Occult America_ The Secret History of How Mysticism Shaped Our Nation - Mitch Horowitz [78]
The Mystic in Decline
As an old man, Hall continued to sound much like he did as a young one. A year before his death, he fretted to a reporter that colleges produce “financially and academically successful students, but not good persons. They don’t teach honor and integrity.” At times he could disappoint New Age–era acolytes with chestnuts like: “Old-fashioned common sense is one of the most uncommon things we have.” After Hall’s death, the Los Angeles Times offered an austere tribute: “Followers say he believed in reincarnation and in a mixture of the Golden Rule and living in moderation.” In this sense, the prodigious scholar had fashioned the study of occult ideas into a search for ethical living.
If the point of all higher knowledge, as Hall saw it, was to refine and improve a person’s life, his own existence would have to be judged a failure as often as a success. In his later years, Hall often slipped into a routine of doing that which he simply knew how to do: delivering another lecture, writing another book, and issuing another pamphlet. In an address at PRS in the closing years of his life, Hall sought to put forth a major statement on the social, political, and environmental threats facing America and the world. The physical frame and confident phrasing were still that of Hall, speaking extemporaneously for a long stretch, rarely shifting in his thronelike chair, and never losing a beat. Yet the content was tedium itself, filled with political bromides such as the need for environmental stewardship and the caretaking of democracy—points with which no sensible person could argue or fail to anticipate.
In the late 1980s, Hall appeared to lose his personal judgment and his ethical compass. He turned over all of his household and business affairs, and even his and PRS’s financial assets, to a self-professed shamanic healer and reincarnate of Atlantis named Daniel Fritz. More prosaically, Fritz was known as a computer marketer, health-products entrepreneur, and, in the eyes of Hall’s friends and colleagues, a grifter. Colleagues say Hall disregarded—and in one case even fired—longtime employees and associates who questioned the relationship. Even a seasoned superior-court judge found Fritz worthy of disdain. “Did Mr. Fritz effectively steal from Mr. Hall?” said Judge Harvey A. Schneider upon invalidating Hall’s belatedly amended will. “I think the answer is clearly yes. The evidence is so overwhelming that Mr. Fritz exerted undue influence over Mr. Hall … the whole thing just doesn’t pass any reasonable person’s sniff test.”
Ill and dangerously overweight in his final years, Hall had apparently bought in to Fritz’s claims as a mystical healer and his Barnum-like promises to spread the aged scholar’s work across the world. One friend observed that Fritz did help Hall drop his weight from three hundred to two hundred pounds through diet and exercise, and relieved his painful constipation with the help of colonics. But in a troubling move, the eighty-nine-year-old Hall signed his estate over to Fritz less than a week before he died. It is tempting to speculate that the aged Hall suffered from senility, yet he delivered a typically well-attended lecture just days before his death. It was a death that Hall’s widow, Marie, stoked intense concerns over, telling the Los Angeles Times in 1994: “I firmly believe it was murder.”
She wasn’t the only one. Investigators with the Los Angeles Police Department found the circumstances suspicious: Hall was alone with Fritz and Fritz’s son when he died; hours passed before the death was reported; the body appeared to have been moved from the outdoors to inside; and there was the strange timing of the new will. Charges