souls dedicated to passing this great secret of life on to future generations. [11]
Hall, his listeners assumed, was such a one.
Hall concluded his lectures—which typically took 90 minutes and were delivered without notes or a break for so much as a sip of water—with homespun common sense about modern living drawn from the spiritual beacons of all ages and cultures he had gleaned from occult books he owned, borrowed, or had checked out from the Los Angeles Public Library.
People were impressed by Hall’s confidence, his knowledge and extraordinary physical stature, a tall silver-tongued orator who carried himself with a distinct air of superiority.
In late 1919, Hall was invited to address one of the most progressive religious forums in the city, the Church of the People, which met on Sunday mornings at the Blanchard Hall Building in downtown Los Angeles and followed up with lunch at Clifton’s Cafeteria on Broadway. [12]
The church and its fellowship were founded by the broad-minded evangelist Benjamin Fay Mills, who had become a student of the transcendental philosophy of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau and the practical idealism of American psychologist and philosopher William James.
Mills was a liberal, energetic and brash preacher. His motto: “If I can’t do it, and my wife can’t do it, and the children can’t do it, it can’t be done.”
Eventually, however, Mills lost faith in the transcendental ideals he had championed for years, reverted to the Presbyterian faith and left town. In his place stepped Los Angeles accountant Reynold E. Blight, a gifted speaker who stood less than five feet tall and had to buy his suits in the children’s sections of department stores. Blight, a 33rd° Mason and student of comparative religion, became a bigger draw than Mills. He brightened the services with musical soloists and strengthened them with lectures on Greek philosophy and politics.
When Blight took a sudden leave of absence, Hall, who had been a regular member of the audience, became temporary pastor of the church’s eccentric six-hundred-member congregation. Among its members were populists, intellectual socialists, utopians, single-tax enthusiasts, vegetarians, and young drifters seeking direction in life. “It takes a crank to make the world go ’round,” his congregants liked to say around this time. [13]
Blight never returned to the pulpit. With Hall assuming increasing responsibility, the little church began to downplay political panaceas and emphasize practical philosophy. Hall charged a dollar to attend his Sunday lectures, a set fee that continued all his life.
One adoring member of the congregation, an elderly Scotswoman, presented the young preacher with a rare and elegant four-volume 19th-century set entitled The Works of Jacob Behmen (Boehme). It was the start of a collection of rare and unusual books that would eventually to grow to 30,000 volumes. [14]
Hall was enchanted by the woman’s curious personal life: she lived in an old-fashioned wood frame house, wore heirloom dresses, and kept a second place setting and the most comfortable chair reserved at her dinner table for an “unseen guest” who might be the presence of Christ one day, and the spirit of her long dead husband on another. [15]
Hall had no experience whatsoever in running a church—or anything else. But the 19-year-old was naïve and enthusiastic enough to take on the duties, which included counseling in a small office people old enough to be his grandparents. [16]
“This is something that has to happen to you before you can fully appreciate it,” he said years later. “Factually, I had little to offer them. I had not solved any problems of my own. I didn’t know exactly why I was leading a church, but it was one of those accidents or circumstances of fortune that you do not question. [17]
“So when these people came to me with their problems, I sat back with the supreme wisdom of a teenager and told them what I thought common sense would dictate, what seemed to me reasonable. And it worked in many cases.” [18]
Peppered with a wide variety of personal questions from people seeking immediate answers, Hall began boning up on comparative religion, philosophy, sociology and psychology. He reported back with the warm, reassuring words and admonishments of Confucius or some other sage. Seemingly overnight, Hall became a one-stop source of an astonishing range of eclectic spiritual material that resonated with the intellect, and the subconscious.
Los Angeles, c. 1915
It was a time when many civic and business leaders, judges, architects, physicians, engineers and entertainment industry figures were members of Masonic lodges, whose Neoclassical temples were among the most imposing buildings on the Southern California landscape. Among them was developer Charles E. Toberman, often referred to as the “father of Hollywood.’” Al Ridenour, in a May 2002 Los Angeles Times article, wrote, “Master of the Hollywood Lodge in 1914, Toberman was not only responsible for enticing Sid Grauman into Hollywood to create the Egyptian, Chinese and El Capitan theaters, but also for construction of the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel, Hollywood Bowl, Pantages Theater and Max Factor Building. Before any of these developments stood along the boulevard, however, Toberman built the new lodge headquarters there, in 1922. At the time, the temple was one of the most substantial structures in Hollywood’s sparse mix of buildings and citrus groves. [19]
“In those days when Hollywood was an independent city, the city attorney, city marshal, city treasurer and first mayor, George Dunlop, all were Masons,” Ridenour wrote. “Arthur Letts, founder of the Broadway department store, and artist Paul de Longpre, whose gallery and gardens drew many to the community, both were members along with prominent judges and a significant number of bankers. The city’s first newspaper and doctor’s office were established by members, and the city’s electric trolley car service was owned and operated by brothers of the lodge.” [20]
Hall hoped to catch their attention.
As a gateway into the world of ancient religions, Hall encouraged his congregants to explore Theosophy, a philosophical system founded in the late 1800s by Madame Helena Petrovna Blavatsky that embraced notions of reincarnation, karma, the cyclic nature of creation and the interconnectedness of all life. According to Blavatsky, this Wisdom, in its pure form, existed before the dawn of civilization, but was given to and understood by only a handful of initiates and great minds throughout the ages.
“It was Blavatsky’s contention that the Wisdom could be partially recoverable from a ‘comparative study and analyses of selected philosophers,’” wrote James Santucci, a professor of religious studies and linguistics at California State University, Fullerton, in his A Brief Overview of Theosophy.
By those Blavatsky meant Pythagoras, Plato, Plotinus, Proclus, or schools of philosophies such as Neo-Platonism, Vedanta, Taoism, Kabbalah and the sacred writings of Christianity, Buddhism, Islam and Hinduism.
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