circumstances worthy of Raymond Chandler.
More than a decade later, Hall is still bestowed by adherents with such reverential labels as “Maestro” and “adept.” Much of his life—the magical story of his birth, the whispers of his supernatural powers and membership in secret societies, the dozens of books offering mystical solutions for difficult social problems, the thousands of lectures delivered in a Mayan-style compound nestled between Hollywood and Los Angeles’ Griffith Park, the homicide investigation into his horrible death—fits the image of a holy man hounded to death for the secrets he guarded.
This book tries to get as close as possible to the complex truth about the man and his myth, tracing his rise from a broken family in rural Canada; a chaotic and unhappy childhood; a life-altering dispute with famed escape artist Harry Houdini; stormy marriages; his climb to success in the metropolis that grew up with him; his ties to political bosses and the Hollywood film industry; and his tragic demise.
At the same time, it provides an inside view of the birth of a vibrant subculture in California comprised of mystically inclined artists, visionaries, authors, business and civic leaders who continue to have a profound influence on movies, television, music, books, art and myriad products. Hall was one of its figureheads, making obscure and arcane spiritual texts and symbols of the remote past accessible to everyone just as Los Angeles started to unfold like a desert flower.
It was a time when flamboyant evangelist and faith healer Aimee Semple McPherson attracted more than 5,000 congregants to her Angelus Temple each Sunday, supported campaigns to uphold the nation’s Christian heritage and ban the teaching of evolution in public schools. Hall was not afraid to challenge Christian dogma, and he did it with such poise, scholarship and confidence that thousands followed. In the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s in Los Angeles, many scholars of comparative religion and mythology owed a debt to him.
His longevity sets him apart from the thousands of other mystics and gurus who brought spiritualism to Los Angeles around the turn of the previous century. His writings continue to sell steadily around the world, while collections of his works are being republished for their enduring value and merit.
The widely-traveled Hall wrote quirky, fascinating books and essays illustrated with strange artistic renderings of deities and demons, forces and principles, atoms and solar systems, relics and rituals. They were mostly variations on a theme: clues to solving the mysteries of life were encoded within the symbols, myths and religious rituals of vanished civilizations.
A huge avocado of a man, six feet four inches tall and wide in the center, Hall had piercing blue-gray eyes and chiseled features worthy of a Barrymore. Ardent students of the occult viewed his imposing stage presence and hundreds of books and lectures as signs that he’d tapped into something authentic.
Hall’s was also the most evasive of personalities. He was charismatic, arrogant, scholarly, deeply intuitive, humorous, at times deceptive, and self-destructive—a man who could be startlingly profound one day and disappointingly naïve the next. His favorite pastimes were children’s games: solitaire and Chinese checkers. Onstage, he was bigger than life, seemingly channeling from the great beyond. Offstage, he was meek to the point of being brutalized by his diminutive wife.
Some critics dismiss Hall’s work as biased interpretations of old philosophies and sacred texts by a man who played fast and loose with the facts to prove the validity of magic, spirit manifestations and mind reading. Hall, they also point out, borrowed heavily from the works of others but rarely credited his sources.
They are right, to a point. Hall saw himself not as a scholar, who seeks knowledge for its own sake and the satisfaction of his own mind, but as a teacher who learns in order to bestow his students with knowledge and insight. He did not always practice what he preached, but always directed his teachings along utilitarian lines.
Hall deeply believed in the value of the testimonies of Plato, Buddha, St. Paul and the pagan martyr Hypatia as medicine for the dark side of scientific progress and materialism: pollution, congestion, crime, selfishness, stress and a steady erosion of ethical and moral standards. The same kind of mystical wisdom that awakened and nourished the soul in troubled times of some primordial golden age, he believed, could inspire new generations facing stony walls of conventionalized thinking and commercialized ideas.
His output over more than six decades has rarely been equaled. In more than two hundred books, hundreds of essays and 8,000 public lectures he displayed an astonishing breadth of knowledge of comparative religion, psychology, pagan rites and symbols, classical Greek philosophy, Eastern religions, early Christianity, Freemasonry, Neo-Platonism, mythology, world cultures, and the schools of art and literature they inspired over the centuries. Hall introduced thousands of readers to sages and seers from Francis Bacon to Gandhi who dedicated their lives to helping others attain wisdom.
Long before the Gnostic Gospels were translated into 21st-century bestsellers, Hall was promoting Gnostic beliefs as windows on the origins of Christianity. Before mainstream publications were touting doctors who incorporated a warm and friendly manner into their practice, Hall was urging physicians to also pay closer attention to their patients’ mental and spiritual well-being and offer a handclasp and a smile. Before the advent of blockbuster movies with mythical settings such as Star Wars, Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter, Hall co-scripted the first major picture with an astrological plotline and actively encouraged entertainment industry leaders to grow new markets by producing more movies and radio programs based on the spiritual visions and allegories of early civilizations in which sorrow, suffering and loneliness are builders of character. These were not inconsiderable accomplishments for a high school dropout from a broken home in rural Canada.
Hall was a collector of books, stamps, artwork—and good jokes, which he used to spice up his writings and public lectures. His favorites included this quote from Voltaire: “I envy the beasts two things—their ignorance of evil to come, and their ignorance of what is said about them.”
Hall, who rarely laughed out loud out of fear of embarrassment because he tended to wheeze when amused, liked to mimic W.C. Fields to deliver asides such as “Charity not only begins at home, but usually hates to leave the house.” And he was fond of irony. “You know,” he once told a friend, “the Theosophists built a hall for the second coming in Australia. Now it’s a dog track.”
It was all part of Hall’s mission to, as Rex Hutchens, past Grand Master of Arizona and a 33rd° Mason honored with a prestigious Grand Cross, put it, “bring mysticism down to earth.”
“Voltaire said one’s life is not determined by what the church tells you,” Hutchens said. “Breaking bonds with the church sent man on a new path—a path toward perfection of one’s own effort. Freemasonry came out of that. Hall took such ideas and said the same was true of all spiritual quests, which is why he wrote about Buddhism, alchemy, Sufism, Kabbalah and early Christianity. This made Hall seem anti-Christian, but he was born at the turn of the last century and wanted to write intelligent books for rational people about the immense diversity—and interconnections—of spiritual paths.
“Hall was never about truth, which is a childish vanity. He was about seeking truth, which is a spiritual quest,” Hutchens added. “He was a profound thinker and a skilled businessman and he knew what sold. So, on one day he wrote profound insights for those who could perceive them, and the next day he wrote trash for the mass marketplace. He earned a living doing this, and not very many people can.”
I knew none of this when I took a phone call late on September 2, 1990, while working night duty at the Los Angeles Times. “Manly P. Hall, the greatest philosopher of our time, has died,” an excited tipster told me. “You better get an obituary ready.” A few minutes later, I was in the paper’s morgue, sorting through a hefty stack of news clippings about the man dating back to
