Master of the Mysteries. Louis Sahagun

thousand years ago? Your Jesus told His disciples that greater things than He did they should do. Why, then, do you declare the miracle-working of India to be false?’” [50]

      He returned to the United States in February 1924 by way of New York, with more than four hundred photographs taken with a four-by-five Graflex box camera, which would accompany him for decades. [51]

      When he next took to the pulpit at his Church of the People, he was sporting a beard. His adherents expressed their displeasure with his whiskers by dropping a few razors into the collection plate.

      As Easter rolled around in 1924, the now worldly Hall was lining his church’s course with an array of novel activities including stereopticon slide presentations of his trip, and feisty public debates over provocative topics: Should the United States police the world? Is modern democracy detrimental to culture? Are motion pictures destructive of public morals? In one debate, Hall opposed the idea that “women have no faith in god or man.”

      In November 1926, Hall revived the All-Seeing Eye as a 10-cent weekly newspaper devoted to philosophy, science and religion. Published out of Room 301 in the Trinity Auditorium Building near 9th Street on Grand Avenue in Los Angeles, it now also served as a clever platform in which to trumpet progress being made on Hall’s elaborate compendium of occult philosophy and symbols.

      Hall’s weekly messenger drew heavily from his growing home library, and laid out the basic themes and principles and literary forms that he would rely on throughout his long, curious career. He included news items clipped from mainstream publications, question-and-answer sections, notices of upcoming events and feature articles on interpretations of biblical stories, Egyptian initiation rites, chakras and glands, alchemy, astrology, Buddhism and reincarnation. He also wrote about the mysterious magician Count de St. Germain, Madame Blavatsky and the theory that Sir Francis Bacon was the true author of Shakespeare’s plays.

      Other articles spoke of the healing powers of arts and crafts, the grinding mindlessness of modern city life, the relationship between stress and disease, and the false promises of most of the metaphysical pursuits that were suddenly all the rage in Los Angeles.

      “Nearly all who spend a few years in modern metaphysics,” he warned in the March 23, 1927 edition of the All-Seeing Eye, “come out broken in mind and body, self-centered egotists who do not know where they are mentally, have lost all desire to work, and wander from one teacher to another searching for knowledge until at last the insane asylum or the state grave yard claims them.” City life, he observed a month later, “is just a rush from one street car to another, from one lunch stool to another, from one excitement to another. There is one general result of it all and that is a nervous breakdown.” For relief, Hall prescribed, among other things, the writings of Philippus Aureolus Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim, the 16th-century Swiss medical physician and alchemist also known as Paracelsus.

      The explorations of the brilliant, belligerent and pudgy Paracelsus, one of the first to stress the power of mind over bodily function, helped trigger a struggle between medicine and magic. Paracelsus proposed that conflicted spiritual convictions can lead to disease, and that the vital energy of life is channeled into the lives of living things. Energy out of control, or blocked, disrupts the mental and emotional life and renders the individual vulnerable to sickness. A great magician is a master of this energy, which he called forth with the magic wand of his will.

      Paracelsus did not invent these ideas. They were adapted from myriad early mystics and religious doctrines. Socrates, for example, once chose a secluded, shady place to meet with his disciples because the spirits who inhabited that spot would contribute dignity and richness to the discourse. Iamblichus believed in guardian spirits not unlike Guardian Angels of Christianity. Pythagoreans described Deity as an infinite being whose body is composed of the substance of light and whose soul is composed of the substance of truth. Kabbalists regarded the psyche as an organism, and physical creation as a manifestation of spiritual emanations. Ancient Oriental acupuncture procedures in which small needles are inserted into certain body points to improve health grew out of the belief that disturbances in the flow of natural life forces lead to a disease state.

      “Paracelsus,” Hall wrote, “the hermeticist and the mystic, the original thinker who gained his knowledge not from long-coated pedagogues but from dervishes in Constantinople, witches, gypsies and sorcerers; who invoked spirits, captured the rays of the celestial bodies in dew, of whom it is said he cured the incurable, gave sight to the blind, cleansed the leper, and even raised the dead, and whose memory could turn aside a plague—this ‘magician’ is the father of chemical medicine.” [52]

      Long before psychologists began talking about complexes, obsessions, various neuroses and stress-related diseases, Paracelsus had identified them as harmful parasitic organisms that feed off the abnormal thoughts and emotions of the person who has the problems. Paracelsus’ medical therapies included the cultivation of wisdom and positive thoughts.

      “As a man may have a moldy piece of bread,” Hall wrote, “so he may have a mind on which certain lichens have fastened, growing and flourishing off of his vitality. . . This is not a rational creature, but something that lives for self-preservation, like all living things. Most of us have one, highly developed, and most people have several.” [53] Lichens or not, Manly P. Hall was about to become one of the most celebrated spiritual figures of the 1920s.

      THE HAND OF THE MYSTERIES

      The original drawings from which this plate was taken is designated the hand of the philosopher which is extended to those who enter into the mysteries. When the disciple of the Great Art first beholds this hand, it is closed, and he must discover a method of opening it before the mysteries contained therein may be revealed. In alchemy the hand signifies the formula for the preparation of the tincture physicorum. The fish is mercury and the flame-bounded sea in which it swims is sulfur, while each of the fingers bears the emblem of a Divine Agent through the combined operations of which the great work is accomplished. The unknown artist says of the diagram: “The wise take their oath by this hand that they will not teach the Art without parables.” To the Qabbalist the figure signifies the operation of the One Power [the crowded thumb] in the four worlds (the fingers with their emblems). Besides its alchemical and Qabbalistic meanings, the figure symbolizes the hand of a Master Mason with which he “raises” the martyred Builder of the Divine House. Philosophically, the key represents the Mysteries themselves, without whose aid man cannot unlock the numerous chambers of his own being. The lantern is human knowledge, for it is a spark of the Universal Fire captured in a man-made vessel; it is the light of those who dwell in the inferior universe and with the aid of which they seek to follow in the footsteps of Truth. The sun, which may be termed the “light of the worked,” represents the luminescence of creation through which man may learn the mystery of all creatures which express through form and number. The star is the Universal Light which reveals cosmic and ceslestial verities. The crown is Absolute Light—unknown and unrevealed—whose power shines through all the lesser lights that are but sparks of this Eternal Effulgence. Thus is set forth the right hand, or active principle, of Deity, whose works are all contained within the hollow of His hand.

       Copyright © Philosophical Research Society | Manly P. Hall | Artist: J. Augustus Knapp

       CHAPTER 2

       The Big Book

      WHEN HALL STOOD BEFORE CROWDS IN DOWNTOWN AUDITORIUMS AND THEATERS AND TALKED ABOUT THE URGENCY OF SEARCHING FOR THE WISDOM HIDDEN IN THE MYTHS AND SYMBOLS OF ANTIQUITY, IT WAS HARD NOT TO BELIEVE HE WAS SPEAKING FROM THE HEART.

      Part showman, part shaman, Hall wore a dark tailored suit and sat mid-stage, his hands resting palms down on the arms of a baronial chair that was bathed in