The Occult Art of John Augustus Knapp 
​By Michael Pearce

A generous series of mysterious and colorful lithographs enrich the pages of a very big book resting on a lectern within the paneled walls and book-lined shelves of the library of the Philosophical Research Society. It is The Secret Teachings of All Ages. It is a beautiful tome, now nearly a century old, written by the prolific and charismatic Manly P. Hall, who created it to give the writers of the wisdom of the world the book he believed they deserved. To lend it the gravity and weight he appreciated in the alchemical texts he collected, he employed artist John Augustus Knapp to paint dozens of bright gouache illustrations, capturing the complex ideas of esoteric philosophical concepts in pictorial form, expressing them as allegorical symbols and portraits of the subjects of each chapter.
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