoreanism. Around 530 BC, he travelled to Croton in southern Italy, where he founded a school in which initiates were sworn to secrecy and lived a communal, ascetic lifestyle. This lifestyle entailed a number of dietary prohibitions, traditionally said to have included vegetarianism. He may have also devised the doctrines of Metempsychosis (transmigration of souls) and Musica Universalis, which holds that the planets move according to mathematical equations and thus resonate to produce an inaudible symphony of music. His political and religious teachings were well known in Greece and Magna Graecia and influenced the philosophies of Plato, Aristotle, and, through them, the West in general.
The essay by Manly Palmer Hall that our publishing house is now proposing to modern readers, The Life and Philosophy of Pythagoras, was one of the most interesting chapters of his monumental work The Secret Teachings of All Ages, published in San Francisco in 1928.

Leseprobe

Τεληστήριον

MANLY PALMER HALL

THE LIFE AND PHILOSOPHY OF PYTHAGORAS

Edizioni Aurora Boreale

Title: The Life and Philosophy of Pythagoras

Author: Manly Palmer Hall

From The Secret Teachings of all Ages, 1928

Publishing Series: Telestèrion

Editing and preface by Nicola Bizzi

ISBN e-book version: 979-12-5504-216-7

Cover image: Pythagoras in a detail of the Raffaello Sanzio’s fresco The School of Athens, 1511

(Vatican, Palazzi Apostolici, Stanza della Segnatura)

Edizioni Aurora Boreale

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MANLY PALMER HALL

AND THE SECRET TEACHINGS OF ALL AGES

By Nicola Bizzi

Manly Palmer Hall, writer, lecturer, Freemason and one of the greatest mystics and esotericists of the last two centuries, was born on March 18 1901 in Peterborough, Ontario (Canada) to Louise Palmer Hall, a chiropractor and member of the Rosicrucian Fellowship, and William S. Hall, a dentist. The younger Hall is said to have never known his father.

In 1919, Hall moved from Canada to Los Angeles, California, with his maternal grandmother to reunite with his birth mother who was living in Santa Monica. Upon meeting her, he was almost immediately drawn to the arcane world of mysticism, esoteric philosophies, and their underlying principles. Hall delved deeply into «teachings of lost and hidden traditions, the golden verses of Hindu Gods, Greek philosophers and Christian mystics, and the spiritual treasures waiting to be found within one’s own soul».

In 1919, Hall took over as preacher of the Church of the People, located at Trinity Auditorium in downtown Los Angeles. Less than a year later, Hall booked his first lecture on the topic of reincarnation and on 17 May 1923 was ordained a minister in the Church of the People. Only a few days later, he was elected “permanent pastor” of the church. His first publications consisted of two small pamphlets, The Breastplate of the High Priest (1920), and Wands and Serpents (1927). Between 1922 and 1923 he wrote three books: The Initiates of the Flame (1922), The Ways of the Lonely Ones (1922), and The Lost Keys of Freemasonry (1923).

During the early 1920s, Carolyn Lloyd and her daughter Estelle, members of a family who controlled an oil field in Ventura County, California, began sending a sizeable portion of their oil income to Hall. With these donated funds, Hall traveled within Europe and Asia to study the lives, customs and religions of the people there. While visiting England in the early 1930’s, Hall acquired a substantial collection of rare books and manuscripts about alchemy and esotericism from an auction agent at Sotheby’s. Due to economic conditions resulting from the Great Depression, he acquired the collection for a much lower than normal price. Caroline Lloyd died in 1946 and in her will, she left Hall a house, $15,000 in cash, and an annual percentage of her family’s oil field shares, valued at approximately $10,000 per year for the next 38 years.

By 1928, Hall had become sufficiently known and respected as an interpreter and lecturer of many ancient writings. He utilized print and word-of-mouth advertising to solicit public funding to finance his magnus opus, The Secret Teachings of All Ages (1928),consisting of about 200 legal-sized pages in 8 point type, concerning subjects such as the Qabbala, Alchemy, Astrology, Symbolism, Tarot, Ceremonial Magic, Neo-Platonic Philosophy, Mystery Religions and the theory of Rosicrucianism and Freemasonry (each of the nearly 50 chapters is so dense with information that it is the equivalent of an entire short book!). He dedicated his book to «the proposition that concealed within the emblematic figures, allegories and rituals of the ancients is a secret doctrine concerning the inner mysteries of life, which doctrine has been preserved in toto among a small band of initiated minds». As the writer Louis Sahagun pointed out in 2008, «the result was a gorgeous, dreamlike book of mysterious symbols, concise essays and colorful renderings of mythical beasts rising out of the sea, and angelic beings with lions’ heads presiding over somber initiation rites in torch-lit temples of ancestral civilizations that had mastered latent powers beyond the reach of modern man».