New Interview on The Magical Buffet website

Click here to read the interview: 10 Questions with Gary Lachman

Master of the Mysteries, by Louis Sahagun

From The Independent UK, Sunday Book Section
Book Reviewed by Gary Lachman
October 12, 2008

These days the name Manly Palmer Hall doesn't ring many bells, but in Hollywood in the Thirties, Forties and Fifties, it was one to conjure with. Back then, Hall, an indefatigable scholar, collector and lecturer on the western metaphysical tradition (think "New Age"), was friend and guru to movie stars such as Bela Lugosi, politicians such as Lt Governor Goodwin Knight, and producers such as Cecil B DeMille. His talks on freemasonry, the Rosicrucians, Hermeticism and other mystical themes, at the Church of the People and later at his own Philosophical Research Society, drew huge crowds. His prolific if derivative writings on practically every aspect of western occultism – best represented in his encyclopaedic Secret Teachings of All Ages – reached millions of readers, one of whom was the US president Harry S Truman.

Louis Sahagun, a Los Angeles Times staff writer, perfectly recreates a Hollywood filled with extraordinary characters that predates its New Age nuttiness by decades. Hall's address book bulged with droppable names: Gloria Swanson, Luther Burbank, Aldous Huxley, Samuel Goldwyn. Warner Bros. pumped him for occult movie ideas, fellow masons such as Sid Grauman built esoterically influenced Hollywood landmarks such as the Egyptian Theatre, and rich oil families such as the Lloyds made sure Hall wanted for nothing. In the 1970s, when I heard him speak at his Mayan-Egyptian-style headquarters near Griffith Park, Hall's fans included Elvis Presley, the Apollo 14 moonwalker Edgar Mitchell, and Sirhan Sirhan, the assassin of Robert Kennedy...(CLICK TO READ)

An American Facsism?

An excerpt from Gary's forthcoming book; Politics and the Occult is up on the Reality Sandwich website. Check it out and pass it on if so inclined.