"To learn is to live, to study is to grow, and growth is the measurement of life."

Once again Brother Greg at Masonic Traveler has provided a great Masonic article. This time it's a biographical piece on Brother Manly P. Hall, a 33rd-degree Scottish Rite Mason who died in 1990 at the age of 89.

Interestingly, much of Brother Hall's writing on Freemasonry was done when he was a young man in his 20's, 30 years or more before he became a Mason.

Best known for his The Secret Teaching of All Ages: An Encyclopedic Outline of Masonic, Hermetic, Qabbalistic and Rosicrucian Symbolical Philosophy, which he published at the age of twenty five, Brother Hall was a prolific writer on Masonic, religious and occult subjects, and is often quoted (many times out of context) by anti-Masonic fundamentalists to make Masons appear to be anti-Christian. In one of his more famous passages, Brother Hall indicates that the nature of a Freemason is ideally more universalist in scope.

"The true Mason is not creed-bound. He realizes with the divine illumination of his lodge that as a Mason his religion must be universal: Christ, Buddha or Mohammed, the name means little, for he recognizes only the light and not the bearer. He worships at every shrine, bows before every altar, whether in temple, mosque or cathedral, realizing with his truer understanding the oneness of all spiritual truth."

Occult | Manly P. Hall | Secret Teaching of All Ages