Master of the Mysteries. Louis Sahagun

for the three days which are necessary, according to students of esotericism, for the complete and gradual disentanglement of the higher vehicles of man from his earthly body.”

      The Psycho-Analytic Society in the 200 block of South Broadway promised “treatments for all psychopathic conditions and psycho-physiological aberrations.” A few blocks away, the International New Thought Alliance Convention challenged members and newcomers alike to learn to hook their minds up to the “power-house of the universe” to cure disease and achieve success.

       Estelle Lloyd

      Over at the Charles Radium Laboratories in the 1600 block of West Washington, customers were lining up to buy The Perfectacoil, a radium-powered mechanism advertised as “Nature’s assistant recreating every tissue, gland, cell and organ in the human body.” With the flip of a toggle switch, its developers said, a user could control three healing elements: “Magnetism provides the alkaline or creative polarity of electricity; Heat with its relief from pain and its power of bringing the blood to assist in elimination; Radium emanation from the pockets of radium ore (carnotite) that completely interline the coil.”

      Some newspaper reporters found Hall’s androgynous appearance as interesting as his publications. Manly P. Hall, wrote reporter Alma Whitaker, in a 1923 article for the Los Angeles Times, “is tall, with unusually broad shoulders—football shoulders—but he wears his curly, dark brown hair bobbed like a girl’s, and even his face and eyes convey an almost feminine impression.” Whitaker also remarked that a majority of the people in Hall’s church pews were women.

      Among them were dedicated acolytes such as Caroline A. Lloyd and her daughter Alma Estelle, wealthy scions with a reputation for attaching themselves to writers and bohemians who could be, as one of their relatives put it, “engaging for a fee.” Conversely, Caroline’s special interests—sculpture, classical music, stamp collecting and world travel—would have lasting impressions on Hall. [42]

       Manly observes a holy man in India.

      Caroline, a pretty woman with pale skin and wire-rim glasses, had studied drawing and miniature painting in Paris. Her daughter, a mannish, full-chested woman who favored walking shoes, vacationed in Europe with Ernest and Hadley Hemingway and kept an apartment in Paris a few doors down from the protean artist Man Ray. They belonged to the clan that controlled a fabulously productive oil field in Ventura County. Their family already was financing young mystery writer Raymond Chandler. [43] When the women began sending a sizable portion of their oil income to Hall, who was a frequent lecturer in the salon of Caroline’s home in Los Angeles’ Los Feliz district, relatives feared they had come under the spell of an evil guru.

      “Caroline and Estelle were so taken by Manly Hall that some relatives thought there must be some sort of romantic involvement at work,” said attorney William Emerick, whose wife is a Lloyd family member. “There was none. He was only interested in their money.” [44]

      The Lloyds’ financial donations started in the early 1920s and freed Hall to pursue a variety of interests and hobbies, most of them shared by Caroline. A stamp collector, he specialized in postage from countries that gave birth to the greatest saints and wise men. He traveled, exploring the world’s religious centers. A lover of classical music, Hall and Los Angeles Philharmonic pianist Douglas Colin Campbell experimented in the 1920s with some of the city’s first mood-enhancing light shows. “My father, who was known back then as the ‘young Paderewski,’ would perform while Manly lectured,” recalled Campbell’s daughter, Cai Taggart. “All the while, a color wheel would turn and cast various shades across the stage. It was all choreographed.”

      Donations from Caroline Lloyd and his own congregation paid for Hall’s first trip around the world to study the lives, customs and religions of countries in Asia and Europe. Hall sailed out of San Francisco on the luxury liner S.S. Franconia on December 5, 1923. He reached Yokohama in late December of that year, after a massive earthquake had devastated the Japanese city and left corpses floating in its harbor. [45] Years later, he recalled, “we found a city of a half a million people without a single building standing. We found pain, sorrow, and misfortune on every hand.

      “But for the first time I became aware of the quality of the Japanese character which lingered with me for a long time. My rickshaw man was to take me to the main hotel in Yokohama, which incidentally now was. . . a shack put together out of empty beer bottles with a cot in it. . . And he asked if he could stop for a moment. . . He wanted to pause for just a few moments to say a prayer in the block where his family had died. His mother, his father, his wife and his children had all died together. [46]

      “After that experience with him, I asked him, ‘How do you feel about all this? What does this mean?’ He said, ‘I have faith. I believe. . . I must accept. I cannot question. I believe that those whom I have loved have left here but they are still alive. I believe they will be born again. I believe they will live here. I believe there is no end. And in this hope of the continuance of their life I have peace.’” [47]

      Photographs show Hall clad in white trousers, a heavy dark coat and pith helmet as he crossed to Korea, stayed briefly in Peking, China, and went on to Burma and India, arriving just as Gandhi was released from prison after a hunger strike. After delivering a lecture in Calcutta, he was invited to walk in a parade and his appearance was publicized in local newspapers. He traveled on through Egypt and central Italy.

      Throughout that 38,000-mile journey he called the “single most important episode in my life,” people were either fascinated or frightened by the imposing self-styled mystic from Los Angeles armed with endless stories of reincarnation, odd gods and lost continents. His remarks often provoked news articles with headlines such as “Bizarre Preacher Startles Ad Club,” “Noted Radical Preacher from Los Angeles Speaks,” and “A World Religion is Advocated by Tourist.”

      In Honolulu’s Wela-ka-hao newspaper, a reporter wrote: “Rev. Mr. Hall is in physical appearance a striking figure. Dressed bizarrely, he wears black hair in the fashion of a stage poet, cultivates a languishing glance and evidently yearns to be classed as a mystic. But he is modest. He disclaimed being the reincarnation of Pythagoras, as a reporter for the morning paper had quoted him as saying he was, although he admitted being a believer in reincarnation, which he said he had been preaching in his church in Los Angeles for two years.” [48]

       Hall makes headlines in 1923.

      Hall dispatched dozens of letters to followers back home. One described his disgust with a white man he witnessed kicking and beating a Hong Kong resident for having “the audacity to walk on the same sidewalk with him.” [49] Another spoke of the hilly roads of Jerusalem, where, Hall opined, life had not changed all that much since biblical times. Yet another told of the superhuman powers of a holy man in Benares who seemingly induced a mango sapling to grow on the spot with flute music.

      Hall also wrote, “I once discussed the problem of miracles with a very learned Brahmin pundit whose conclusions on the subject may be summarized as follows: ‘You Christians believe that He [Jesus] turned water into wine; that He raised the dead, healed the sick, passed through closed doors, and multiplied