Master of the Mysteries. Louis Sahagun

the conjurer’s art. Beyond that room was a yard where magicians boarded pets used in their performances—doves, rabbits, goldfish, dogs and cats. Houdini wanted to board an elephant, but found the facilities too small.

      One Saturday, Houdini dropped by and delighted Hall and other admirers with an old favorite. The short, stocky and slightly bow-legged magician stood on the backroom stage and seemed to make a package of needles and a spool of thread appear from nowhere. Then he put a half dozen needles and a foot of thread in his mouth, and started chewing with gusto. Hall was amazed when he started pulling the thread from his mouth. The needles were threaded about an inch apart.

      In Martinka’s back rooms, Hall said he engaged in late-night debates with Houdini, Howard Thurston and other famous magicians over whether miracles could be wrought without stage paraphernalia. Their talks invariably led to discussions about the practices of East Indian fakirs, Egyptian snake charmers and Native American medicine men.

      Houdini told Hall that the only reason he could perform his feats was that he copied them from Asian jugglers and magicians. He also admitted that he did not know exactly how they did their tricks, only how to mechanically reproduce their effects. In Hall’s mind, that was practically conceding that there were supernatural aspects about such things that he did not understand. [64]

      Houdini went on to buy Martinka’s, which had been serving magicians since just after the Civil War. He also launched a high-profile public crusade to expose as fraudulent all psychics, fortune-tellers, and spirit mediums, a class that flourished after World War I as friends and relatives of slain soldiers desperately tried to communicate with their loved ones on the other side. [65] To Houdini, spiritualism was nothing more than mental intoxication resulting from the seductive words and promises of con artists.

      Hall, however, headed west, firm in the belief that the universe was stranger and more interesting than Houdini wanted to admit. Over the next 10 years Hall would undergo striking intellectual and personal changes, and render himself an adventurer in the realm of the spiritual self. By the late 1930s Hall was enjoying the richest years of his life.

      Hall began spicing up his holiday season lectures with astrological horoscopes of the world, the United States and California. Usually, the forecasts were so ambiguous and obvious that they left plenty to chance. But on May 20, 1934, he told his congregation sometime between 1940 and 1942, the civilized nations of the world would be plunged into cataclysmic political unrest and violence. [66] His source was a booklet published in 1860 by Dr. L.D. “Astrological Doc” Broughton, a medical physician and astrologer from Washington, D.C. who was famous for having predicted the assassination of President Lincoln. In that booklet, Broughton declared that the return of Uranus to the constellation Gemini in 1942 would undoubtedly be accompanied by years of anguish and strife at home and abroad. [67]

      In the meantime, Hall was making new, powerful allies during his travels. At the Pythagorean Society in New York in 1935, Hall met a serious student of Platonism and reincarnation who would become His Grace, Athenagoras I, spiritual leader of the Greek Orthodox Church. They became devoted friends; when meeting on the street the tall, husky and bearded religious leader would throw his arms around Hall. Many of Hall’s books were in the Patriarchate Library in Istanbul. At one Easter service in New York, Hall walked in solemn procession with Athenagoras I. [68]

      Also in 1935, Robert Andrews Millikan, a Nobel Prize winner and chairman of the executive council of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, invited Hall to attend a fund-raising dinner for troubled youths. The guest speaker was former President Herbert Hoover. The master of ceremonies was comedian and actor Joe E. Brown. Sponsors included pioneer motion picture director Cecil B. DeMille, one of many influential Freemasons in Hollywood at the time. [69]

      Such high-profile public appearances lent further credibility to the man who behind the scenes was quietly investigating shamanistic formulas for bending the laws of nature. He studied the magical aspects of minerals and gems, concluding that manic states could be balanced by keeping a piece of lead in one’s pocket; nervous tension could be remedied with green tourmaline and copper, depression by silver and zinc. [70] He slept with his head to the north so that the magnetic currents of his body would “correspond with the vaster currents moving about and through the earth.” [71] He applied Pythagorean theories about the therapeutic value of music, and entertained the idea that people in bathing suits would get more out of stirring string music than heavily clothed individuals because bare skin responds positively to pleasant sounds. [72] Hall also claimed that without too much training, students with the right frame of mind could learn to read playing cards placed face down on a table. [73]

      Hall was profiled in an extensive Los Angeles Times Sunday Magazine article, published in August 1935, as a world-class expert “in the so-called Mystery Schools of the ancient world which, instead of nurturing a semi-barbarism as most modern historians assume, was really in most ways superior to the addle-pated present.”

      “Now, it is Mr. Hall’s idea to attempt to reconstruct these Mystery Schools,” said the article by George Addison. “He holds that this can be accomplished by decoding the ciphers, symbols, hieroglyphs, fables, myths, and legends which abound in classical writings. He further hopes that some key documents escaped destruction and, in the course of time, will be found in the Sahara Desert, Gobi Desert, and possibly in the ruined cities of Central America.”

      The discovery of such codes, Hall predicted, might be of more value in setting man on the right path of knowledge than all the accomplishments of science and technology.

      At the time, Hall also was trying with the help of actor friends to break into the movie business, which he believed should have been incorporating more mythical and magical themes in its major motion pictures. In 1939, eight years after Tod Browning’s adaptation of Bram Stoker’s Dracula hit the silver screen, Hall wrote a proposed sequel and dispatched it to Stanley Bergerman, associate producer of The Mummy.

      The nine-page treatment would have made Stoker proud. It begins where the first movie left off: Dr. Van Helsing driving a stake through the vampire’s heart. Only there’s a twist. The “vampire howls with fiendish glee and shams death,” Hall wrote, because the assassination attempt occurred seconds after nightfall, when Dracula is invulnerable.

      Three decades later, after old age and death has claimed the lives of Dracula’s foes, “the lid of the great sarcophagus rises by some mysterious mechanism,” Hall wrote. “The gruesome hand bearing the ring of Voivode Dracula appears and the vampire slowly rises. He has had no blood for many years, therefore he is now a white-haired man, aged and bearded. His face is hollow with sleep of years and his clothes are rotted about him.”

       Portrait of Hall as guru by Schuyler Crail, 1938

      Meanwhile, in Argentina, Señorita Martinez has a frightening secret: she has always known the sinister count was not dead. Worse, she learns he plans to visit her home along the La Plata River “in a strange vessel.”

      Later, “there is a mist upon the river,” Hall wrote. “Through the fog suddenly appears a magnificent black streamlined yacht bearing the name Nemesis III. The yacht enters the south basin slowly. . . ”

      A group of detectives dispatched to investigate the craft discovers that its crew is dead. “There is apparently nothing alive but a great black cat that hisses violently at them,” Hall wrote.

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