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PREFACE

to the EXPANDED EDITION

THE ENTHUSIASTIC RESPONSE TO THE FIRST EDITION OF MASTER OF THE MYSTERIES: THE LIFE OF MANLY PALMER HALL LED ME TO EXPAND THE BOOK YOU ARE HOLDING IN YOUR HANDS. INTRIGUED, MANLY P. HALL AFICIONADOS WROTE ASKING FOR MORE, AND MANY OFFERED LEADS ON NEW SOURCES OF INFORMATION.

After reading the first edition, some sources were no longer reticent to discuss their experiences, allowing me to fill critical omissions with their surprisingly candid details about quirky habits and intimate moments at home.

This edition contains five new chapters including one based on the previously unpublished love letters between Hall and the woman who would become his second wife, Marie Bauer. Dan York, a movie producer and friend of the Halls in the 1980s, preserved the letters, which he obtained from Marie before she passed away.

In addition to sharing the letters, York also provided his own unpublished memoir of an emotionally stormy winter afternoon spent with the Hall family in 1983. It offers the first portrait of these married mystics and their intense, often embattled relationship.

Another new chapter explores the unusual relationship between Hall and James Edward Baker, a.k.a. Father Yod, the middle-aged owner of The Source, a successful health food restaurant on Sunset Boulevard, and leader of a spiritual commune that included his 14 young wives. Inspired by Hall’s attempt to create an occult environmental legacy in the 1970s, Baker’s tribe attempted to join forces with Nature’s invisible armies of magical spirits.

Since the book was first published, it was revealed that Al Qaeda founder Osama bin Laden was fascinated by Hall’s writings. Other additions include a portrait of the niece who regaled Hall with her adventures in the counterculture, and recollections of Helen James, the flamboyant Hall family lawyer whose queries into the suspicious circumstances of Hall’s death provided the Los Angeles Police Department with evidence it needed to launch a homicide investigation.

James reveals that she was both urged on and stymied by what she concludes was Hall’s spirit, which she said kept coming to her in dreams and telepathic messages, attempting to direct the course of the civil case she brought against the man police believe took Hall’s life.

Some may find this new information unsettling. A journalist’s job is to turn over every rock, record what’s underneath and follow that evidence wherever it leads.

There was a time while writing the first edition when I was sorely tempted to scrap the project. I questioned the very idea of focusing more attention on yet another self-styled mystic with all-too-human flaws who made a career out of telling people how to live right.

In that period of self reflection, I reached out to Huston Smith, the noted scholar whose book The World’s Religions has sold over two million copies.

In 2006, over dinner at a restaurant less than a mile from Hall’s Philosophical Research Society, the heart of Los Angeles’ metaphysical community, I said, “Huston, help me out here. Manly P. Hall had serious personal issues. Khalil Gibran was a chain smoker who died of cirrhosis of the liver. Madame Blavatsky was exposed as a fraud, and had such bad personal hygiene that there were ulcerous sores on both her legs. Alan Watts spent his last years in a stupor, guzzling warm vodka by the quarts. Carlos Castaneda was a fraud and a jerk. Edmond Szekely’s wife told me that he never discovered Essene documents in the Vatican—he made that up.

“Do these people deserve a moment of our attention?”

Smith smiled and, with a twinkle in his eyes, said, “Let me tell you a story.

“As a young man, I spent 10 years studying Zen in Tokyo. At the end of those 10 years, just before I returned to the United States, my master invited me to his home. He said, ‘Huston, before you leave, there are some things I want you to know.’

“At the appointed hour, I knocked on his front door. He said, ‘Huston. Welcome. This is Miss So-and-so, she takes care of my personal needs.’

“Then he led me into an adjacent room and said, ‘Huston, do you see this enormous television set? I watch Sumo wrestling on this television set. I love watching Sumo wrestling.’

“Then he pushed through the curtains of yet another room and said, ‘Huston, do you see all these empty beer cans and all these empty wine bottles? I drank all this wine and all this beer watching Sumo wrestling.’

“Clearly, my master did not want me to leave with him on a pedestal. What he couldn’t know is that after learning all these things, I loved him even more.”

Thank you Huston.

–L.S.