1920s and freed Hall to pursue a variety of interests and hobbies, most of them shared by Caroline. A stamp collector, he specialized in postage from countries that gave birth to the greatest saints and wise men. He traveled, exploring the world’s religious centers. A lover of classical music, Hall and Los Angeles Philharmonic pianist Douglas Colin Campbell experimented in the 1920s with some of the city’s first mood-enhancing light shows. “My father, who was known back then as the ‘young Paderewski,’ would perform while Manly lectured,” recalled Campbell’s daughter, Cai Taggart. “All the while, a color wheel would turn and cast various shades across the stage. It was all choreographed.”
Donations from Caroline Lloyd and his own congregation paid for Hall’s first trip around the world to study the lives, customs and religions of countries in Asia and Europe. Hall sailed out of San Francisco on the luxury liner S.S. Franconia on December 5, 1923. He reached Yokohama in late December of that year, after a massive earthquake had devastated the Japanese city and left corpses floating in its harbor. [45] Years later, he recalled, “we found a city of a half a million people without a single building standing. We found pain, sorrow, and misfortune on every hand.
“But for the first time I became aware of the quality of the Japanese character which lingered with me for a long time. My rickshaw man was to take me to the main hotel in Yokohama, which incidentally now was. . . a shack put together out of empty beer bottles with a cot in it. . . And he asked if he could stop for a moment. . . He wanted to pause for just a few moments to say a prayer in the block where his family had died. His mother, his father, his wife and his children had all died together. [46]
“After that experience with him, I asked him, ‘How do you feel about all this? What does this mean?’ He said, ‘I have faith. I believe. . . I must accept. I cannot question. I believe that those whom I have loved have left here but they are still alive. I believe they will be born again. I believe they will live here. I believe there is no end. And in this hope of the continuance of their life I have peace.’” [47]
Photographs show Hall clad in white trousers, a heavy dark coat and pith helmet as he crossed to Korea, stayed briefly in Peking, China, and went on to Burma and India, arriving just as Gandhi was released from prison after a hunger strike. After delivering a lecture in Calcutta, he was invited to walk in a parade and his appearance was publicized in local newspapers. He traveled on through Egypt and central Italy.
Throughout that 38,000-mile journey he called the “single most important episode in my life,” people were either fascinated or frightened by the imposing self-styled mystic from Los Angeles armed with endless stories of reincarnation, odd gods and lost continents. His remarks often provoked news articles with headlines such as “Bizarre Preacher Startles Ad Club,” “Noted Radical Preacher from Los Angeles Speaks,” and “A World Religion is Advocated by Tourist.”
In Honolulu’s Wela-ka-hao newspaper, a reporter wrote: “Rev. Mr. Hall is in physical appearance a striking figure. Dressed bizarrely, he wears black hair in the fashion of a stage poet, cultivates a languishing glance and evidently yearns to be classed as a mystic. But he is modest. He disclaimed being the reincarnation of Pythagoras, as a reporter for the morning paper had quoted him as saying he was, although he admitted being a believer in reincarnation, which he said he had been preaching in his church in Los Angeles for two years.” [48]
Hall makes headlines in 1923.
Hall dispatched dozens of letters to followers back home. One described his disgust with a white man he witnessed kicking and beating a Hong Kong resident for having “the audacity to walk on the same sidewalk with him.” [49] Another spoke of the hilly roads of Jerusalem, where, Hall opined, life had not changed all that much since biblical times. Yet another told of the superhuman powers of a holy man in Benares who seemingly induced a mango sapling to grow on the spot with flute music.
Hall also wrote, “I once discussed the problem of miracles with a very learned Brahmin pundit whose conclusions on the subject may be summarized as follows: ‘You Christians believe that He [Jesus] turned water into wine; that He raised the dead, healed the sick, passed through closed doors, and multiplied the loaves and fishes. Do you believe the day of miracles ended two thousand years ago? Your Jesus told His disciples that greater things than He did they should do. Why, then, do you declare the miracle-working of India to be false?’” [50]
He returned to the United States in February 1924 by way of New York, with more than four hundred photographs taken with a four-by-five Graflex box camera, which would accompany him for decades. [51]
When he next took to the pulpit at his Church of the People, he was sporting a beard. His adherents expressed their displeasure with his whiskers by dropping a few razors into the collection plate.
As Easter rolled around in 1924, the now worldly Hall was lining his church’s course with an array of novel activities including stereopticon slide presentations of his trip, and feisty public debates over provocative topics: Should the United States police the world? Is modern democracy detrimental to culture? Are motion pictures destructive of public morals? In one debate, Hall opposed the idea that “women have no faith in god or man.”
In November 1926, Hall revived the All-Seeing Eye as a 10-cent weekly newspaper devoted to philosophy, science and religion. Published out of Room 301 in the Trinity Auditorium Building near 9th Street on Grand Avenue in Los Angeles, it now also served as a clever platform in which to trumpet progress being made on Hall’s elaborate compendium of occult philosophy and symbols.
Hall’s weekly messenger drew heavily from his growing home library, and laid out the basic themes and principles and literary forms that he would rely on throughout his long, curious career. He included news items clipped from mainstream publications, question-and-answer sections, notices of upcoming events and feature articles on interpretations of biblical stories, Egyptian initiation rites, chakras and glands, alchemy, astrology, Buddhism and reincarnation. He also wrote about the mysterious magician Count de St. Germain, Madame Blavatsky and the theory that Sir Francis Bacon was the true author of Shakespeare’s plays.
Other articles spoke of the healing powers of arts and crafts, the grinding mindlessness of modern city life, the relationship between stress and disease, and the false promises of most of the metaphysical pursuits that were suddenly all the rage in Los Angeles.
“Nearly all who spend a few years in modern metaphysics,” he warned in the March 23, 1927 edition of the All-Seeing Eye, “come out broken in mind and body, self-centered egotists who do not know where they are mentally, have lost all desire to work, and wander from one teacher to another searching for knowledge until at last the insane asylum or the state grave yard claims them.” City life, he observed a month later, “is just a rush from one street car to another, from one lunch stool to another, from one excitement to another. There is one general result of it all and that is a nervous breakdown.” For relief, Hall prescribed, among other things, the writings of Philippus Aureolus Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim, the 16th-century Swiss medical physician and alchemist also known as Paracelsus.
The explorations of the brilliant, belligerent and
