Master of the Mysteries. Louis Sahagun

Hall and James Edward Baker, a.k.a. Father Yod, the middle-aged owner of The Source, a successful health food restaurant on Sunset Boulevard, and leader of a spiritual commune that included his 14 young wives. Inspired by Hall’s attempt to create an occult environmental legacy in the 1970s, Baker’s tribe attempted to join forces with Nature’s invisible armies of magical spirits.

      Since the book was first published, it was revealed that Al Qaeda founder Osama bin Laden was fascinated by Hall’s writings. Other additions include a portrait of the niece who regaled Hall with her adventures in the counterculture, and recollections of Helen James, the flamboyant Hall family lawyer whose queries into the suspicious circumstances of Hall’s death provided the Los Angeles Police Department with evidence it needed to launch a homicide investigation.

      James reveals that she was both urged on and stymied by what she concludes was Hall’s spirit, which she said kept coming to her in dreams and telepathic messages, attempting to direct the course of the civil case she brought against the man police believe took Hall’s life.

      Some may find this new information unsettling. A journalist’s job is to turn over every rock, record what’s underneath and follow that evidence wherever it leads.

      There was a time while writing the first edition when I was sorely tempted to scrap the project. I questioned the very idea of focusing more attention on yet another self-styled mystic with all-too-human flaws who made a career out of telling people how to live right.

      In that period of self reflection, I reached out to Huston Smith, the noted scholar whose book The World’s Religions has sold over two million copies.

      In 2006, over dinner at a restaurant less than a mile from Hall’s Philosophical Research Society, the heart of Los Angeles’ metaphysical community, I said, “Huston, help me out here. Manly P. Hall had serious personal issues. Khalil Gibran was a chain smoker who died of cirrhosis of the liver. Madame Blavatsky was exposed as a fraud, and had such bad personal hygiene that there were ulcerous sores on both her legs. Alan Watts spent his last years in a stupor, guzzling warm vodka by the quarts. Carlos Castaneda was a fraud and a jerk. Edmond Szekely’s wife told me that he never discovered Essene documents in the Vatican—he made that up.

      “Do these people deserve a moment of our attention?”

      Smith smiled and, with a twinkle in his eyes, said, “Let me tell you a story.

      “As a young man, I spent 10 years studying Zen in Tokyo. At the end of those 10 years, just before I returned to the United States, my master invited me to his home. He said, ‘Huston, before you leave, there are some things I want you to know.’

      “At the appointed hour, I knocked on his front door. He said, ‘Huston. Welcome. This is Miss So-and-so, she takes care of my personal needs.’

      “Then he led me into an adjacent room and said, ‘Huston, do you see this enormous television set? I watch Sumo wrestling on this television set. I love watching Sumo wrestling.’

      “Then he pushed through the curtains of yet another room and said, ‘Huston, do you see all these empty beer cans and all these empty wine bottles? I drank all this wine and all this beer watching Sumo wrestling.’

      “Clearly, my master did not want me to leave with him on a pedestal. What he couldn’t know is that after learning all these things, I loved him even more.”

      Thank you Huston.

       –L.S.

       INTRODUCTION

      ON THE EVENING OF MAY 26, 1990, MANLY PALMER HALL, THE 20TH CENTURY’S MOST PROLIFIC WRITER ON ANCIENT PHILOSOPHIES, MYSTICISM AND MAGIC, ENTERED THE IMPOSING SCOTTISH RITE TEMPLE ON WILSHIRE BOULEVARD IN A WHEELCHAIR, LOOKING FRIGHTFULLY PALE AND WEAK. ASSISTANTS LUGGED IN THE WOOD AND VELVET THRONE FROM WHICH HE WOULD DELIVER THE KEYNOTE ADDRESS AT A GATHERING OF MASONIC DIGNITARIES.

      The 89-year-old seer was lifted onto the throne. Concerns that he wasn’t up to the task melted away after he rested one hand on the arm of the chair, the other on his wooden cane, and launched into his chosen topic: Freemasonry in the New Millennium. The scene was classic Hall: there he was in the spotlight, flanked by two American flags, at once a philosopher and a master of narration, his blue eyes darting back and forth as though he were reading from an enormous scroll unfurling over the heads of the capacity crowd of four hundred people.

      They leaned forward in their seats, hanging on every word as Hall chronicled the mysterious beginnings and mission of the centuries-old fraternity with a sure voice, projecting, in his phrase, “the hope of taking a major step forward. . . in a time of emergency,” with such force one could virtually smell the fire pit of some great castle in the Age of Enlightenment.

      “The 21^st century has an extreme reminiscence to the 21^st year of a person’s life,” Hall told them. “It is a year of coming of age. . . when a person becomes an adult.” Similarly, he continued, in the 21^st century, the United States must take on the responsibilities and labors of its own maturity at a time when natural resources were being squandered, politicians were corrupted by power and greed, crime was spiraling out of control, education was failing children, and wars persisted worldwide. Mankind, he said, “has not the right to take a beautiful world with all its privileges and opportunities and turn it into a purgatory.”

      “This situation should remind Freemasons that they have something to live for,” he said. “We have the power to build worlds, the wisdom to govern them, and the divine right to inherit the earth and preserve it in good condition in order to pass it on to our descendents as a place of happiness, usefulness and security for thousands of years to come.”

      “We’re not asking for treason. We’re not asking for disobedience,” he said. “We’re only asking. . . that in every way possible, when they have the choice, stand for truth and, if necessary, take a little punishment for it.”

      From a front-row table with a generous view, Michael Marsellos, a 33rd° Mason and Romanian movie actor, thought to himself, “This is a man of genius. I kept glancing over my shoulders to see how others were responding. Everywhere I looked there were dropped jaws.”

      Hall’s 30-minute call to arms was one of his last public appearances in a career spanning nearly seven decades. On August 29, he died under bizarre and suspicious circumstances worthy of Raymond Chandler.

      More than a decade later, Hall is still bestowed by adherents with such reverential labels as “Maestro” and “adept.” Much of his life—the magical story of his birth, the whispers of his supernatural powers and membership in secret societies, the dozens of books offering mystical solutions for difficult social problems, the thousands of lectures delivered in a Mayan-style compound nestled between Hollywood and Los Angeles’ Griffith Park, the homicide investigation into his horrible death—fits the image of a holy man hounded to death for the secrets he guarded.

      This book tries to get as close as possible to the complex truth about the man and his myth, tracing his rise from a broken family in rural Canada; a chaotic and unhappy childhood; a life-altering dispute with famed escape artist Harry Houdini; stormy marriages; his climb to success in the metropolis that grew up with him; his ties to political bosses and the Hollywood film industry; and his tragic demise.

      At the same time, it provides an inside view of the birth of a vibrant subculture in California comprised of mystically inclined artists, visionaries, authors, business and civic leaders who continue to have a profound influence on movies, television, music, books, art and myriad products. Hall was one of its figureheads, making obscure and arcane spiritual texts and symbols of the remote past accessible to everyone just as Los Angeles started to unfold like a desert flower.

      It was a time when flamboyant evangelist and faith healer Aimee Semple McPherson attracted more than 5,000 congregants to her Angelus Temple each Sunday, supported campaigns to uphold the nation’s Christian heritage and