MARIE BAUER HAD JUST DRIVEN HER 1935 DARK GRAY TWO-DOOR FORD THROUGH A SURPRISING NUMBER OF CONSECUTIVE GREEN LIGHTS ALONG GLENOAKS BOULEVARD ONE SUMMER DAY IN 1950 WHEN SHE DECIDED THAT, YES, SHE WOULD MARRY MANLY PALMER HALL.
Marie had already contrived an exotic appearance for him by donning bright colors, wearing metallic bracelets shaped like serpents, and shaving her eyebrows so she could paint them on with the ends turned up like a goddess’. Marie had always believed she had the clairvoyance of a goddess, the senses to see hidden messages and visions invisible to others. Sometimes she saw them in freeway billboard signs, or received them by way of imagined conversations with President Abraham Lincoln, Sir Francis Bacon, or a plump Buddha adorned with Christmas lights that appeared once at her bedside. Occasionally, the messages were conveyed in casual conversations with strangers she decided had been dispatched by secret societies with special plans for her.
She believed that her hypersensitive brain picked up apocalyptic signals. For example, in 1941 a gopher snake crossed her path while she was walking her daughter to a birthday party in Glendale. It was not long after Hall’s first wife committed suicide. Marie bashed the snake with a rock. That encounter was followed by a mental breakdown and weeks of hospitalization. [1]
Those visions, plus her talent for drawing complicated renderings of what she described as “divine geometry” and her headline-grabbing quest for a secret cache of documents and golden goblets she believed were buried in Williamsburg, Virginia, by Bacon, brought her to the attention of students of the occult and mysticism, as well as a few scholars and scientists, who thought she possessed rare powers of perception. Marie, her followers liked to point out, was a living example of how “there is a fine line between genius and madness.”
There were two Maries. There was Marie, the five-foot two-inch beauty with raven black curls, sparkling eyes and a penchant for big jewelry and flashy outfits punctuated with embroidery and crocheted flowers she designed and knitted herself. She loved bright colors, sunshine streaming in through the windows, and working with her hands: turning soil for a flower garden in the morning, and disappearing into a basement full of fabrics in the afternoon to sew sweaters and dresses for friends and relatives. That Marie was a talented and thoughtful woman who challenged business executives and religious leaders—including her husband—to improve the role of women in the workplace and more accurately reflect the role of women in history.
But there was another Marie who was alternately fawning and cruel, and prone to temper tantrums. She was the Marie who berated Hall alone and in public for emphasizing male philosophers in his books, for not watching his calories, for failing to promote her ideas in his books and Sunday lectures, and for having her institutionalized against her will several times over the years. That Marie was superstitious and self-centered and spoke louder than anyone else in the room.
Their relationship would be similar to that of Socrates and Xantippe. In his book Journey in Truth, Hall wrote that the woman’s tirades “were little short of sacrilege to the disciples of the master; but even in the most embarrassing moments Socrates sided with his wife.” [2]
Recalling their relationship during an interview in the living room of their home in 2001, Marie said her husband needed grounding. “There was an awful lot of idolatry in connection with Manly, and he supported it,” she said. “It came naturally to him,” she said, “He had the physical stature. He took it for granted that he was adored. That didn’t appeal to me much and I told him so, plenty.” [3]
Whether at a dinner party or at one of their favorite hangouts such as the Brown Derby restaurant, Hall’s usual reaction to her yelling was to slump into his chair, stare at the floor, munch on cookies or pretend to snooze. [4]
For Marie, marrying Hall would open doors to the highest levels of public life, exactly what she needed to continue her search for Sir Francis Bacon’s buried vault and its blueprints for Utopia.
She was born Marie Schweikert in a village in the foothills of the German Alps on June 25, 1904. One of eight sisters, she was sent to good schools on the modest income of her father Wilhelm, a school teacher and devout Roman Catholic.
Like Hall, Marie too described a fanciful birth story rife with strange events and coincidences.
She claimed that at the moment of her first cry, the sounds of a church choir backed by trumpet and violins issued from just beneath a bedroom window of the Schweikert home. The incident heralded the advent of the “approaching new world,” she said.
Marie liked to say that she was only a few weeks old when she uttered the word “licht,” or light, to her mother. In the third grade, she claimed mysterious recruiters from a “New Age Undertaking” came and gave her a special test. [5]
After World War I, the inflation that ravaged Germany wiped out her family’s savings. [6] Desperate to move to the United States, Marie arranged to be a nursemaid to the daughters of a banking official in Leonia, N.J., until her transit ticket was paid off. [7] Her starting salary was $25 per month. [8] She quit after a few months to be a file clerk at a foreign money exchange. [9] A year later, she became a receptionist at New York’s Savoy Hotel, where she said a “nice, rather short and friendly” George M. Cohen once asked, “What are you doing behind an office desk with that head of hair? Would you like to go on the stage?” [10]
Marie ignored him. But she accepted a subsequent offer to run an office at the Manhasset Yacht Club in Port Washington, Long Island, where she befriended the Bauer family: widow Ann and her two sons, Carlton and George, who had graduated from Cornell University with a degree of mechanical and aeronautical engineer. [11]
The euphoria of being in a position of authority was soon superseded by a personal tragedy so devastating that Marie only mentioned it to her closest friends. [12] She was assaulted and raped by a group of men who left her bleeding on a boathouse floor. Marie became pregnant after the attack and George Bauer helped her arrange an abortion in upstate New York. In her journals, Marie would only say that she abruptly decided to quit the yacht club, close out her bank account and buy a one-way ticket to Los Angeles, where she found work as an extra in 15 motion pictures. [13] But she gave up her dreams of a Hollywood career for marriage to George Bauer in 1931. [14]
Once married and living in New York, Marie suffered mood swings and griped about not having a sense of purpose beyond that of simply being George’s wife and mother to their first child, Peter. A wedding gift from her husband’s brother would change all that. It was a tablecloth with a wide border decorated with scenes of colonial buildings and a church with an ivy-mantled tower in historic Williamsburg, Virginia. Marie was deeply moved by the imagery. [15]
Within a few years, she sought out that very tower and the dull sounds of shovels and pickaxes would be echoing in its shadows as the code-cracking mystic with Shirley Temple curls directed a sensational quest for Bacon’s buried treasure. What possessed Marie? She may have felt she could never do enough to outshine Manly Hall, who she met under mysterious circumstances one day in 1934.
In her biographical book Quest for the Bruton Vault, Marie said she was out shopping in New York when a handsome stranger suggested she take a nickel subway ride from 33rd to 70th Street to attend a lecture at the Pythian Temple. Somehow, the idea “struck me as just right,” she recalled. [16] The lecture was already underway when she arrived and took a balcony seat. Marie was spellbound by the “articulate fluency and conviction” of the man on stage, and a slide-show presentation of architectural drawings of a philosophical school he wanted to build in Los Angeles. “To me it was a straight answer from heaven and meant only one thing,” she wrote in Quest. “It was the school Peter would attend, and we would therefore have to move to Los Angeles ‘for good’ as soon as we could manage.” [17]
Marie immersed herself in studies of astrology, esoteric philosophy, and every book by Manly P. Hall that she could find. For a brief time, she worked as a clothing designer in order to raise $100 to buy a copy of Hall’s Secret Teachings of All Ages. In 1937, Marie persuaded her husband to move his family to Glendale, placing her only a few miles away from Hall’s headquarters. When he was old enough, she would enroll her son Peter in Hall’s school. In the meantime, Hall thrilled her with personal tours of his stunning collection of alchemy books, and asked her to translate some of the old German texts he had collected.
To her, no one better personified the American metaphysical dream than Manly P. Hall. In April 1937, for example, Hall had lectured at a tea in his honor at the opening of an exhibition of his rare Elizabethan books sponsored by the British Empire Chamber of Commerce in New York’s Rockefeller Center. Hall told a newspaper reporter assigned to cover the event that deep scientific and philosophical secrets extremely dangerous to even speak of had been hidden in Bacon’s cryptic writings. The reporter’s subsequent article erroneously concluded that Hall was fluent in 40 languages and was an authority on almost every philosophy and religion ever practiced.
The following year saw the release of Lost Horizon, a motion picture with a mystical theme and starring Sam Jaffe as a memorable High Lama. The movie’s production crew included set photographer Schuyler Crail, who had Hall pose in costume—wearing dark facial makeup, a beard and a white turban—for a series of unrelated portraits, which were never made public.
The visits with Hall at his retreat imbued Marie with what she described as “the most focused sense of home” she’d ever felt. [18] One day in early 1938, Marie was volunteering at the PRS library when a visitor waiting for an appointment with Hall drew her into a casual conversation. He was Dr. Wallace McCook Cunningham, a balding middle-aged economist listed in Who’s Who as a scholar of Shakespeare. [19]
Cunningham told her he’d devised a system of “anagrammatic codes” that enabled him to decipher hidden messages in the bard’s plays and sonnets. Reading behind the lines, as it were, he told her that Bacon had stashed a treasure in gold, secrets to world peace and lost Shakespearean manuscripts in a vault buried in the Bruton Parish Episcopal Church grounds in Williamsburg, Virginia. Marie felt as though she had been hit by lightning. Rather than just talk about the vault, she thought, “Let’s go dig it up!”
Francis Bacon
First, she asked Hall for permission to review his collection of 17th-century books on symbolism. It didn’t take long to find what she was looking for in George Withers’ Emblemes, Ancient and Modern. In her eyes, the volume was loaded with hidden messages about Bacon’s buried treasure. [20] Marie was so excited she couldn’t sleep that night. Her husband, who was busy directing construction of their dream house in Glendale, thought she was possessed by Bacon’s ghost. Fearing she had lost touch with reality, a relative took charge of caring for her two young children, as well as the household chores.
The foundation of the Bauers’ new home had just been laid, jutting barely two feet above ground when Marie bought round-trip train tickets to Virginia. Before leaving, she visited Hall for his blessing, and to borrow the Withers book.
Marie departed Los Angeles on the train Challenger on May 16, 1938. Thirteen days later, she arrived in Colonial Williamsburg Inc., John D. Rockefeller Jr.’s $20 million restoration project, armed with Withers’ book, an original copy of Bacon’s New Atlantis and a copy of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. She heard the peal of an afternoon bell, and it sounded to her like a warm welcome.
In a decade of discovery crackling with excitement over the unearthing of Egyptian tombs and expeditions to the last frontiers of South America, Africa and Asia, Marie’s project soon attracted the interests of an assortment of spiritual dilettantes and dreamers.
William Shakespeare
By September, the effort had been chronicled by all the local newspapers, which pointed out that Williamsburg officials who worked on restoration of the colonial city were skeptical, but ultimately seduced by Marie’s zeal. Duncan Cocke, retired vice president of Colonial Williamsburg, recalled Marie as an artistic, articulate and persuasive individual, wearing pervasive perfume.
Helping Marie was Cunningham, who first informed her of the coded messages in Shakespeare’s works. Under the watchful eyes of security guards and curious townsfolk, two African-American workers provided by Colonial Williamsburg dug 12 feet into the earth, then sank steel rods six feet deeper still. Nothing.
Hecklers on the sidelines reportedly asked aloud how it could have been that Bacon—politician, poet, scholar, dramatist, philosopher and founder of modern science—could have found the time to write Shakespeare’s volumes. If Bacon wrote Shakespeare, who wrote Bacon? Undaunted, Marie studied the inscriptions on nearby tombstones and decided that they too contained hidden codes, directing them to a different spot. “Dig here!” she ordered, gesturing to a nearby plot where they uncovered an old foundation that seemed to jibe with her predictions. [21]
As dirt flew in the air and photographers leaped into the pit for a closer look, Marie and the workmen chipped a piece of a wooden box lined with thumbtacks. Excitedly she proclaimed it was a chunk of Bacon’s treasure, which by now she had dubbed the Bruton Vault.
But Colonial Williamsburg officials balked. They said it was a coffin and forbade her from digging any deeper. Before leaving for home, however, Marie enlisted the services of Mark Malamphy, an engineer with Hans Lundberg Company of Toronto, Ontario, who, on her behalf, made history by conducting the first geophysical survey for an archeological application in either North or South America, according to geophysicist Bruce W. Bevan, who in 2000 published a scientific analysis of the effort in Archeological Prospection.
Malamphy’s “electrical potential measurements” suggested the existence of a large object in the work site. Decades later, subsequent explorations at the site revealed, however, that it was anything but a cubic stone vault filled with 17th-century documents in copper cylinders. In an interview, Bevan said, “Malamphy was right; there was something unusual down there: a natural change in the composition of the sediment of compacted sand and shells.” [22]
Marie, who knew none of that at the time, returned to Glendale in triumph. The Bruton Vault had been found “without a shadow of doubt,” she proclaimed in her first book, Foundations Unearthed, published in 1942. The book spoke of a plan to create a “United Brotherhood of the Earth,” and the need for a national movement demanding that the federal government take on the job of opening the vault. [23]
When federal authorities came calling a year later, it wasn’t about her book. Somehow it was reported to the War Department that she had the notion that Hitler might release a “deathly thing” on the world if he was pushed into a corner. [24]
She also bragged of having discovered a formula “which would control energy and force released by electrons and atoms,” according to FBI documents. An inquiry by the Manhattan District of the United State’s Engineer’s Office in Chicago—a branch of the same federal agency that was secretly developing the first atom bomb at the time—eventually led to the doorstep of Marie’s mentor, Manly P. Hall. Hall told investigators that while Marie was an expert in cracking codes buried in Lord Bacon’s writings, he did not believe that she had been able to “tune in” to anything “big.” He also suggested that she had gleaned her ideas from three-hundred-year-old books in his library. Federal authorities dropped the inquiry.
Marie’s staunchest ally was Fred Cole, a trim, dapper Long Beach electrician who said he “made a solemn vow” in 1947 to devote his life—and much of his income—to her cause. True to his word, Cole became her one-man army. Cole had a terrible crush on Marie, and great respect for Hall. In any case, he couldn’t have asked for a more obliging spiritual leader. She almost instantly consented to let him accompany her to the homes of local metaphysicians such as Hubert Stowitts, the first American star of the Russian ballet who spent the later years of his life in Redondo Beach painting mandalas. [25]
Stowitts, who was smitten by Marie, gossiped wrongly that her idol, Hall, suffered from syphilis. Marie confided to friends that Stowitts liked her mystical drawings so much that he planned to abandon his own work in order to promote hers. [26]
Marie and Cole were inseparable. They traveled to astrological conventions on the East Coast and to Washington, where they tried to solicit help from Congressional leaders, FBI Chief J. Edgar Hoover, the U.S. Department of Justice, the Library of Congress, the People’s Republic of China Consulate, and the President of the United States. Cole researched and wrote two bills seeking federal support for Marie’s cause—the “World Peace Act of 1950,” and the “Leadership Emancipation Act of 1950”—then lobbied Congress for their passage. The same year, Cole planned to hire an aircraft to drop thousands of leaflets about Marie and her visions over the nation’s capital. The plan was aborted at the last minute, he recalled.
It is not clear whether Hall knew the full extent of Marie’s campaign. Yet her flirtatious nature and moxie had energized and stimulated him at a time when he was becoming increasingly sedentary, gray-haired and heavy. Having a beautiful, energetic woman on his elbow felt right at a time when California was gearing up for the postwar boom, Disneyland, and movies starring fun-loving, occasionally misguided, teenagers. Beyond all that, he was swamped with invitations to prestigious gatherings across the city.
Hall was keynote speaker for graduating classes at the College of Osteopathic Physicians and Surgeons in Los Angeles. He delivered lectures on comparative religion at USC. He was master of ceremonies at the American Federation of Astrologers annual convention banquet held at the Hotel Biltmore in 1950.
Manly P. Hall and Marie Bauer stood together on December 5, 1950, in a small ceremony at the Hollywood home of Blanca Holmes, astrologer to stars including Marilyn Monroe, a minister in the Arcane Church of Astrology and wife of movie actor Stuart Holmes. At the critical moment, Holmes forgot the words to the wedding vows. Hall whispered them to her so that she could speak them back aloud. [27]
The newlyweds are believed to have honeymooned briefly at Riverside’s Mission Inn, 45 miles southeast of Los Angeles, before moving into Hall’s home on Commonwealth near Griffith Park. He had received the house–an unassuming structure with heavy drapes and pink interior—along with $15,000 cash under terms of the last will and testament of his patron Caroline Lloyd, who died in 1946. Lloyd also left Hall a roughly $10,000 portion of her estate’s annual income from shares in the world’s largest oil companies for 38 years. [28]
Lloyd family historians say Caroline’s daughter, Estelle, was even more generous to Hall in her own last will and testament.
Hall was aware that as public figures he and Marie symbolized a modern occult marriage, one that fulfilled their own idealistic books and teachings. In fact, their home life was as rocky as it was unconventional. From the beginning, Manly and Marie slept in separate bedrooms. Her paranoia and explosive temper kept friends and relatives on edge. Not long after they were married, Marie had a nervous breakdown at Los Angeles International Airport after returning from an East Coast campaign to solicit support for her Bruton Vault project. Their first Christmas as husband and wife was a disaster. Marie believed the holiday season brought personal bad tidings because of the juxtaposition of the sun, moon and stars. [29]
In late 1950, while Hall was out of state on a lecture tour, Marie sold his Commonwealth house and bought a spacious Mediterranean-style estate a few blocks away on Hillhurst Drive.
Marie went to work redecorating the new place inside and out. Interior walls disappeared. Trees and shrubs were planted. With the help of Hall’s handyman stepfather, Charlie Hall, a Japanese tea house was erected in the backyard.
“Charlie was a wonderful guy—he was the only one who never negated me,” Marie recalled in an interview. “I’d say, ‘Charlie, smack this wall out and put in some windows.’ He did it. Meanwhile, I’d be outside mixing cement.”
Marie and Charlie quickly transformed the property into a lush, exotic garden. Hall was angry that she had not consulted with him before buying the new home. But he could not deny the new house on a shady lane in the upscale north side of Los Feliz was a move in the right direction. Not quite far enough, according to Marie’s daughter, Jo Ann.
“Ours was not a happy home,” recalled Jo Ann, who was a teenager at the time of their marriage. “Mom had a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde personality. On top of that, there were all these people seeing things in Manly and mom that just weren’t there. The inconsistencies and hypocrisy were depressing.” For example, Marie’s followers didn’t mind that from the beginning of her writing career she had resolved never to use a dictionary, for definitions or spelling, because, as she explained in an essay called “Inquiry into the Nature of Space and of Life in Space,” “I wanted to write for everybody, not just intellectuals or book-worms.”
Marie’s tirades were getting on Hall’s nerves. In frustration, he placed late-night calls to Marie’s youngest sister, Agnes, who lived in California at that time. Occasionally, Hall would stay at the home of a friend until the storm was over. “Manly called me many times when Marie went overboard with her crazy ideas,” recalled Agnes Avery, 81. “Desperate and almost in tears, he would ask, ‘Can you come over? I can’t handle it. I don’t know what to do.’”
“I’d go in there,” she said, “and say, ‘Marie, if you want to believe these things, fine. But why not cool off and let people around you have their peace?’”
In many ways, though, Hall had never had it so good. Although Marie picked on him relentlessly, she gave him a semblance of a family life. Beyond that, her looks were striking, and she really did try to please him by whipping up his favorite meat and potato dishes, sweet cakes, cookies, puddings, pies, and strudels.
Hall rarely spoke harshly of his wife in public or in private. Instead, he quietly endured her attacks while working behind the scenes to ensure that she didn’t hurt herself, others or his public image. That wasn’t easy. Shortly after they were married, law enforcement authorities showed up at their doorstep wanting to talk to Marie. Exactly what they wanted from her is unclear. Marie’s children believe it had to do with a failed attempt by local Nazi Party members to recruit her during World War II. But it could just as easily have been about Marie and Cole’s repeated unsuccessful efforts to meet with federal officials about the Bruton Vault.
For a brief time, Cole had even lived in Washington as her “ambassador in residence.” [30]
“While working as a maintenance man in Washington,” Cole recalled, “I was changing light bulbs in a capital building office when I spotted W. Averill Harriman [then an advisor to President Eisenhower] and tried to tell him about the Bruton Vault. My boss screamed, ‘Hey, you’re not supposed to be talking to these people!’
“Another time, I shoved some of Marie’s booklets under the arm of a young and promising Congressman by the name of John F. Kennedy, who just gave me a funny look.”
Cole returned to Los Angeles in 1951 with news of defeat. “I sat in Manly and Marie’s living room one night and burst into tears,” he said. “I told them, ‘I tried to represent your work and I failed.’ They commiserated.”
From then on, however, Hall referred to Cole sarcastically as “The Senator” behind his back.
The Halls still appeared as an occult celebrity couple in Los Angeles. They drove to dinner parties and fundraisers in Hall’s big black Lincoln. They hosted lively spiritual gatherings in their home. They lectured at PRS on how best to improve harmony in marriage, raise well-adjusted children and conquer anxiety amid the proliferation of nuclear weapons. They experimented with alternative medicines and healing techniques, and injected themselves with B-vitamin energy boosters, all popular with the movie industry crowd.
Hall used his celebrity to counter a number of postwar ideas that were attracting huge followings. Existentialism, which holds that each individual must oppose a basically hostile and purposeless universe through the exercise of his free will, was a dangerous “emancipation from purpose” at a time when “sympathetic forms of spiritual nutrition” were needed, Hall said. [31] He railed against an emerging corporate culture, calling it “shrewd, competitive and efficient,” but “not profoundly wise, ethical or good.” He dismissed psychiatrist Karl Menninger’s notion that the search for permanent peace was actually a thinly disguised wish to die, as antithetical to time-tested religious prescriptions for harmonious living through tradition and custom.
“Unless we attain some degree of freedom from personal chaos,” Hall wrote in his magazine, “it may be difficult to bring about a reorganization of society or the improvement of the collective human pattern.” [32]
Other essays addressed issues closer to home. An advice column he wrote for his Horizon magazine seemed aimed at Marie and Cole. “There is also something amiss in the rather familiar situation of some so-called visitor from the hinterland burdening a totally unqualified mortal with a project which would require the wisdom of Solomon and the ingenuity of an international banker . . . To entrust a docile housewife with the formation of a world religion or some tired businessman, who has never been able to balance his own budget, with reconstruction of the economic system, would appear decidedly unreasonable.” [33]
Probably it was a desire to relieve his congregation of anxieties and harmful dreams that moved Hall in the early 1950s to issue a stream of easily digestible essays. Students who had been prepped for Egyptian magic, Masonic rituals and alchemical secrets were now being told to relax and consider the philosophy of Oriental flower arrangements, the need for internal maturity and guardian angels.
Hall had not turned his back on magic and utopian ideals, but more and more, he was sharing such notions only with a select few. Leila Sherman, an artist with an open mind who had been following Hall’s work since the 1940s, was more interested in the chiseled lines of the philosopher’s face, which were prominently displayed on PRS letterhead, book covers and advertisements.
Rocket scientist and occultist Jack Parsons
Sherman was 39 and living in a Hollywood apartment complex owned by actors Wallace Beery and his brother Noah when Marie learned that she had created a remarkable bas-relief carving of Hall’s head. “Manly and Marie came by the apartment wanting to see it,” Sherman recalled six decades later. “When they walked in the door, a friend of mine directed Manly to a chair that she said would be comfortable. He chuckled and said, ‘My dear, it’s not a question of comfort. It’s a question of sturdiness.’” [34]
“He was pleased with the sculpture and they stayed for afternoon tea,” she said. “But Manly didn’t say boo the whole time because Marie talked a blue streak about digging something up that would prove Shakespeare’s plays were written by Lord Bacon.”
“I was a little in awe of Manly just the same,” she said. “He was tremendously egotistical. The middle of his body was large and very round. His legs were very strong. His eyes piercing, but cold.”
A dinner party at Hall’s home for Brave New World author Aldous Huxley, his wife Laura, and Church of Religious Science founder Ernest Holmes, also fell flat amid Marie’s relentless self-aggrandizing chatter. [35]
The year ended with a setback that marked the end of an era for Hall by claiming the lives of two people who had been with him from the start. On December 23, 1951, 83-year-old Walter Young, who had donated his home to the philosopher’s publishing business three decades earlier, was in conversation with Hall at a Vermont Avenue theater when he collapsed on the floor. Young was taken to a local hospital where he was pronounced dead. About 45 minutes later, his wife, 75-year-old Mary Young, went to the hospital, where she collapsed and died after being informed of her husband’s death. [36] The $33.73 that Walter had in his pocket, and the couple’s modest bank savings, were donated to Hall and his society.
Los Angeles got a shocking view of the darkest fringe of the occult world on June 18, 1952, when rocket expert John “Jack” Parsons, co-founder of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena and secret practitioner of sex magic, was killed in an explosion that ripped apart his garage. Parsons was 31 when he dropped a batch of mercuric fulminate, setting off a blast that blew off his right arm, breaking his other arm and both legs, and leaving a gaping hole in his jaw. Later that day, his mother committed suicide by taking sleeping pills.
Parsons was a student of Aleister Crowley, the English occultist who called himself “Beast 666” and was branded by the press as “the wickedest man in the world.” Parsons and his associates had been trying to conceive a “magical child” on a black altar inside his two-story home on South Orange Grove in Pasadena. [37]
There is no indication that Hall ever visited Parsons’ home, or even crossed paths with those who did. Hall’s writings would probably have seemed far too watered down for their tastes. However, he was familiar with Crowley and his works. Depending on who he was talking to, Hall variously described Crowley as “a horrible man” or “a great poet.”
In any case, he owned a collection of Crowley’s books, which were stored on a library shelf that was off-limits to the public. He also for years kept an autographed copy of one of Crowley’s paeans to debauchery, Summa Spes, in the top drawer of his office desk. That poem was written in 1903 and opens with the lines:
Existence being sorrow,
The cause of it desire,
A merry tune I borrow
To light upon the Lyre:
If death destroy me quite,
Then I cannot lament it;
I’ve lived, kept life alight,
And damned if I repent it!
Let me die in a ditch,
Damnably drunk,
Or lipping a punk,
Or in bed with a bitch!
I was ever a hog;
Dung? I am one with it!
Let me die like a dog;
Die and be done with it!
When asked by an associate what such a thing was even doing in his office, Hall explained that it served as a constant reminder of how low human intellect can go in the name of art.
