The Eastern Mysteries: An Encyclopedic Guide to the Sacred Languages & Magickal Systems of the World

by David Allen Hulse

In scope and clarity, there is no book that can compare to The Eastern Mysteries . This reissue of David Allen Hulse's landmark work is the one book all students of the occult must own. It catalogs and distills, in hundreds of tables of secret symbolism, the true import of each ancient Eastern magickal tradition. Each chapter is a key that unlocks the meaning behind one of the magickal languages. Through painstaking research and analysis, Hulse has accomplished an unprecedented feat―that of reconstructing the basic underlying systems that form the vast legacy of mystery traditions. The real genius of this accomplishment is that it is presented in a way that is immediately understandable and usable. Although the book deals with many foreign scripts, ancient tongues, and lost symbols, it is designed for the beginning student. Included is a wealth of cross-references, excellent introductory material and overviews, an extensive annotated bibliography, and―new to this edition―a complete index.

Genres: Occult, Reference, Esoterica, Religion, Language, Magick, Nonfiction

656 pages, Paperback

First published April 1, 1996

Reviews

[Ren]

Thick with inaccuracies. Meanings are all switched around. It is terribly inaccurate, like oddly so. I've studied this topic for years and even the seemingly obvious things are switched around in the book. I don't get why it's like that.
As an example, it lists -
wood = hearing
fire = sight
earth = touch
metal = smell (only right one)
water = taste

when it is actually
wood = sight
fire = touch
earth = taste
metal = smell
water = hearing

so that's odd. But even more odd are the animal types. The cardinal animals even instruct the associations but it gets that wrong too. It says -

wood = feathered (even though the scaled dragon represents wood)
fire = hairless (even though the feathered phoenix represents fire)
earth = hairy (even though it represents bare-skin animals)
metal = armored (even though the furry tiger represents metal)
water = scaled (even though the armored tortoise represents water)

There's clear jumbling going on here for some reason.

[Mitchell]

Seems a decent enough encyclopedia but not much new if you’ve perused anything similar like The Magician’s Tables by Stephen Skinner.

[James Staiti]

I had to put down a date I finished reading this. I have known this book for years, and I never finish reading it, because Hulse gives so much interesting information and correlations of various systems through the symbols of Hebrew, Arabic, Sanskrit, Chinese, and other Eastern languages that the engaged reader will always learn something new, see a new connection, upon each and every exploration of the book. If you've heard about gematria and related ideas and you want to learn more -- a great deal more -- about how language is used in such symbolic ways to convey mysteries about the expansion of consciousness, this is an indispensable reference to have.

[Eric]

This is the first volume of Hulse's major compendium of world magical systems.