INTRODUCTION
The Initiates of the Flame is not only Manly P. Hall’s literary debut but it is also a framing of the teacher’s philosophical approach to life, set down at an early, intellectually powerful, and even gestational phase—yet consistently held to throughout his career. Within symbol, the budding sage wrote, you discover not only an image of yourself but the continuum between your psyche and the cosmos. “As above, so below,” as the Hermetic dictum goes.
Published in 1922, when Hall was just twenty-one years old, The Initiates of the Flame was, effectively, the teacher’s earliest public statement—appearing six years before The Secret Teachings of All Ages—and it heralded the arrival of the preeminent voice of esoteric inquiry of the new century.
The young scholar was a curator as much as a philosopher, and maybe more so. He brilliantly imbibed esoteric tradition, often Western but sometimes Eastern, and reinterpreted it for modern readers—and for himself. The Initiates of the Flame is a codex of symbolism, ethics, eternal needs, and the search for truth.
The period in which Hall wrote this book resembled our own. The United States—the Canadian-born youth’s adopted home—had just emerged from a worldwide pandemic experienced in 1918 at the grinding end to World War I. Economically, politically, and culturally the world was marked by uncertainty, decline of old empires, mass migration, and rising nationalism. The last of those factors raged on despite the horrific events wrought by nationalism in the just-ended war—and nationalist passions on an unprecedented scale would soon engulf the world again. Intermixed with all this was a sense of individual possibility and of a future that could appear exciting, unsettled, and wide open.
Into this world, Manly P. Hall hoped to reintroduce symbolical philosophy—and specifically the ideal that our lives could be understood as mirroring a cosmic order that extends to the ultimate source of creation, to which the individual could, in initiatory phases, grow ever-closer. Within humanity’s ancient symbols—such as the all-seeing eye, the crucifix, the flame of wisdom, the sword and stone, the grail of knowledge, the pyramid—Hall detected the code of eternal life and its response to the private needs of the individual.
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Historically, The Initiates of the Flame has had two distinct prior lives—this edition is its third. As noted, Hall published his concise, evocative volume in 1922, six years before his “Great Book,” The Secret Teachings of All Ages. I see Initiates as the germination of that larger effort.
In Occult America I wrote:
Like a bolt from the blue a short work of immense power emerged from the young Manly P. Hall—a book that seemed to prefigure the greater work that would come. In 1922, Hall produced a brief, luminescent gem on the mystery schools of antiquity, The Initiates of the Flame. With ease and gracefulness, Hall wrote across a spectrum of subjects, describing Egyptian rites, Arthurian myths, and the practices of alchemy, revealing the psychological underpinnings of arcane methods. “Man has been an alchemist from the time when first he raised himself,” Hall wrote. “… Experiences are the chemicals of life with which the philosopher experiments.”
Hall revised his book in 1934. He shrunk down some of its earlier line drawings and eliminated their captions (sometimes incorporating caption material into the larger text). He collaborated on the new edition with artist J. Augustus Knapp, with whom he had worked on The Secret Teachings of All Ages and several other projects including a Tarot deck. Knapp added to the book seven dramatized, full-page paintings of scenes from esoteric history, which are reproduced in this edition. This volume primarily uses the 1934 revision as its basis. Hence, the “deluxe edition,” which hopefully captures the ideals of the original and the lushness of Hall and Knapp’s revisitation, is the book’s third incarnation.
In preparing this edition, I am grateful to my colleagues at the Philosophical Research Society, Greg Salyer and Kelly Carmena, for their collaboration and encouragement, and also to graphic artist Josh T. Romero for his critical efforts in preparing the original illustrations.
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It is a privilege to present this new edition of The Initiates of the Flame. But relaunching such a book also begs the question: What can we learn today from a statement of symbolical philosophy?
At the very least, I hope that this book gives you an entry point of inquiry into the symbols that it analyzes. Like most of us, I build my search upon the work of people who came before me or whose efforts inspired me, including Manly P. Hall. But I do not personally seek to use their analyses or conclusions as recipes. Rather I regard precursory works as points of embarkment for my own experiments and questions to which I alone am subject and for which I am responsible.
Indeed, I believe that the lowest level of engagement with an idea is to use it to set boundaries or expectations, either for oneself or others. Spiritual and philosophical literature can be especially tempting in this regard. Many of us—myself included—eagerly imbibe books of religious, esoteric, and ethical philosophy, underlining passages, making margin notes, and attempting to live by the terms, concepts, and ideas that we encounter. Often these ideals do not survive the tests that ensue after we get up from a chair and reenter the world of emotions, experiences, relationships, and frictions.
I would not offer a specific solution to this predicament even if I had one, but I will venture a possibility, or at least a different point of engagement from the type I just described. Although it is necessary to use general historical terms and symbols to communicate with one another—some degree of generality is required for relationships, which are the root of life—it is vital that familiar references not be confused with settled truths. Self-verification is, I believe, the highest principle of the spiritual search. And for the seeker this principle must be lived and not just recited.
Hence, I invite you to use this powerful book as a source of insight, as a window, and as a launch point. But I believe that what you discover within, as with the innards of any philosophical work, must serve as a goad to your own intimate study and experience.
Someone once told me: “Books are where stories go to die.” I do not agree with that. Books are where stories—or ideas—provide torchlight, as this enduring work does. But if you sit under the torch and get transfixed you do not proceed anywhere. You become a stagnant journeyer who believes that the circle of light and relative warmth of the torch are all there is, or are at least the safest place to dwell. This is not dissimilar to the predicament facing the cave-dwellers in Plato’s classic allegory.
This book is filled with sufficient torchlight to point you on the path of your journey—a place you must ultimately venture within the solitary channels of your own psyche and efforts. Let its flame point the way.
Mitch Horowitz
New York City
February 2021
INTRODUCTION
Few realize that even at the present stage of civilization in this world, there are souls who, like the priests of the ancient temples, walk the earth and watch and guard the sacred fires that burn upon the altar of humanity. Purified ones they are, who have renounced the life of this sphere in order to guard and protect the Flame, that spiritual principle in man, now hidden beneath the ruins of his fallen temple. The mysteries of antiquity have seemingly perished; the faith, however, of the golden age—the first religion of man—can never wholly die.
As we think of the nations that are past, of Greece and Rome and the grandeur that was Egypt’s, we sigh as we recall the story of their fall; and we watch the nations of today, not knowing which will be the next to draw its shroud around itself and join that great ghostly file of peoples that are dead.
But everywhere, even in the rise and fall of nations, we see through the haze of materiality, justice; everywhere we see reward, not of man but of the invincible One, the eternal Flame.
A great hand reaches out from the unseen and regulates the affairs of man. It reaches out from that great spiritual Flame which nourishes all created things, the never dying fire that burns on the sacred altar of Cosmos—that great fire which is the spirit of God.
PREFACE copyright © 2021 by Greg Salyer.
INTRODUCTION copyright © 2021 by Mitch Horowitz.
