ENERGY WAS THE BYWORD OF HEALTH GURUS AND METAPHYSICIANS WHO FLOURISHED IN LOS ANGELES IN THE 1950S, AS THEY PITCHED MYSTIC MEDICAL TECHNIQUES THAT PROMISED RELIEF WITH RAYS FROM THEIR HANDS, SECRET HERBAL MIXTURES, OR FROM STRANGE MECHANICAL DEVICES.
A Swiss immigrant measured “brain waves” with a “biometer”; a woman diagnosed the “vibrations” in drops of dried blood with a “radionics” machine; a therapist bathed abdomens in colored lights, then tapped the tummies to detect telltale sounds of sickness; a stout machinist gave jolts of healing energy from his hands. These were the faces of alternative medicine in Los Angeles.
They made a living even as they tried to stay one step ahead of the American Medical Association’s relentless crackdowns on scientifically unproven cures. To hear them tell it, they were pioneers trying to break through the walls of tradition, only to be attacked by skeptics in law enforcement and jealous doctors in the medical establishment.
An article in Hall’s PRS Horizon touted these healers and latter-day alchemists for laboring in home kitchens and basements, conducting mysterious experiments and pondering the recipes of ancient alchemists in the belief that the madness of one generation would be recognized as genius in another. [1]
The general goal was to restore a proper flow and balance of a person’s “vibratory energy,” a type of spiritual vitality that could not be measured by traditional physical, chemical or biological methods, but was conditioned by thoughts, emotions, habits and attitudes. In healthy, emotionally balanced people, this energy field, when properly balanced, serves as a barrier to bacterial attacks. Thus, while people are not responsible for the particular germ or virus that attacks them, they are responsible for their vulnerability.
Blocked energy is also harmful, much as a person would find in a home with clogged water pipes. As Hall put it, “Energy flowing desperately outward will do the same thing as a flooded stream. It will break through dams. It will destroy good land. It will break through dikes and flood important communal areas. Energy out of control floods the mental and emotional life resulting in excesses of numerous kinds which always arise from lack of control.” [2]
A key to improvement in human energy fields is attitude. Therefore, metaphysician Hall concluded, “Mysticism, as preventative medicine, could probably reduce the need for curing and treating 40% to 50%. A great many ailments could be controlled simply by attitude.” [3]
The patron saints of this approach included Antoine Mesmer, the 18th-century Austrian physician who supposed a healing fluid emanated from the stars, and the similarly inclined 14th-century Swiss physician and alchemist Paracelsus.
Hall’s alchemist friends embraced their ideas. Some of them routinely hiked into the nearby San Gabriel Mountains at night with heavy glass plates on which to collect 15 to 20 gallons of morning dew they believed was laden with powers captured from the rays of the stars.
In fact, Paracelsus prompted the development of modern chemistry as he ventured through Switzerland, Austria and Bavaria preaching, treating and studying various diseases. Paracelsus, who was reviled in his lifetime for challenging academic authorities and for his bombastic personality, also championed the healing power of energy currents he believed streamed from an invisible spiritual world that parallels ours. [4] And it follows, he suggested, that each physical body co-exists with an invisible twin “etheric body,” and that the spleen, liver and other “contact points” allow for the flow of Divine Energies. Blockages of these contact points cause sickness. Paracelsus and other similarly enlightened physicians could clear these passages and restore health. In many respects, Paracelsus’ treatments mirrored those described in records of Oriental acupuncture practices going back more than 2,500 years. Like Paracelsus, the ancient Chinese thought the body’s physiological systems were connected to pathways through which a vital life force they called chi circulated.
Better living through occult technology
“As the odor of the lily passes from the flower into the surrounding air,” Paracelsus wrote, according to a translation by Franz Hartmann in his book The Life of Paracelsus, “so the vital force contained in the invisible body passes into the visible form, and beyond it. The physical body has the capacity to produce visible organs—such as the eyes and the ears, the tongue and the nose-—but they all take their origin from the invisible body, of which the external visible form is only the outward representation.” [5]
Such ideas were discussed long into the night at Betty Morales’ legendary parties for leaders in alternative medicine, medical professionals and celebrities at Eden Ranch, her 23-acre homestead in Topanga Canyon. Known as “The First Lady of Nutrition,” Morales was a charismatic woman of Irish and English descent with a bawdy sense of humor, a 42D bust and a successful health food store on Third Street and Western Avenue called Organic-Ville. “Betty didn’t smoke or drink, but she loved being around interesting people,” recalled her daughter-in-law, Patricia Moore-Joshi. “Betty used to say the gatherings were wonderful, strange mixes of eclectic personalities.” [6]
Before she died in 1987 at 82 as a result of complications from injuries she suffered in a seven-car pileup on the Santa Monica Freeway, Morales was constantly lecturing, experimenting with vitamin concoctions, and smuggling the alleged cancer cure Laetrile across the border from Mexico.
Mingling under Morales’ scrub oaks and pepper trees on a given evening were scientists such as Linus Pauling, the Nobel Prize winning champion of mega-doses of Vitamin C, and celebrities in the occult underground such as actress Rhonda Fleming, who was a member of the metaphysical First Church of Religious Science, actress Gloria Swanson, a famous health food fanatic, and actor Glenn Ford, one of the first movie stars to come out strongly with a belief in reincarnation and astrology. Also on hand were occult philosophers such as Manly P. Hall and psychics and miracle workers for whom Hall was a VIP patient.
His myriad ailments related to his thyroid problems, obesity, addiction to junk food and aversion to exercise kept them busy.
Among Hall’s favorite “doctors” was William E. Gray, a cheery, stocky machinist who claimed he could ‘blow out your cancer’ with jolts of energy from his hands. Gray went by the aliases “Mr. A” and “Phil” to protect his privacy, but he traveled in the same social circles as Hall. A mutual friend of theirs, Judy Crawford, recalled that the men “talked mentally to each other,” and were allied with “The Masters” who help guide human activity from some ethereal realm. “I once asked Bill Gray about the Holocaust,” Crawford said. “Bill said that he, Manly and the Masters ‘saved as many Jews as we could.’ You see, Manly and Bill were put here to help change the earth into the new way of doing things. They knew each other from past lives.” [7] Gray confided to Hall that he had been born with the power to heal, and that he had used it as a small boy to help sick farm animals. During World War II, he said he used it to treat the aches and pains of Vallejo, California, ship builders. But he could not transfer his powers to others.
Gray’s frequent companion was Dr. Dena L. Smith, a resident surgeon at Los Angeles General Hospital. An article in Cosmopolitan magazine in 1963 dubbed the blue-eyed blonde one of the nation’s “beauties in medicine.”
In the 1950s and 1960s, Gray and Smith, who hoped to establish a research clinic based on his seeming ability to help some people, spent the winter months relaxing in the South Pacific. During the summer, they traveled from one appointment to another with patients including Congresswoman Francis Bolton, California Gov. Goodwin Knight and Alabama Gov. George Wallace.
In an interview Smith recalled, “One night, all Sacramento was worried because the governor was missing. In fact, Goodwin had gone to Berkeley that night to receive treatments from Bill.” On several occasions, she added, “Bill stayed at the governor’s mansion.” [8]
Their liaison to Hollywood high society was actor Glenn Ford, who invited his friends including judges, attorneys, and Hollywood executives over for treatments in the living room of his spacious home behind the Beverly Hills Hotel, Smith recalled. Ford, who had a deformed back that was deftly concealed from view in his movies with special costumes and camera angles, grew vegetables in his backyard on immense nursery beds built on stilts so that he wouldn’t have to bend down. He liked to tell people that the Gray’s treatments energized him to work in the garden.
Renulife Violet Ray electrotherapy pamphlet
“Oh boy! Bill is coming today! Bill is coming today!” Hall would chortle to herald the impending arrival of the healer who believed that mononucleosis resulted from repressed emotions, multiple sclerosis from jealousy, polio from “atmospheric life energy storms,” and female indigestion, eczema, bronchial trouble, shortness of breath and heart strain from a “dormant clitoris nerve.” [9]
After exchanging pleasantries and a few jokes about Hall’s weight problem, Gray would set to work, ‘recharging the magnetic fields’ of the philosopher, his wife, and a select group of friends and relatives. The sessions began with Gray laying his ear on a patient’s chest and exclaiming, “Oh, I’ve got the signal.” [10] Then he would slip his flingers beneath a patient’s shirt or blouse, pants or dress, and administer his electric current. Close friends of the Halls said that upon contact, the muscles between Gray’s left shoulder and elbow would expand and contract like an electric pump.
Gray was frequently called on to apply his magic touch to Hall’s chronic sore spots: his neck, stomach, joints, and feet. Hall had particular problems with his gall bladder. He also treated Marie for a problem in her neck that “deflected her energy and made her crazy,” according to Judy Crawford, a friend of the family.
“When things got too bad,” Crawford recalled, “Manly would call and say, ‘Marie’s fighting with everybody. Can you come by and do something?’ Bill would go over and give her an energy treatment below the belly button. She’d lie on the sofa, and he’d apply the energy. Then she’d be just fine.”
In New Age author Ruth Montgomery’s biography of Gray, Born to Heal, Hall recalled a visit by Gray when he was bedridden with a severe gallbladder attack. “My abdomen was distended, and I was vomiting green bile,” Hall said. “The doctors told me I was too overweight to risk the necessary operation, and I was really sick. [Marie Hall] called Phil [Gray], who was working in Los Angeles at the time, and he came to my home. After greeting me, he said, ‘Well, Manly, looks like you’re in trouble, so we’ll see what the energies will do. Otherwise I know they’ll pick me as a pallbearer, and you’re too damned heavy to carry.’ Phil and I are always kidding each other, but that time I was too sick even to grin. He blasted the energy through me, and soon I was back on my feet.” (The “remedy” was short-lived. Hall’s gallbladder problem returned with a vengeance a few years later. Before going in for surgery to remove it, Hall went on a cottage cheese-no chocolate diet and shed about one hundred pounds so that medical instruments could more easily reach the troubled organ.)
Gray also treated Marie’s daughter Jo Ann for mononucleosis. Marie’s sycophant Fred Cole brought his mother in once to have her bowel movements corrected. “He put his hands under my mother’s skirt,” Cole recalled. “But she eventually had to have an operation.” [11]
Not everyone was comfortable with Gray’s style of healing. “He tried to lay his hands under my dress and on my tummy,” recalled Marie Hall’s sister, Agnes. “I said, ‘That will be enough of that, mister!’” [12]
When the sessions ended, Marie would prepare an elaborate dinner for the group while Gray and Hall squealed with childish delight over a game of Chinese checkers.
The Halls were close friends of Oscar Brunler, an amiable physician and Rosicrucian chemist who lived a few miles west at the top of a steep flight of stairs on Queens Way off Sunset Boulevard. Brunler was noted for having invented a special torch used in underwater demolition work during World War II. But the Halls were interested in his “brain scale,” a mechanism roughly the size and shape of a shoebox that he said produced a numerical value for the frequency of the “di-electric radiation” vibrations streaming out of a person’s brain, or off their artwork, or handwriting.
Brunler believed that a person’s handwriting could be measured for levels of “brain radiation” with his biometer. This was because, he said, eyes focus such energies on the moving pen or pencil during the act of writing. People with the greatest mental capacity, he determined through experimentation, also showed the highest frequency of vibrations. Writing samples could only be tested with his biometer if they were rendered with a fountain pen. Ballpoint pens, which were becoming popular in the early 1950s, were useless, Brunler said. Hall, who had been collecting the signatures of occultists and influential leaders in science, literature, business and religion for decades, provided Brunler with lots of material for testing.
In his promotional literature, Brunler claimed his “discovery of the di-electric radiation and its application to the mind of man is proving to be one of the epoch-making discoveries of the Twentieth Century,” and that he had measured the brain radiation of “20,000 men, women and children from the common laborer to the outstanding personalities in all walks of life.” Brunler held that most people registered below 300 on his brain scale. Hall’s biometric reading of about 450 was in the vicinity of Einstein’s and Tolstoy’s, Brunler concluded, but about 200 points below Madame Blavatsky’s and Michelangelo’s. Brunler rated himself at 792, 12 points higher than Leonardo da Vinci.
In his book Rays and Radiation Phenomena, Brunler tried to explain the dynamics of the peculiar radiation, which he said “no instruments used by orthodox science can measure.”
“The radiation of our mind is di-electric radiation,” he said. “Our mind is a condensation of the all-pervading energy. Mind is not matter, but is energy at its first stage of condensation. Mind is composed therefore of neutrons and the radiation of our minds is the radiation of the neutrons. The wave length of the radiation indicates the energy condensation of the neutrons.”
Brunler’s peers included a mutual friend of his and Hall’s, Ruth B. Drown, a masculine-looking specialist in bone diseases who was being closely watched by American Medical Association investigators. Drown’s method was to transmit shortwave “healing rays” over long distances from a “broadcasting room” in Los Angeles. Drown also used a “radio-vision instrument” to analyze the radiation flowing off dried drops of a patient’s blood on blotter paper and then draw conclusions about his or her health.
In her book The Theory and Technique of the Drown Radio Therapy and Radio-vision Instruments, she explained the system this way. “When placed on a blotter, the blood is crystallized, even as ice is crystallized steam, and each small atom is the precipitated crystallized end of an invisible line which reaches into the ethers,” she writes. “This invisible line passes through the body over the nerves and through the blood vessels and the electrons from the air, water and earth supply the body structure, attaching themselves to that line, which holds the pattern of the body.”
Medical authorities believed Drown was an outright fraud, or insane. But some metaphysicians regarded her as a medical genius. Among them was one of Hall’s close friends, Dr. Robert Gerard, who served as chief of intelligence for psychological warfare under General Dwight D. Eisenhower during World War II and later headed the Psychophysiological Research Laboratory at the Veterans Administration Neuropsychiatric Hospital in Los Angeles. “Ruth Drown was a brilliant woman who was psychologically crucified by the state,” Gerard said. “When you use machines that are more advanced than what science believes, you will be accused of being a quack.” [13]
Gerard, a longtime PRS trustee, was also a devotee of Brunler, who died in 1952, and among five people trained to use his “biometer.” The others included a college counselor, a head of personnel for a large corporation, and a physician, Gerard said.
Leaning back in a comfortable armchair in his Brentwood living room, Gerard reveled in the memories of the 1950s and 1960s. “I got my Ph.D. in clinical psychology at UCLA in 1958. It would have been denied had they known I studied Blavatsky. At UCLA, I was known as a great scholar and hardcore scientist.” Brunler, he added, “thought I was a virtuoso occultist” who could measure a person’s energy fields simply by looking at them. “Before Brunler died, I told him that I could get biometric results without using his machine, which was empty except for some nylon strings,” Gerard recalled. “I had discovered that one’s very soul knows what another’s measurement is. Brunler took my hand and said, ‘So, you have discovered the secret. Please, keep it to yourself. Some people need black boxes in order to believe.’ I said, ‘Dr. Brunler, it shall remain a secret.’”
About 120 miles south of Hollywood, at a secluded health resort in the hills of Tecate, Baja California, Mexico, Hungarian immigrant Edmond Bordeaux Szekely was running the International Biogenic Society he had co-founded with Romain Rolland, a French writer awarded the 1915 Nobel Prize in literature. Rolland’s works celebrated the spiritual struggles of great artists such as Beethoven, Michelangelo and Tolstoy. Szekely, who said he received a Ph.D. from the University of Paris and spoke 10 languages, offered a health regimen that he called a path toward “a wholesome, meaningful and spiritual fulfillment in your way of living, nutrition, meditation, self-analysis, and in other essential preconditions of individual happiness.” [14]
Szekely drew some of his medical strategies from a book called The Essene Gospel of Peace, published in 1936, which he claimed to have translated from an Aramaic text he’d gotten from the secret archives of the Vatican. In that gospel, Jesus urges a group of followers to cleanse their “hinder parts” with an “angel of water”: a colonics device made from a hollowed-out gourd filled with “river water warmed by the sun.”
“No man may come before the face of God,” Szekely quotes Jesus as saying, “whom the angel of water does not let pass.”
In another book Cosmotherapy, Szekely gave instructions for “preparing the human organism for the taking of an internal douche” by having him or her consume “fruit juices” at lunch and dinner for three days. When it came time for the treatment, the patient was to absorb two to four quarts of water from a container fixed six feet high “so as to provide the pressure required to make the water flow into the intestines.” Application included massaging a patient’s water-filled abdomen by “rubbing it with the hand in a clockwise direction.” In general he advised, “It is a good plan to repeat the douches every five days throughout the period of detoxification, whatever the nature of the illness.” [15]
Szekely, who published more than 80 books before his death in 1979, offered for sale a range of other health programs and gadgets. Among them was a “biogenic battery” comprised of bound leaves of grass to be brushed over one’s genitals. But it was a Szekely-style “water angel” that may have contributed to Hall’s failing health in 1990, according to his family physician and the Los Angeles County Coroner’s Office.
A page from Hall’s 17th-century hermetic and alchemical book collection
Hall and Szekely were never chummy, although they often crossed paths at Hollywood parties in the 1930s. Nonetheless, Hall respected Szekely’s approach to alternative medicine enough to keep first-edition copies of his books in the PRS library. In the final days of his life, Hall was receiving up to two water angel treatments a day. They were administered with the help of his assistant Dan Fritz, who ran a Santa Monica business called Biogenics. Fritz insisted the daily cleansings were needed to rid Hall’s intestines of toxins. However, Hall’s physician at the time, Dr. Sterling Pollock, said he repeatedly warned the philosopher and his assistant that the treatments were damaging Hall’s rectal tissues and worsening his heart problems by throwing his electrolytes out of balance. Hall and Fritz, Pollock said, figured they knew better. [16] Indeed, Hall had for decades championed what he believed were spiritual aspects of enemas.
In a series of lectures delivered in the 1940s called “Practical Mysticism,” Hall said, “The old theory of medicine from Paracelsus down to the present generation, for there are still some old-fashioned doctors among us, was that the individual depended largely upon good health, upon relaxation, blood purification and adequate elimination. So if he had all these things, he was in pretty fair shape. Someone once said to a man I knew, ‘Doctor, how long do you think I’ll live?’ The doctor looked him over and said, ‘You are in pretty good shape. You will live just as long as you keep your elimination regular.’ That’s the length of your life. We find, for example, that poor elimination nine times out of ten arises from nervous tension; that some form of intensity moves in on this situation breaking these rhythms, creating further toxins and causing the individual to die by first of all creating a tension in the intestinal area. Most of these people begin to die in the great intestine and then it sort of spreads.” [17]
Hall’s closest friends and relatives had grave doubts about the water angel procedure, which Fritz administered behind the partially closed door of Hall’s bathroom. They were worried sick that Fritz had persuaded the Halls to invest in marketing the devices and about what Marie’s sister Agnes called a “possible sexual component to the water angel.” [18]
What no one knew was that Szekely’s water angel was most likely a product of his imagination. There never was an Essene Gospel of Peace, according to Deborah Szekely, who later transformed her husband’s Tecate health spa into a popular health retreat. “No one has been able to find any evidence whatsoever that it ever existed,” she said, referring to a book that has sold over a million copies in 26 languages. As for the “water angel,” she added, “my husband fiddled with some fancy enema techniques at one stage in his life, but he became more mainstream as the years went by.” [19]
Decades later, however, Fritz hoped to make millions off the gizmos. In any case, Deborah Szekely added, using colonic treatments too often is “stupid,” and possibly dangerous to one’s health, as Hall discovered.
Marriage therapist Judith Marx vividly remembers the first time she met Manly P. Hall. She was 16 and the hulking philosopher was graying handsomely at the temples, wearing a huge blue suit and standing in the home office of her stepfather, chiropractor James “Doc” Sabia, on Beechwood Drive in the Hollywood Hills. Hall, who seemed sad that day, towered over Sabia, a balding southern Italian of medium build with short-cropped hair, a neatly trimmed beard, and a fondness for “sex and pasta,” [20] Marx said. “Sabia was always referring to Manly as a great man, and he was proud to have him as a patient,” she recalled. “To me, Manly was bigger than life. I knew in my heart he was the real thing. He knew truths.”
Sabia would ramp up his “electro-stimulating machine,” a wooden control device the size of an upright piano with dials arranged in five rows and seven columns. Hall grasped a copper plate in one hand and a nickel plate in the other while Sabia flipped switches on the machine and recorded numbers that he said corresponded to the energy vibration levels peculiar to various organs of the body. Manly and Marie, along with several Hollywood celebrities, were sold on the machine and its ability to pinpoint the causes of their aches and pains. At PRS headquarters, however, Hall’s staffers jokingly referred to Sabia as “the ghoul from Transylvania” because of his thick accent and odd techniques. “Sabia was an oddball all right. He was into New Age stuff and healing, and he was connected to the Mob,” Marx said of her own stepfather. “Yet, he was completely effective. Whatever it was that he did, it was remarkable.”
Among such spiritual medics, Hall was regarded as high priest, an initiate as well as a scholar with advanced academic degrees. Hall, who never corrected people when they called him “Dr. Hall,” was partly to blame for that. So it must have been a humbling experience in late 1956 when Jaques Cattell, editor of the Directory of American Scholars, invited Hall to submit background information to add him to the esteemed list. [21] Although he was lacking in formal higher education, Hall fit the image of a classical scholar. Always clad in a pressed blue suit, crisp shirt and tie, he would sit for hours inside his vault, puffing on a curved briar pipe while perusing rare tomes such as the Collectio Operum of Robert Fludd, published in 1617, and its images of inverted Sephirotic Trees with 10 roots above in Eternity and 10 fronds below named after orders of angelic beings recognized in the Kabbalah.
Eventually, he would summon his secretary for hours of dictation. Then, leaning back in his oversized office chair with his eyes closed, he would speak as if in a trance about early stone carvings, the rebirth of interest in Lao Tzu, the power of Mozart’s opera The Magic Flute, the correlation of the heavens and the affairs of mankind, and how to grow old with dignity.
Nonetheless, the job of responding to Cattell’s request for biographical details was handed to PRS secretary Hedda Lark. She wrote back, “I find it difficult to fill out your form adequately . . . due to the fact that Mr. Hall’s career and activities are not actually in the academic field.” [22]
Cattell did not add Hall to his directory. But it didn’t seem to matter to Hall, who had become a powerful, affirming mouthpiece for a growing subculture of seekers and a friend to some of its most colorful characters. Among them was maroon-turbaned organist and television celebrity Korla Pandit, who mesmerized thousands in the 1950s. Pandit, who never spoke a word during his nine hundred TV musical performances, also lectured at PRS on the universal language of music. The olive-skinned musician who claimed he was born in New Delhi, India, and was hailed by Paramahansa Yogananda as an embodiment of fused Eastern and Western musical traditions, had a secret: he was an African American from St. Louis. It’s hard to say how Hall would have reacted to that fact had he known.
For Hall supported the notion that Americans and British citizens were the most spiritually advanced people on the planet, and divinely appointed to lead lesser beings to the next level of development. “We have received with our Aryan birthright great spiritual and intellectual legacies,” Hall said in a series of lectures on race and evolution in 1951. “We have the highest spiritual conviction of right, and also the highest evolved group of faculties ever bestowed upon living things, and these must continue and have their way, they must grow and unfold. There has been a great deal of question as to where the Sixth Subrace would come from. Some have felt it would come in an amalgamation of the American and British Empire. We do not know. Certainly the far-flung dominions such as Australia, New Zealand, Canada and other parts of the Empire, plus the American way of life will be a spearhead of a common attitude, and possibly from this spearhead will be derived a new type.” [23]
Korla Pandit and Manly
Not surprisingly, many people concluded that Hall—a Canadian-born amalgamation of American and British parents—was among the emerging elite. They took it to heart when he warned that his race was falling down on the job. “Our problem as a race has been that we are arrogant,” he said. “The danger of arrogance is using strength to gain our purpose rather than the greatest good. . . Today, we are here not to exploit, but to redeem and help all life with which we come in contact. Our great struggle is to recognize that war, crime, and the difficulties of life are all intended to help us orient ourselves toward parenthood.” As the parents of modern mankind, he advised Anglos to try to be more tolerant of the concerns being expressed by increasingly vocal oppressed minorities, whom he compared to adolescents experiencing growth pains.
Hall generally held a dim view of the lower classes of society and promoted birth control as a means of reducing the number of what he deemed the “mentally and physically unfit.” [24] By his logic, eugenics—controlling hereditary factors through selective breeding—would provide reincarnating souls with greater chances of being born into wealthier, happier, and more creative families. The world depends on leadership, he wrote in an essay on infant mortality in 1937, and constructive creative leadership can come into this world only when bodies of a fine organic quality can be produced. If some say it is unfair to keep out the waves of comparatively un-developed egos by birth control, he reasoned, it is also unfair that there be no class in society suitable to receive, nurture and culture the higher types of life waiting to bring the world knowledge and understanding.
Much of what Hall and other metaphysicians of his era said seems astonishingly racist, anti-Semitic and unsavory by today’s standards. After all, they were the kinds of politically charged ideas and dangerous stereotypes that had helped give rise to Hitler and Mussolini. For the most part they were drawn from 19th-century comparative studies of races that attempted to prove social and spiritual dimensions of Darwin’s theory of evolution. By adding karma, reincarnation and archetypes to social Darwinism it became distressingly easy for such internationally famous spiritualists and mythologists as Blavatsky and Carl Jung to find supposed racial psychospiritual differences among various groups, or to conclude that races were reflections of entities that were supposedly born into them.
Hall adhered, for example, to Blavatsky’s notion that there were three great systems of “racial karma” operating in the world: Lemurian, Atlantean and Aryan. Hall believed that remnants of what he described as “so-called Black peoples” were condemned to struggle against physical enslavement because they were the first humans to hunt and kill animals. Oriental nations and American Indians, he said, stemmed from Atlantean races paying for sins of arrogance and uncontrolled appetites by suffering through foreign invasions, internal corruption and perpetual poverty. The Aryan mind, he said, regarded complexity as synonymous with excellence. The result: dreams of empire, conspicuous consumption and blind faith in science. [25]
In a 1942 essay called “The Jew Does not Fit In,” Hall suggested that anti-Semitism was the price Jews had to pay for being what he called “a peculiarly race-conscious people.” The karma “of the Jew,” he wrote, “holds a gradual dying out of racial persecution of Jews as a class in the degree and with the rapidity that the Jew forgets he is a Jew and remembers he is a human being.” [26]
Hall’s notions about Jews at the time mirrored those of his friends and mentors including British Theosophical occultist Alice Bailey, who taught that “the average Jew is lonely and unsettled, able to do little to put himself right before the world. Instinctively and intellectually, the Jew is separative; intuitively he has vision, but at the same time he possesses no sense of fusion with other peoples.” [27]
The same year he proposed that “millions and millions of entities who did not believe in competition or competitive systems in life were incarnated in India. The result is that the natural temperament of the Oriental is peaceful, not particularly ambitious; culturally static.” In the same way, he said, in America entities of an almost intolerably possessive type had entered into incarnation together.
Hall’s unsettling speculations about modern life were not restricted to race. In a lecture titled “A Thoughtful Consideration of Capital Punishment,” Hall proposed “de-glamorizing criminal behavior” by censoring news reports on crime and punishment. Newspaper articles should say no more than that “on a certain day, a certain person was tried and convicted, or that another was tried and acquitted.” The sparse coverage, he reasoned, “would end the continual emotional stress aroused by detailed crime reports.” As for the death penalty, he argued that “these cases are far too complicated to advise wiping out these people. . . We cannot say a man who committed a crime at 20 has to be a criminal at 50; he may be, but we have to find out.” He did not address other challenges to the ultimate penalty as being all too often capricious, unfair to the poor and minorities who cannot afford brilliant lawyers, and the investigation and trial processes prone to error. [28]
Description of the Sephirotic Tree, 16th-17th century
He even defended phrenologists as pioneers who “devoted years of study and training to their work, and examined thousands of heads, normal and abnormal, before they attained outstanding proficiency.” Because of their efforts, he pointed out, “We speak of ‘high brows’ and ‘low brows’ when referring to degrees of intelligence.” He never mentioned that the Nazis had twisted phrenologists’ notions to justify their racial pogroms. [29]
Hall believed that since benevolent thoughts had constructive powers, it seemed reasonable to assume that evil thoughts had the reverse effect. Thus, Hall reasoned, calamities such as droughts, floods, earthquakes, even plagues could be the direct result of divine verdicts for selfish and destructive attitudes. In other words, for Hall, our very water, earth and air had been polluted in some mysterious way with the world’s perversions: ignorance, stupidity, avarice, greed, materialism. Thus, earthquakes and revolutions were closely related. In 1920, when China was establishing its Communist government, an earthquake claimed 180,000 bodies he believed had been misused, abused and neglected. [30]
The ancients would have been proud of Hall for trying to lug the cudgel of their primordial cosmology into the 20th century. But even as some of his followers in the late 1950s were starting to question the validity of those notions at a time when science was eradicating polio and smallpox without any spiritual underpinnings, Hall’s efforts turned toward getting his long-delayed auditorium project off the ground. In July 1956, Hall and Dr. Frederick Waller, consul-general of the Republic of Austria, organized an auspicious musical concert at the Wilshire Ebell Theater to celebrate Mozart’s 200th birthday and raise money for Hall’s building fund. Performers included Marisa Andreis, mezzo-soprano with the Munich & Stuttgart State Opera, and Werner Gebauer, eminent violinist with the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra. Ticket prices ranged from $1.50 and were sold at Hall’s Sunday lectures. [31]
A year later, Hall delivered seven lectures in the Oakland Real Estate Board Auditorium and made frequent guest appearances on radio programs sympathetic to his causes such as commentator Ben Hunter’s show on KFI. In April 1957, Hall gave seven lectures in New York’s Carnegie Recital Hall. Proceeds from those out-of-town campaigns were also dedicated to the fund.
Facing contractual deadlines and impending changes in city building codes that would restrict parking, even prevent construction, Hall began work with money borrowed on the promises of contributors who had yet to fulfill their pledges. Years of grueling preparation, fundraising and labor culminated in a dedication ceremony marking the placement of the four-hundred-seat auditorium’s final cornerstone on May 16, 1959. At a precise moment determined by the juxtaposition of the stars and planets overhead, Hall placed a box behind the cornerstone containing a list of all the living and dead who had contributed to the undertaking, along with a copy of the PRS constitution, its by-laws and principles. Then he told the crowd of spectators, supporters and news reporters in attendance, “In our foundation, we have recognized the three great instruments of the divine purpose—religion, philosophy and science. We believe that these three divided, have brought terrible hardship upon mankind and that in the re-union of these we have the perfect servant of the eternal.” [32]
Anticipating snipes from skeptics who might regard the building as a monument to a cult leader, Hall added, “It is a great and solemn responsibility to be at the center of a purposed endeavor, but I would like to say that, actually, I am not any such center at all. I am only working with you, trying in my own way; just as you are trying to do something that my heart and soul tell me we all want to have done. We do not want this in any way to be a personal loyalty, but a loyalty to ideals.” [33] The ceremony would mark the last major achievement of Hall’s career.
But Hall, a perennial name in Who’s Who in California, retained considerable influence and remained loyal to members of his congregation. When they clamored for guidance on the hottest topics of the day—flying saucers, the Russian Sputnik, Zen Buddhism and health fads—Hall reported back in lectures and essays. Hall’s talent for ambivalence came in handy when it came to UFOs; he alternately declared in various lectures that they were military aircraft, or machines from another world driven by beings that might share the same religious sentiments as his most cherished philosophers. Hollywood mystic and author Gerald Heard, at the same time, proposed that smart bees from Mars were steering UFOs. After all, Heard reasoned, no other living thing could withstand the high speeds and sharp turns noted by witnesses.
Actress Gloria Swanson, who had a well-known interest in metaphysics, didn’t know what to think when she and some friends discovered a 12-foot-diameter metallic disk in a shallow hole off Lakeridge Drive in the Hollywood Hills one night in January 1957. Swanson notified the Los Angeles Times, which dispatched aviation writer Dewey Linz to the scene, according to an article by Los Angeles Times reporter Cecilia Rasmussen. After interviewing neighbors, Linz determined that the “spacecraft” with wooden floors, dangling electrical wires and cockpit seats upholstered in coral leatherette was a discarded prop from a documentary that had been filmed nearby.
By decade’s end, Hall, like UFO sightings, had become vulnerable to public criticism. His most powerful political ally, Gov. Goodwin Knight, had met serious defeat in a run for the U.S. Senate in 1958. The same year, astrologer and Theosophical lecturer G. Cardinal LeGros dared to publicly analyze Hall’s character in a Horoscope magazine article titled “Manly Palmer Hall—Plato in Hollywood,” published in August 1958. LeGros predicted that the “mysterious person with the pale ascetic face and haunting eyes, believed by Hollywood admirers to be an intellectual genius, a magician, a clairvoyant, the possessor of a photographic memory and the reincarnation of Plato,” would be remembered most for his personality, rather than for his works. “His critics argue that he is not an original thinker and merely rewrites, in a smooth, diamond-clear style, the ideas of other men,” he added. “Being human he is not wholly free from error. Occult students point to his support of certain aspects of hypnotism, a dangerous practice forbidden by all teachers of white magic from time immemorial.” [34]
“The remarkable thing,” LeGros concluded, “is that Hall has been able to do so much with so little and to surmount the same kind of handicaps that check the progress of thousands of people whose charts are blessed with many virtues lacking in his.” LeGros’ portrait seemed to suggest that Hall was all style and little substance.
Hall placing a time capsule in the auditorium wall at PRS, 1959
Not long after that article appeared, a $50 volume titled Bacstrom’s Alchemical Anthology was published, edited with an introduction by London author J.W. Hamilton-Jones. Hamilton-Jones failed to give credit to Hall or his collection of works by 18th-century Rosicrucian Sigismund Bacstrom at PRS although Hall had allowed him free access to it. [35]
Then there were challenging letters from people demanding to know exactly why Masons excluded women from their ranks. “I’m not aware that Masonry makes a special point of guarding its secrets from women,” Hall wrote back to one of them. “This is about all I can tell you, but it may be comforting to know that it is among the principles of Masonry to honor and protect all womankind and to improve one’s character in relation to his wife and his daughter, and to have loving thoughtfulness about the families of his brethren and all good and upright persons. Trusting this will be of some help.” [36]
Those soothing, carefully weighed words were in stark contrast with the fiery, ultra-masculine descriptions of Masons Hall had presented to the world in his 1929 book Lectures on Ancient Philosophy. “The Mason who would discover the Lost Word must remember that in the first ages every neophyte was a man of profound learning and unimpeachable character,” Hall wrote, “who for the sake of wisdom and virtue faced death unafraid and had triumphed over the limitations of the flesh which bind most mortals to the sphere of mediocrity. In those days the rituals were not put on by degree teams who handled candidates as though they were perishable commodities, but by priests deeply versed in the lore of their cults. Not one Freemason out of a thousand could have survived the initiations of the pagan rites, for the tests were given in those strenuous days when men were men and death the reward of failure. The neophyte of the Druid mysteries was set adrift in a small boat to battle the stormy sea, and unless his knowledge of natural law enabled him to quell the storm as did Jesus upon the Sea of Galilee, he returned no more. In the Egyptian rites of Serapis it was required of the neophyte that he cross an unbridged chasm in the temple floor. In other words, if unable by magic to sustain himself in the air without visible support he fell headlong into a volcanic crevice, there to die of heat and suffocation.” [37]
Hall hadn’t lost faith in magic and folklore. Throughout the 1960s, he had happily loaned artifacts and books—Kabbalah scrolls, the Egyptian Book of the Dead, Santeria art figures, illuminated Bible leaves—for display in department stores and city and county libraries across Southern California. But in a rapidly changing postmodern world, he became more discreet, preferring to keep his devotion to them between himself and his aging audience at PRS. Hall, now in his sixth decade, was no longer walking on water but treading in it, trying to keep pace with the times, as ideas and technology seemed to be advancing faster than the swept-wing DC-727s roaring overhead.
Hall’s monthly magazine, which had changed its name from Horizon to PRS Journal in late 1958, was competing against a growing number of periodicals that also sought to put the world of mysticism and magic within easy reach in the early 1960s. Borderline magazine was led by Sydney Omarr, a nationally recognized astrologer to the stars with a fondness for Hollywood starlets, Cuban cigars, fine scotch and gambling. FATE magazine’s pages were filled with profiles of spiritualists and psychics, accounts of UFO sightings, encounters with monsters and reports on the latest paranormal investigations. Another publication, Exploring the Unknown, offered articles penned by religious leaders and scholars on topics ranging from witchcraft to sex—subjects Hall never felt comfortable talking about in public. Comic books jumped on the bandwagon with such vividly illustrated series as Tales of Suspense.
On television, Rod Serling’s hit television series Twilight Zone combined masterful writing with modern tales of fantasy and suspense that resonated strongly in a world torn by confusion, fear and anxiety over a possible nuclear war.
The Zen craze withered when new spiritual trailblazers led by Aldous Huxley, Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert made news in the early 1960s by trumpeting psychedelic shortcuts to the kind of awareness that Hall insisted required “lifetimes” of self-discipline and adherence to strict moral codes to achieve. At the same time, Hall was barraged with questions from followers about thorny issues unknown to initiates of old: racism, feminism, LSD, civil rights, abortion and sexual identity.
He began to warn of a looming disaster.
On February 19, 1961, Hall forecasted great tumult and anguish in a lecture titled “The Great Conjunction of February 1962: The Most Important Planetary Configuration of Recent Years.” A similar conjunction of planets in the sign of Virgo in 1861, he reminded, heralded the Civil War. [38]
Citing the writings of Nostradamus, who also predicted social strife for 1960–65, Hall warned of “political change, social change, cultural change and of course, under the tremendous pressure of the release of atomic knowledge and electronic fields, we may also have the overshadowing menace of war—the kind of war that only a scientific world could conceive or actually make.”
Hall seemed prophetic when in November 1962 the United States and Soviet Union came close to nuclear war during the Cuban Missile Crisis. On October 27, 1963, he predicted trouble for President John F. Kennedy. “Where you have Saturn in the Tenth House conjunct a planet like Neptune,” Hall said, “you always have at least the remote danger of assassination. You have danger to life; you have danger to health; you have danger to public office in a great many ways. So the President’s physical condition would, I think, justify a considerable amount of thoughtfulness and care.” [39] Kennedy was assassinated on November 22, 1963.
But Hall’s ability to correctly forecast events was erratic. In 1962, he announced a connection between an unexpected freeze that had damaged orange groves in southern Texas and the conjunction of planets that would have an impact beyond U.S. borders. “In Cuba, especially, we must bear in mind the Castro regime was established under a square of the sun and moon, and must inevitably be short-lived,” he said in a Sunday lecture. [40]
He also assured his audience that illicit drugs would never become popular in England, because “the English way of life is more sober and conservative, and is strongly influenced by tradition.” “This can only point out that, in general, the English have a basic pride of personal character,” he said. “They have inherited certain levels of behavior. These they must perpetuate and pass on to their children.” As for the spreading use of illicit drugs in the United States, he said, “We are fascinated by the psychological consequences of munching certain types of mushrooms. Our curiosity is insatiable, and our self-control negligible.” [41]
Hall awards proclamation to a PRS student
Legions of people on both continents, who were getting stoned and making love or “merging into the all” while listening to the Beatles’ “A Day in the Life” and the Beach Boys’ “Good Vibrations,” would say Hall missed the point. The 1960s followed the beat of a different drum. Hall belonged to the ’20s, ’30s, ’40s and ’50s.
If Hall’s ideas had grown stale, his presence was still in demand in some quarters. When medical surgeon Evarts G. Loomis, the founder of a holistic health retreat surrounded by orange groves in Riverside, wanted a high-profile metaphysician to join the physicians, psychologists and ministers on his Friendly Hills Fellowship’s board of consultants in the early 1960s, he invited Hall. Loomis, a trim, dapper and silver-haired “father of holistic medicine,” based his practice on the belief that glands and hormones were linked to subtle spiritual “life rhythms throughout the universe” and had to be taken into account to properly treat the whole person—body, mind, and spirit. Health, Loomis contended, is the body’s natural state but could be affected by attitudes, activities or internal processes that disrupt the “realm of the spirit” flowing through the human body’s chakras and nervous system. Therefore, he reasoned, it took a medical doctor—as well as a minister and a philosopher—to heal ailments from nervous disorders to obesity.
Hall, who was 61 and increasingly self-conscious about his weight, accepted Loomis’ invitation. It was a chance to be a disciple of a seemingly back-to-the-future concept: manipulating philosophy, science, and religion to achieve physical and psychic perfection. “If you are willing to accept me on an ‘as is’ basis,” he wrote, “I would be honored and pleased to be included among your consultants.” [42] Judging from a photograph taken of Hall at the time, the philosopher should have enrolled as a patient at Loomis’ health center. Standing at a Los Angeles street corner and staring into the camera lens with a grim expression on his face, Hall looked dangerously obese in a parachute of a dark coat, his head puffed out like a balloon about to burst.
