Along with elucidating forgotten philosophical systems and extracting practical applications for these ideologies, Hall threw in jokes and spoke to current events. Thanks to a photographic memory, Hall could lecture for a solid ninety minutes without notes. Within six months, he was lecturing on human auras and reincarnation soon, a six-hundred-member metaphysical church appointed him pastor.
After his introduction to the occult sciences through a chance encounter with a phrenologist on the Santa Monica Pier, the eighteen-year-old Hall was a quick study.
While the image may have been calculated (film-studio photographers were used to shoot his publicity photos), Hall’s interest in ancient myths, rituals, and symbols was authentic. The billowing clothes also worked to conceal Hall’s ample midsection, the product of a gluttonous addiction to sugary sweets. Sahagun describes Hall as “a huge avocado of a man” whose theatrical looks and black capes transmitted a magus-like air. Though relegated to the fringes of intellectual history, Hall’s mission to “bring mysticism down to earth” made him one of the most interesting and colorful characters of the twentieth century, as Louis Sahagun’s terrific biography, Master of the Mysteries: The Life of Manly Palmer Hall, attests. During his lifetime, Hall delivered thousands of public talks and authored more than fifty books covering a wide range of arcane subjects he also managed to toss off a script for Warner Bros., befriend Bela Lugosi, and establish a nonprofit society, the Philosophical Research Society (PRS), which would later develop its own press and university. A Canadian who in the early 1920s found his way, like so many mystics, to Los Angeles, Hall was a self-taught lecturer on a variety of subjects, from reincarnation to freemasonry, astrology to psychology. Hall, who popularized much of what we now call New Age philosophy long before the age of Aquarius began. No person did more for the dissemination of occult wisdom in America than Manly P. Occult Doubles: Two Men, Two Voyages, Two Books
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