Manly Palmer Hall (March 18, 1901 – August 29, 1990) was
a Canadian-born ascholar and philosopher. He is perhaps most famous
for his 1928 book The Secret Teachings of All Ages.
Manly P. Hall, the Philosophical Research Society’s first
president, was a seeker and lover of wisdom, the very definition of a
philosopher. He had the courage and the raw intellectual energy to look for
wisdom in places most men had long since forgotten about, or never knew
existed. He lived in an era when most Americans did not look toward other
cultures and traditions, without looking down. Yet during such times, Manly P.
Hall spoke, and wrote extensively, of the wisdom found in all ancient
traditions. In an age when serious study of “other religions” was anathema to
most, he found deep cross-cultural threads and revealed many interconnected
roots of modern religious expression. Neither Guru nor Saint, he made no claim
of perfection, far from it; but his work is exceedingly rare in its grand
scope, detail and synthesis. He embraced the wisdom of every tradition, and,
with a fluid command of their obscure and complex contents, worked to express
their unifying truths. His legacy is over 200 printed volumes, 8000 lectures, a
hand picked library which is one of the finest in the field, and a Society and
University that continue in his spirit of universal exploration and learning.
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]
- See more at:
http://prs.org/wpcms/manly-p-hall/#sthash.9BzCpaOR.dpuf
