Occult America_ The Secret History of How Mysticism Shaped Our Nation - Mitch Horowitz [76]
By mid-1928, having presold subscriptions for almost a thousand copies (and printing 1,200 more), Hall published what would become known as the “Great Book”—and it has never gone out of print since. While self-published and self-financed, and invisible to mainstream scholars, the book soared on the wings of enthusiastic reports from readers. Hall received a letter from the Crown Prince of Sweden praising the work. Freemasonic lodges everywhere bought copies, and to this day the book remains a standard in Masonic libraries. Its admirers ranged from General John J. Pershing, the ramrod-straight commander of American forces in World War I, to, a generation later, Elvis Presley, who possessed his own signed copy.
To enthusiasts of the esoteric, The Secret Teachings solidified Hall’s reputation as a scholar of mythic proportions. And it gave the young writer new clout in attracting benefactors. Hall collected enough money from his growing list of acolytes—including the wife of an L.A. oil tycoon and highly placed Freemasons (Hall joined Masonry himself in 1954)—to open an art-deco faux-Mayan campus in 1934 in the Griffith Park neighborhood of Los Angeles. Calling it the Philosophical Research Society, or PRS, Hall fancifully spoke of modeling his organization after the ancient mystery school of Pythagoras. More practically, PRS provided a cloistered setting where Hall spent the rest of his life teaching, writing, and assembling a remarkable collection of antique texts and devotional objects. His small campus eventually grew to include a fifty-thousand-volume library with catwalks and floor-to-ceiling shelves; a three-hundred-seat auditorium with a thronelike chair for the master teacher; a bookstore; a warehouse for the many titles he wrote and sold; a woodpaneled office (complete with a walk-in vault for antiquities); and a sunny stucco courtyard. Designed in an unusual pastiche of Mayan, Egyptian, and art-deco motifs, PRS became one of the most popular destinations for L.A.’s spiritually curious, and remains so.
After Hall’s death on August 29, 1990, the idyllically self-contained campus barely survived simultaneous legal battles—one with Hall’s widow, who claimed it owed her money, and another with an eccentric con artist who, in the estimation of a civil-court judge, had befriended an ailing octogenarian Hall to pilfer his antiques and assets. Hall signed over his estate to this shadowy “trustee” just six days before his passing. As will shortly be seen, the timing and other circumstances rendered Hall’s death sufficiently suspicious for Los Angeles police to label the case as “open” for several years after.
The financial damage from these stormy years was irreversible. Following a protracted court battle in which a superior-court judge nullified Hall’s will and turned over control of PRS from his dubious beneficiary to a group of longtime supporters, the nonprofit organization faced a crushing $2 million legal debt. To survive, it was forced to sell off some of its most cherished items—including 234 alchemical, Hermetic, and Rosicrucian manuscripts to the Getty Museum in Los Angeles. Other valuables, including 214 rare manuscripts that Hall had spent a lifetime amassing, were delivered as part of a settlement to his widow, who reportedly earmarked them for sale to a European collector.
Its holdings permanently diminished, PRS regained fiscal health beginning in 1993 under a new president, Obadiah Harris, the man who had once been a protégé to Science of Mind founder Ernest Holmes. Harris was now a religious scholar and respected university administrator. He took the job for no salary. Under Harris, PRS established a state-accredited “distance learning” university, which granted graduate degrees. The school fulfilled a goal that Hall had spoken of toward the end of his life. Through both good times and bad, PRS kept in print the sumptuous, oversize editions of Hall’s “Great Book.”
Beginning in 2001, PRS partnered with