Manly Palmer Hall

Early Years

Manly P. Hall was born 1901 in Peterborough, Ontario to William S. Hall, a dentist, and Louise Palmer Hall, a chiropractor. In 1919 Hall moved from Canada to Los Angeles, California. In that year he was ordained to the Church of the People and published his first of over 150 works, The Lost Keys Of Freemasonry. Later in 1928, at the age of 27 years, he published An Encyclopedic Outline of Masonic, Hermetic, Qabbalistic and Rosicrucian Symbolical Philosophy: Being an Interpretation of the Secret Teachings concealed within the Rituals, Allegories and Mysteries of all Ages, which is more commonly referred to as The Secret Teachings of All Ages.^[1][2]

Hall, who never knew his father, moved to California with his maternal grandmother to reunite with his birth mother, who was living in Santa Monica, and was almost immediately drawn to the arcane world of mysticism, esoteric philosophies, and their underlying principles. His nascent interest was solidified by meeting–and becoming a student of–Sydney J. Brownson, “a diminutive horse-and-buggy doctor and Civil War veteran in his early 70s” who had set up business as a practitioner of phrenology, “the pseudo-science popular at the turn of the century that divided the brain into areas responsible for noble traits such as heroism and despised ones such as cruelty, and mapped them out in patterns on the surface of the brain. Hall delved deeply into “teachings of lost and hidden traditions, the golden verses of Hindu gods, Greek philosophers and Christian mystics, and the spiritual treasures waiting to be found within one’s own soul.” Less than a year later, Hall booked his first lecture, and the topic was reincarnation.^[3]

A tall (6′, 4″), imposing, confident and charismatic speaker who soon took over as preacher of the Church of the People in 1919, he read voraciously on “comparative religion, philosophy, sociology and psychology,” and “seemingly overnight . . . became a one-stop source of an astonishing range of eclectic spiritual material that resonates with the intellect, and the subconscious.”^[4] Hall was ordained a minister in the Church of the People on May 17, 1923, and “a few days later, he was elected permanent pastor of the church.”^[5]

During the early 1920s, Carolyn Lloyd and her daughter Estelle–members of a family that controlled a valuable oil field in Ventura County, California–began “sending a sizeable portion of their oil income to Hall,” who used the money to travel and acquire a substantial personal library of ancient literature.^[6] Hall’s “first trip around the world to study the lives, customs and religions of countries in Asia and Europe,” which commenced December 5, 1923, was paid for by donations from Carolyn Lloyd and his congregation.^[7]

Career As Philosopher

During the early 1930s, using money from the Lloyds, “Hall traveled to France and England, where he acquired his most extensive collection of rare books and manuscripts in alchemy and esoteric fields from London auctioneer, Sotheby & Company.” Through an agent, due to the depressed economic conditions of the era, Hall was able to buy a substantial number of rare books and manuscripts at reasonable prices. When Caroline Lloyd died in 1946, she bequeathed Hall a home, $15,000 in cash, and “a roughly $10,000 portion of her estate’s annual income from shares in the world’s largest oil companies for 38 years.”^[32]

In 1934, Hall founded the Philosophical Research Society (PRS) in Los Angeles, California, a 501(c)3 nonprofit organization^[33] dedicated to the study of religion, mythology, metaphysics, and the occult.^[34]

It is claimed that Hall was made a knight patron of the Masonic Research Group of San Francisco in 1953, although he was not raised as a Freemason until 22 November 1954 into Jewel Lodge No. 374, San Francisco. He later received his 32° in the Valley of San Francisco AASR (SJ).^[35] On December 8, 1973 (47 years after writing The Secret Teachings of All Ages), Hall was recognized as a 33° Mason (the highest honor conferred by the Supreme Council of the Scottish Rite) at a ceremony held at the Philosophical Research Society(PRS)^[36][37]). The definitive Manly Palmer Hall Archive states that Hall received the 33°, “despite never being initiated into the physical craft.”^[38]

In his over 70-year career, Hall delivered approximately 8,000 lectures in the United States and abroad, authored over 150 books and essays, and wrote countless magazine articles. He appears in the introduction to the 1938 film When Were You Born, a murder mystery that uses astrology as a key plot point.

Legacy

• The PRS still maintains a research library of over 50,000 volumes,^[41] and also sells and publishes metaphysical and spiritual books, mostly those authored by Hall.^[42]

• It was reported in 2010 that President Ronald Reagan adopted some ideas and phrasing from Hall’s book The Secret Destiny of America (1944), using them in speeches and essays.^[43]

References