Life and career
Manly Palmer Hall began lecturing in Los Angeles as a young man. His audiences shared his interest in comparative religion and the meanings of symbols, subjects he explored through illustrated lectures as well as books. Before he was thirty he had undertaken the expensive production of The Secret Teachings of All Ages, issued in 1928 with the support of subscribers. Its scale made the visual material as important to the undertaking as the writing.
In 1934 he founded the Philosophical Research Society in Los Angeles. He remained its president for the rest of his life. Its lecture programme, library and publishing activities gave his work a permanent home. Books and manuscripts Hall acquired in the 1920s and 1930s formed the core of the society’s library. The Getty Research Institute now preserves his collection of alchemical manuscripts.
Work and ideas
Hall read symbols comparatively. An Egyptian image, a Masonic emblem and a figure from alchemical illustration could appear beside one another in his books because he believed they preserved related insights. The selection and arrangement express Hall’s philosophy. A picture reproduced from an older source and a modern painting created to illustrate his interpretation carry different kinds of historical evidence.
J. Augustus Knapp was an important collaborator in giving those interpretations a visual form. Hall also used fiction to explore spiritual questions. The Ways of the Lonely Ones is a collection of stories, including The Maker of the Gods, where the relation between a maker and the object of worship becomes a human predicament. It shows the storyteller at work beside the familiar lecturer and encyclopaedist.
