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Although Browne had briefly edited one of Garvey’s newspapers, he was largely unknown in either the white or black press. But he remained a man on the move. In 1950, he and his wife, Cecilia, founded the Hermetic Society for World Service, a Theosophical-influenced religious order claiming guidance by the same Masters who had taught Blavatsky and Olcott. Browne died in 1978, but his Hermetic Society still has members in the United States and Latin America—it is headquartered in the Dominican Republic, where Browne had established a branch in 1970. Foremost in the order’s founding statement, Browne called for “the protection of America, designated as the Grail in which will manifest the Great Cosmic Light which is destined to Illumine the whole world.”

“Our beloved America,” Browne wrote, is “the Future Holy Land” from which world enlightenment would arise. Until the very end, Robert T. Browne—a man born not twenty years after the end of slavery, a mystic whose cosmological work was quickly celebrated and just as quickly forgotten—was still defending his vision of America, a harsh, magical land filled with limitless hope.

* Scholars generally attribute the greater retention of African religious traditions in the Caribbean and Latin America to the greater ratio of blacks to whites on comparatively vast plantations, as well as to the continual influx of new slaves. In America, by contrast, plantations were smaller, black-to-white ratios less, and by the start of the Civil War most North American slaves were native born. “In North America,” writes historian Albert J. Raboteau in his classic Slave Religion, “a relatively small number of Africans found themselves enslaved amid a rapidly increasing native-born population whose memories of the African past grew fainter with each passing generation.”

* The law was later narrowed to target con artists who tailor predictions to cheat believers out of large sums of money, rather than storefront palm readers or psychics.

CHAPTER SEVEN

THE RETURN OF THE “SECRET TEACHINGS”

In this house I chanced to find a volume of the works of Cornelius Agrippa. I opened it with apathy; the theory which he attempts to demonstrate, and the wonderful facts which he relates, soon changed this feeling into enthusiasm. A new light seemed to dawn upon my mind; and, bounding with joy, I communicated my discovery …

—MARY SHELLEY, FRANKENSTEIN

Reference librarians had gotten accustomed to the hulking young man with the penetrating eyes and unstylishly long hair. Each day he entered the cavernous reading room of the New York Public Library and requested books that few others did: old works of esoteric lore, Hebrew Kabala, Hellenic mythology, Pythagorean mathematics, papyrus transcriptions, and the like. Day by day he sat silently, combing through curious volumes with clockwork precision.

It was the mid-1920s, the era of big money, bootlegged gin, and the Charleston—pleasures for which the precocious twenty-five-year-old cared little. Rather, the amateur scholar and sometime banking clerk was on a mission: to save the ancient wisdom teachings from obscurity in a world that he believed was going ethically illiterate.

He bore the stately name of Manly P. Hall. And though to many the young man laboring over ancient tomes might have seemed just one more eccentric who passed daily through the library’s great doors, the book he was preparing would become one of the most unusual and accomplished studies of esoteric lore and literature in modern history.

The Real “Know-How”

In the years following World War I, when Theosophy and New Thought had directed fresh attention to occult philosophy and “secrets of the ages,” a bevy of self-styled mystics and turbaned “scholars” produced thick works purporting to unlock hidden doctrines. Many were patchwork affairs, pieced together from Renaissance-era occult works, academic tracts on myth and symbol, and guides to folklore. The Chicago occult dealer L. W. de Laurence produced one