1901 – 1990 · A portrait
A self-taught writer, barely twenty-seven, published a single enormous book trying to summarize the West's hidden traditions — alchemy, tarot, Kabbalah, Freemasonry — in one volume. He spent the next sixty years lecturing on it.
Born in Canada and raised largely by his grandmother, he left school early and never attended college. What he knew of the occult, comparative religion and philosophy, he read his way to alone, for years, before he ever taught a class.
Wealthy patrons and advance subscriptions paid for a lavish first edition — full-color plates, oversized pages — of The Secret Teachings of All Ages, his attempt to gather alchemy, tarot, Kabbalah and Freemasonry into one volume. He was twenty-seven.
He founded the Philosophical Research Society to house his library and continue the work outside any university. It became the platform for the rest of his life: he lectured for six decades and wrote more than a hundred further books and pamphlets.
Having written and lectured about Freemasonry for decades, he became a member of a Masonic lodge himself only in 1954, at fifty-three.
The Philosophical Research Society still runs in Los Angeles, publishing his books and teaching from his library. The book itself has never gone out of print. After his death in 1990, a successor, Obadiah Harris, built a distance-learning university on the same campus to carry the courses forward.
Many of the book's historical claims can't be traced to primary sources; scholars read it as a synthesis of occult belief, not documented history. He had no university training himself. Whether the book still deserves its stature, or only its size, remains debated among those who study esotericism.