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a trade publisher to create a newly designed “Reader’s Edition” of The Secret Teachings of All Ages, a compact, textually unabridged version of Hall’s original.* Within a few years, the Reader’s Edition had entered more than sixteen printings, probably reaching more readers than The Secret Teachings had throughout its previous lifetime. More than a decade after his death, Hall had not only eluded the obscurity that time held in store for most of his contemporaries but had became one of the few esoteric figures from the twentieth century whose work grew in reach in the next.

A Private World

Hall wrote scores of other books over the course of his life and composed literally thousands of pamphlets and articles. He is estimated to have delivered about eight thousand lectures—typically given without notes, recited with crystalline precision. Yet for all his output, Hall remained a riddle to those around him. Following his Sunday-morning lectures at PRS, he would promptly exit the auditorium from a side door, enter a car, and be driven back to his nearby house.

A first marriage in 1930 ended with his wife’s suicide a little more than a decade later. He was into middle age in 1950 when he remarried, to a petite German–American divorcée, Marie Bauer. His second bride harbored a deep interest in the occult and an all-consuming belief that a buried vault in Williamsburg, Virginia, contained the secret mystical manuscripts of her and Hall’s hero, the philosopher Francis Bacon. (Marie and her husband also considered Bacon the hidden genius behind the Shakespearean plays—a theory that Hall took considerable efforts to defend in his “Great Book.”) Possessed of a mercurial temper and fierce determination, Marie Bauer was, in the eyes of some, a formidable equal to her imposing husband. To others, she raised the question of Hall’s choice of companions. Marie was known for sharp mood swings and a dictatorial manner toward friends and guests who would venture near her husband. Two years after Hall’s death, two acolytes of Marie’s ideas were convicted of trespassing in Virginia’s Bruton Parish churchyard, where they conducted an illegal dig for the mythical Bacon vault.

Unlike his histrionic wife and the many spiritual teachers who flocked to Hollywood, Hall showed relatively little interest in attracting publicity or hobnobbing with movie stars. Later in Hall’s life, his best-known friend was the folksinger and balladeer Burl Ives, famous for his rendition of “Frosty the Snowman.” Ives was also a fellow Freemason. Hall rarely involved himself in the movie business, though in 1938 he did contribute the story to a forgettable murder yarn with an astrological theme: When Were You Born? In a segment at the film’s opening, a young Hall looks into the camera and explains to the audience the meaning of the zodiac signs.

In those instances when Hall did succumb to Hollywood glitz, the results were more humorous than glamorous. In 1940, an entertainment columnist reported that Hall—“famous Los Angeles student of occult sciences”—hypnotized actor Bela Lugosi for a death scene in a low-budget Lugosi–Boris Karloff vehicle called Black Friday. Universal Pictures trumpeted Lugosi’s portrayal of a man suffocating to death in a closet as “the first scene ever filmed of a player under the influence of hypnotism.” The movie trailer briefly showed an angular, mustached Hall sitting over Lugosi and waving his hands across the actor’s face in the style of Mesmeric “passes” found in the books of Andrew Jackson Davis. Entertainment pages reported that Lugosi, hypnotically convinced he was in mortal danger, wrecked the movie set in a desperate fight to escape. The affair gave rise to an urban legend that Hall had hypnotized Lugosi before his legendary performance as Dracula.

Off the movie set, the Hungarian actor and Californian occultist became close friends. The two men bonded over their shared love for classical music, which they listened to together on phonograph records. In 1955, the seventy-three-year-old Lugosi wed his fifth bride at Hall’s Hollywood