Manly P. Hall: "Armageddon, The War that Ends in Peace"
In my newest podcast episode, I analyze a classic Manly P. Hall lecture
In my newest podcast episode, I analyze a classic lecture from Manly P. Hall titled “Armageddon: The War that Ends in Peace.”
The contents of this lecture fit right in with the theme of mankind’s “Fight with the Shadow”, a topic we have explored often in the various books and articles I’ve published so far on this Substack.
For example, my most recent article and podcast episode on the WHO is built entirely around this theme:
The audio version of the new episode is available on my podcast. The video is posted below.
In addition, the written transcript of this episode is posted below for subscribers.
Manly P. Hall - Armageddon: The War that Ends in Peace
Alex
Hey, folks, welcome back to the Wisdom Tradition podcast. This is Alex Sachon. Today I'm going to be doing a lecture breakdown of a classic from Manly P. Hall. It's called “Armageddon: The War That Ends in Peace”. And the topic of this lecture by Manly Hall is one that's very relevant to the material I've been doing not only recently, but stuff that stretches back from the whole history of my podcast.
And the main theme here, it has to do with the shadow, the fight, with the shadow. And so that was explicitly the topic of my previous podcast episode, talking about all the ways that world events seem to be culminating in a great confrontation with mankind's own dark side and its own evil nature, sort of a battle of good versus evil within the human soul. And all the ways that this is manifesting in this intense darkness that is taking place in the world today.
And this darkness manifests as a type of shadow complex. And the ultimate purpose of this activity from a spiritual perspective is that we act it out and also at the same time are forced to confront it. It objectifies the shadow element of ourselves and forces us to deal with it and ultimately to shine light on the shadow as part of a transformation process, a cleansing process of the soul.
And so that's the big picture theme of the fight with the shadow. This is something I have talked about from the standpoint of Jungian philosophy. I've also gone through a bunch of Manly Hall’s works on this. If you go back to my series on Buddhism, I talk about it there. I talk about it also in my series on Mandalas. It was also a big theme in my series on America called America Land of the Feathered Serpent.
It's a prominent theme in my book on the secret history of the 20th century, which I'm still waiting to do a big reedit of and get a physical copy of on Amazon. But that will be happening at some point, and it's been a constant source of discussion in my recent podcast episodes as I've been focusing more on current events in the past several months.
And this is also a theme of a book that I'm working on, well it’s actually someone else's book, but I'm helping contribute some research and ideas and things like that to, and I'll be getting more into that down the road once that book has been officially announced and I'll let you know who that author is. But anyway, this has been a prominent theme in my life the past several years, and, you know, I've had my own confrontations with the shadows, so to speak.
And so this is a topic that more and more all of us need to be aware of. And the sort of great confrontation with evil and the possibilities of evil not as a spiritual reality, but actually as a evil, as an aspect of the human soul, as a possibility or potential within the human soul. So it's not, you know, God versus the devil or God versus Satan in terms of the terms of the battle in the universe, in the universe. It’s all God actually. The battle of God vs. Satan is really something that takes place in the human soul during our process of evolution.
So that's a key point I want to drive home before we get into the content of today's episode. So these are some of the themes that Manly Hall is going to be discussing in his lecture here on Armageddon. And he's going to start off here with an intro to the topic of Armageddon and how it appears in various religious systems and philosophic systems of the past.
The idea of Armageddon, specifically that word and the story, comes from the Bible. But there are similar themes and similar stories to be found in all great religious traditions. So it's describing an archetype. So it's something that the human soul, no matter where you are, what time period you're in, will be forced to confront.
By archetype I mean it’s an ingrained power within nature. So humanity is destined during its evolutionary process to go through this confrontation with the shadow. And that takes place as a symbolic battle of good versus evil.
So let's kick things off here with Manly Hall talking about how Armageddon, this idea, is found in all different religious traditions.
Manly P. Hall
The Great War, the last war has occurred as a symbol in a great many different religions. It is recorded, of course, in the Bible, and probably the word Armageddon is derived from an early Palestinian term. It was the war in which the kings of the Earth would make war against the hosts of Heaven, and ultimately the kings of the Earth would be utterly discomfited.
Perhaps the form of the story also borrows from Egypt, where it is tied closely into the myth of the dying God Osiris. Osiris, who is the principal deity of the later Egyptian recension was slain by his own brother, who usurped his kingdom after the death of Osiris, Isis, his wife, posthumously brought forth a child Horus, the avenger of his father, Horus, the Golden Hawk was the symbol of the resurrection of Osiris himself, who is said to have been reborn in his own son.
And in the end, Horus lead the hosts of Light against the power and tyranny of Typhon. And that was a great last, great battle. And in this battle, Typhon was overcome and chained forever in the pits beneath the earth. This last great war also arises in the Hindu tradition and the two great epics of India, the Mahabharata and the Ramayana. Both are concerned with a great symbolic conflict in the Mahabharata is concealed the magnificent lines of the Bhagavad Gita, the Lord’s song in which the victory of life over death, of virtue and integrity over corruption. This victory is clearly set forth. In the Ramayana. We have another great battle, more in an epic form and somewhat reminiscent of the Odyssey and Iliad of Homer. But it was a great battle of evil against righteousness, and righteousness prevailed.
Then you remember in the Nordic rites the last Battle on the Plain of Ragnarok. It was here that the gods from high on high, the Nordic Olympus, gathered on the plane to have that last final conflict with the powers of evil. And the battle was a terrible one and good and bad perished together, and the earth was desolated. But one couple escaped into a high mountain and from them came forth a new race to replenish the earth.
The war that is to end war is constantly referred to in different levels of human society. Primitive tribal beliefs, highly sophisticated epics deal with this subject. So it is interesting to try to understand perhaps, how this concept developed until it has become an enduring belief, a belief that has about it the strange circumstance that generation after generation has identified this last war with the conflicts of their own times.
Whenever the great emergency had arisen, it was believed or speculated that perhaps this was the Armageddon. And because the date was never given, there was no way of confirming it. I think, however, that if we study the subject in the spirit of the Sibylline prophecies and the great prophetic books of the Bible, Isaiah in Revelation and perhaps the Chaldean Oracles of the Zoroasters, we will come to a little different point of view as to the meaning of this magnificent, elusive prophecy.
Alex
Okay. In this next clip, we're going to hear Hall go deeper into the symbolic aspect of this battle of good versus evil and what the myths about Armageddon actually represent. Because as I was stressing in the beginning, it really references an internal battle within the soul, the human soul. Or in more modern terms, the psyche or the mind.
You know, we create these myths for ourselves, and we have to be careful when we're talking about things like Satan or evil. You know, we can't make the mistake of projecting something that’s within ourselves onto the universe and saying, no, it's an objective truth: there is a Satan in the world. There is a force of evil independent of human existence.
It's impossible for to us to say anything is independent of human existence because we're always interpreting the world through the lens of our own subjective consciousness. So the subjective and the objective go together. There's no separating, just pure objective. Like you can describe something that's just true of the universe or just true of the physical environment or the world that's separate from the apparatus that's making that statement, which is your own mental apparatus.