Occult America_ The Secret History of How Mysticism Shaped Our Nation - Mitch Horowitz [75]
A Fitful Idealist
Like many young artists, Hall felt himself a stranger to his times. He fretted over the Jazz Age giddiness and the hunger for money that he saw firsthand in his brief career at a New York brokerage firm before the Great Depression. In addition to witnessing a distraught investor’s suicide, he recalled an elderly bookkeeper who was discovered dead at his desk after nearly a half century on the job. During a dangerous flu epidemic, Hall remembered, people trudged into work as though “devotion to the business was the symbol of true character.”
The numbing influence Hall detected in high commerce was not all that disturbed him. He bemoaned the phony “Mahatmas” who had begun hanging out shingles in large American cities—turbaned figures like Chicago’s de Laurence who extolled Tibetan wisdom and “Hindoo” magic, often without having ventured beyond American shores. Hall later wrote:
Self-appointed teachers arose without adequate backgrounds, knowledge or credentials, and swept through the nation.… Glamorous ladies in thousand-dollar evening gowns, waving ostrich-plumed fans, taught “prosperity” to the hungry poor at twenty-five dollars a course.… Mysterious swamis, yogis, and the like entranced audiences of from two to four thousand at a meeting …
Nor did he find succor in mainline religious scholarship, which, in his eyes, treated esoteric and primeval religions as museum pieces, not living philosophies with relevance for contemporary people. “With very few exceptions,” Hall wrote, “modern authorities downgraded all systems of idealistic philosophy and the deeper aspects of comparative religion. Translations of classical authors could differ greatly, but in most cases the noblest thoughts were eliminated or denigrated … and scholarship was based largely upon the acceptance of a sterile materialism.” Indeed, one of the period’s most influential academic studies of myth and arcana, The Golden Bough, disparaged the meaning of its own subject matter: “In short, magic is a spurious system of natural law as well as a fallacious guide of conduct; it is a false science as well as an abortive art.”
Barren religious scholarship, fake gurus, worship of mammon—wherever Hall looked, he was dismayed. The Secret Teachings of All Ages took shape in his mind as a way to reestablish a vital, living connection to the search for meaning that he believed characterized the academies of the ancient world. To signal how his approach differed from materialist scholarship, Hall quoted his philosophic hero, Francis Bacon, early in the massive work: “A little philosophy inclineth man’s mind to atheism; but depth in philosophy bringeth men’s minds about to religion.”
The “Great Book” Appears
Hall’s world travels in the early 1920s gave him some degree of proximity to the monuments and philosophies of antiquity. But the materials that finally made it possible for him to complete his book of wisdom were those he discovered in the great Western libraries just opening to widespread public use. Through the influence of benefactors—including General Sir Francis Younghusband, who led Britain’s invasion of Tibet at the turn of the century—the budding scholar gained access to some of the rarest manuscripts at the British Museum. While living in New York in the mid-1920s, Hall found a resource to rival Britain’s own: the vast beaux arts reading room of the New York Public Library.
Sitting at one of the huge oak tables that line the cathedral-size space, Hall toiled over books of myth and symbol just steps away from the Times Square razzmatazz that represented everything he chafed against. He amassed a bibliography of nearly one thousand entries. The books he requested were always