Biographie de l'auteur :
Manly Palmer Hall was born on March 18, 1901 in Peterborough, Ontario, Canada, near Toronto. In 1919 Hall moved from Canada to Los Angeles, California. In that year he was ordained to the Church of the People and published his first work, The Lost Keys Of Freemasonry. He is perhaps most famous for his 1928 work The Secret Teachings of All Ages. At the age of 27 years, he published An Encyclopedic Outline of Masonic, Hermetic, Qabbalistic and Rosicrucian Symbolical Philosophy: Being an Interpretation of the Secret Teachings concealed within the Rituals, Allegories and Mysteries of all Ages, which is more commonly referred to as The Secret Teachings of All Ages. Hall moved to California with his maternal grandmother to reunite with his birth mother in Santa Monica and was almost immediately drawn to the arcane world of mysticism, esoteric philosophies, and their underlying principles. His nascent interest was solidified by meeting a practitioner of phrenology, "the pseudo-science popular at the turn of the century that divided the brain into areas responsible for noble traits such as heroism and despised ones such as cruelty, and mapped them out in patterns on the surface of the brain. 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." Less than a year later, Hall booked his first lecture, and the topic was reincarnation. A tall (6', 4"), imposing, confident and charismatic speaker who soon took over as preacher of the Church of the People in 1919, he read voraciously on "comparative religion, philosophy, sociology and psychology," and "seemingly overnight . . . became a one-stop source of an astonishing range of eclectic spiritual material that resonates with the intellect, and the subconscious." Hall was ordained a minister in the Church of the People on May 17, 1923. More than 80 years later, "with more than a million copies sold, The Secret Teachings of All Ages remains one of the most popular introductions to esoteric traditions." In his over 70-year career, Hall delivered approximately 8,000 lectures in the United States and abroad, authored over 150 books and essays, and wrote countless magazine articles. He appears in the introduction to the 1938 film When Were You Born, a murder mystery that uses astrology as a key plot point. He died on August 29, 1990.
Présentation de l'éditeur :
Shadow Forms is a collection of weird and uncanny tales based on Oriental mystery, magic and sorcery. Some of the stories are based on mythology and folklore, while others are raised from the foundation of superstition and hearsay. This is one of the relatively early works of Manly Palmer Hall who enjoyed an exceptionally long career as a successful writer spanning more than 70 years from 1919 until 1990.
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