Manly Palmer Hall

Hall was born in Peterborough, Ontario in 1901, had no university education, and published The Secret Teachings of All Ages in 1928, at twenty-seven, a folio encyclopedia of Western symbolism covering the mysteries, Freemasonry, Kabbalah, alchemy, Rosicrucianism, Pythagorean number and comparative religion, with colour plates by J. Augustus Knapp, funded by subscription. It has never gone out of print and it is the book through which an enormous number of people first encountered this material.

Its value is as a compendium of what the tradition believed about itself, assembled with real breadth and genuine affection. It is not a work of history and should not be used as one: it repeats the Egyptian origin of the tarot, ancient lineages for Freemasonry and Rosicrucianism, and a chain of initiatory transmission running from the Egyptian temples through Pythagoras to the modern lodges. None of that survives historical scrutiny, and Hall was reporting the tradition's self-understanding rather than testing it.

He founded the Philosophical Research Society in Los Angeles in 1934, lectured for six decades, and was made an honorary 33rd-degree Mason late in life. His death in 1990 was strange enough that it was investigated: he died at eighty-nine in circumstances involving a business associate, Daniel Fritz, and the case was reported as suspicious without any charge ever being brought. Louis Sahagun's biography sets out what is known.

The Secret Teachings made Hall famous at twenty seven; the Philosophical Research Society is what he did with the fame. Founded in Los Angeles in 1934 on a campus in Los Feliz whose buildings mix Mayan and Egyptian motifs, the PRS was designed as a working institution rather than a following: a hall where Hall lectured on Sunday mornings for half a century, a press that kept his writings in print, and above all a library. Hall was a serious and knowledgeable collector, and the library he assembled, tens of thousands of volumes with notable holdings in alchemy, Rosicrucianism, cabala and Eastern philosophy, including rarities acquired from the great auctions of the 1920s and 1930s, was opened to any reader without charge, an act of deliberate policy from a man whose own education had been public libraries. He lectured thousands of times, wrote steadily, and consulted on Hollywood's occasional flirtations with the esoteric.

Freemasonry honoured the outsider late: initiated only in 1954, he was crowned an honorary thirty third degree in 1973, a rare recognition for contribution to masonic literature rather than lodge service. He died in 1990 amid circumstances his biographers still argue over, but the institution held; the society continues on Griffith Park Boulevard, and the library remains what Hall built as his real monument, a private canon deliberately made public.