much of the 20th century he dazzled the rich and famous, counseled heads of church and state, and lectured at Carnegie Hall and the World’s Fair as a collector and interpreter of ancient texts and symbols as mystical road maps to wisdom, health and longevity.
The founder of the Philosophical Research Society, a school of enduring wisdom teachings Hall established on Los Feliz Boulevard, was frequently quoted opining on the hottest topics and fads of the day: World War II, Zen Buddhism, space travel, unidentified flying objects and prospects for peace in the atomic age. Portions of his vast collection of books, artifacts and rare stamps accumulated from around the world were often loaned for display in city and county libraries, schools and department stores across the state. Hall was a frequent guest lecturer at universities and private colleges on the subject of comparative religion.
I was fighting a tight deadline and the paper had room for a brief obituary, which began, “Manly Palmer Hall, an eclectic philosopher and founder of the Philosophical Research Society, has died at 89, the society reported Sunday. The peripatetic philosopher, who authored more than two hundred books and gave more than 8,000 lectures—many of them from a throne-like chair at the society’s Los Angeles headquarters—died in his sleep Wednesday of natural causes, a spokesman said. The death had been kept private for 72 hours at the request of his wife, Marie Hall. ‘His wife said the silence had to do with his religious beliefs,’ said Daniel Fritz, a trustee of the nonprofit educational society founded in 1934.”
The obit lacked important information that was unavailable on deadline. How did Hall become a venerated expert on spiritual beliefs, philosophical principles and symbols? Where did the money come from to pay for his world travels and a treasure trove of artifacts and books? How relevant are his works in modern society? Exactly how did Hall die? Like everything else about Hall, the answers are complicated.
Gathering facts was not easy. Hall was never forthcoming when it came to details about his personal life or his credentials. Many of his closest associates had died decades earlier. The theories Hall promoted are subject to interpretation.
With a goal of letting Hall speak for himself, I have relied heavily on his essays, books, memoirs and unpublished letters, as well as court records, testimonies and interviews with his widow, stepchildren, friends and associates around the world, homicide investigators, coroner’s officials, defenders and detractors.
Hall’s was an extraordinary life, one entwined with the original idealists of formative Southern California at the dawn of the 20th century and Los Angeles, the city that nourished them.
He’d come to California in 1919 to be reunited with his mother, who had abandoned him in infancy. The 18-year-old Canadian immigrant—who had bounced from town to town as a child with his maternal grandmother, the peripatetic Florence Palmer—turned his back on a business career in New York City’s Wall Street after she died suddenly.
Within a decade, Hall would take over a prominent Los Angeles church and then transform himself into a world-renowned philosopher and student of the occult—the hidden mysteries of the universe, of life and of death—in a place that was mushrooming into one of the most promising metropolises on the planet. Public fascination with magic, healing arts and “the other side” of life flourished in the 1920s. As if drawn by a magnetic field, others not unlike Hall came to the city: earnest seekers and enthusiasts, utopians, mystics, spiritualists, gurus, healers, quacks and cranks of every stripe.
In 1928, at the age of 27, Hall published his magnum opus, an introduction to ancient symbols and secret traditions called An Encyclopedic Outline of Masonic, Hermetic, Qabbalistic and Rosicrucian Symbolical Philosophy. Chapters of the lavishly published book, also known as The Secret Teachings of All Ages, open like portals into parallel universes. The diction is simple and strong, and punctuated with many lines taken directly from sources as old as the Pentateuch of the Bible and The Divine Pymander concerning Hermes Mercurius Trismegistus. This immense book is filled with strange, often disturbing illustrations, and uses Roman numerals instead of standard page numbers.
Publication of Hall’s so-called Big Book initiated a new era of appreciation for ancient religions and symbols and catapulted him to the top of the list of America’s scholars of mysticism and magic. He also gathered many acolytes, some of them trust funders of an earlier age seeking purpose in a world where their every whim had been fulfilled with little effort or thought. A mother and daughter belonging to the Lloyd family, an oil dynasty of Ventura County, over the years would donate millions of dollars to Hall’s projects. They helped underwrite his whirlwind tour of the world’s centers of spiritual thought in 1923 and eventually helped establish his compound near Griffith Park in 1934.
When some groups pitched elaborate schemes promising to share divine secrets for a fee, authorities began to take notice. Eager to separate himself from the riff-raff of spiritualists, Hall worked briefly in 1939 as the eyes and ears of the Los Angeles District Attorney’s office when it wanted to topple a cult known as Mankind United, believed to be bilking members of their worldly possessions.
Throughout the 1930s, he lectured from coast to coast, attending dinner fundraisers with influential people including Robert Andrews Millikan, chairman of the executive council of the California Institute of Technology, and legendary motion picture director Cecil B. DeMille. In 1938, he scripted an occult murder mystery for Warner Brothers titled When Were You Born? In 1940, he delivered a lecture at the New York World’s Fair on the contributions of ancient Greece. Hall was enjoying the most successful period of his life. Still, a devastating personal crisis was falling into place at home. In 1941, his first wife, the sultry Fay Bernice Hall, committed suicide.
During World War II, Hall, a patriot to the core, tried to rally hope by drawing on obscure Masonic writings, fragments of Egyptian religious teachings and utopian fables by the likes of Sir Thomas More to suggest that the creation of the United States was part of a great experiment launched by leaders of an ancient league of nations to develop a philosophic empire. Thousands of years before Jesus, he said, they had charged the Western Hemisphere with special spiritual, mental and emotional forces. Evidence of what he called the “secret destiny of America” was first seen in the advanced civilizations of the Aztecs and Mayans, as well as the democratic systems and reverence for nature demonstrated by Native American cultures. With the nation on a war footing, the plan now required that America accept the challenge of leadership and establish “a new order of world ethics firmly established on a foundation of democratic idealism.”
By then Hall had delivered thousands of lectures and published dozens of books on the teachings of sacred thinkers and basic principles of wisdom teachings he felt were potent and timeless. His readers came to view his works as instruction manuals for harmonizing with the inflexible laws of the universe, laws that guide the motion of planets and human evolution, even the destiny of the nation.
President Harry Truman had Hall’s books on his shelves. California Lt. Governor Goodwin Knight was a trustee of Hall’s society, and influential Los Angeles politician Sam Yorty touted him as a valued citizen. Movie stars Bela Lugosi, Lew Ayres and Gloria Swanson were close friends.
But times were changing. By the late 1950s, some thought Hall’s archaic ideals were out of step with materialistic progress, and the world had started to drift away from him. When some of Hall’s concepts about early civilizations and the origins of religion were judged by modern archeological and anthropological standards, their flaws seemed glaring. Everything modern, bright and shiny as a new car had promise. Everything old suddenly seemed quaint, or useless. His ancient spiritual ideals did not seem to mitigate the anxiety and fear that accompanied the advent of weapons of mass destruction.
Hall stood firm, insisting that science couldn’t fathom purposes or meanings of qualities of spirit; that courage and bravery can change the outcome of possibilities on the battlefield, in the laboratory or in the workaday world
