Occult America_ The Secret History of How Mysticism Shaped Our Nation - Mitch Horowitz [79]
Aged, obese, and suffering from a strained heart, Manly P. Hall was probably not the victim of foul play, as friends feared, but his final days were still puzzling. One longtime friend of Hall’s wondered how someone like Fritz could so suddenly grow “unduly influential over a man noted for his independence of thought and action.” Hall’s intimate companions—the shifty Fritz, the erratic Marie, the sometimes sycophantic staffers—all seemed to point to a man who proved a poor judge of where to place trust. The wisdom that Hall had cultivated his whole life appeared to abandon him when its fortification was most needed. As though prophesying his own decline, Hall wrote in the PRS Journal in 1986: “Noble thoughts out of context lost most of their protective meanings.”
For all his emphasis on the practicality of ancient wisdom, Hall’s life, in some respects, was a case in point of a truth not found in his writings: A person can accumulate the “wisdom of the ages”—gleaning knowledge from the greatest books, lectures, and research—with none of it penetrating one’s self. That perplexity of human nature, a puzzle at the heart of all ethical philosophies, seems never to have occurred to him.
The Enduring Value of The Secret Teachings
“Every writer,” literary critic Irving Howe once noted, “… must be read and remembered for his best work.” So it is with Manly P. Hall. The depth of Hall’s early achievement remains undiminished—and throws an observer back to the question: How did a modest young man complete what can be considered a one-of-a-kind codex to the ancient occult and esoteric traditions of the world, all by age twenty-seven, with little traditional education? To read Hall’s “Great Book” is to experience a readerly joy rarely associated with ordinary compendiums of intellectual or religious history—its depth, breadth, and detail are, simply put, not ordinary and not easily understood.
In an obscure astrology magazine of the 1940s, an Indian journalist wrote a personal profile of Hall, which held an interesting, if somewhat fanciful, passage:
The question is constantly asked on all sides as to how Mr. Hall can know and remember so much on so many different and difficult subjects.… Perhaps a direct answer to this constant question may be discovered in the following episode in the life of Mr. Hall himself: The first question Mr. Claude Bragdon, American mystic,* asked Mr. Hall after their first meeting in New York in 1937 was:
“Mr. Hall, how do you know so much more about the mathematics of Pythagoras than even the authorities on the subject?”
Standing beside both these dear American friends of mine, I was wondering with trepidation in my heart what reply Mr. Hall would make.
“Mr. Bragdon,” answered Mr. Hall quickly, unhesitatingly, and with a simultaneous flash of smile in his eyes and on his lips, “you are an occult philosopher. You know that it is easier to know things than to know how one knows those things.”
To the question of how Hall achieved what he did, his most fervent admirers suggest that he was born with knowledge from other lifetimes; others believe he had a photographic memory. In the end, perhaps one can only conclude such a question with still more questions. But the accomplishment of The Secret Teachings is finally this: It was the only serious, comprehensive codex of its era that took the world of myth and symbol on its own terms. Hall peered into sources that many historians refused to consider—from Masonic and Rosicrucian tracts to alchemical and astrological works—and recent scholarship has justified some of his historical conclusions. Up through the late twentieth century, most classical scholars would have considered Hall’s descriptions of oracular rites at Delphi as near fairy tale, with their portraits of soldiers and statesmen visiting an intoxicated trance