Manly P. Hall and the Philosophical Research Society

Manly Palmer Hall -- an occult Magus at 27.

He was the Grand Old Man of Southern Californian occultism.

During his unprecedented 70-year career, he delivered over 8,000 lectures, authored over 150 books and monographs, and wrote countless millions of words in periodicals. A self-taught authority in subjects ranging from alchemy to Eastern religion to symbolism, he amassed in his lifetime thousands of rare and obscure books, manuscripts and documents, and created one of the world’s biggest private libraries of religious and metaphysical titles. And he was one of the first authors and speakers to cast a light on the Western spiritual tradition’s more esoteric corners, and make its doctrines accessible and applicable to three generations of seekers through his lectures and his books, as well as the organization he founded.

His name was Manly Palmer Hall, and the organization that promoted both his teachings, and those of the sages and seers who he brought into the modern world, was the Philosophical Research Society. No occult figure of the 20^th century matched his literary output or his durability, and although his Society lacked the global reach of groups like the Theosophists and the Rosicrucians, his writings made him one of the era’s most influential metaphysical authors.

Hall’s life touched quintessentially Californian themes. After he arrived in L.A., he cast off his humble past, and reinvented himself as a guru and prophet in the region’s wide-open spiritual marketplace. He rediscovered ancient ways to expand consciousness, and indulged in unorthodox health treatments. He marketed his ideas to Hollywood, and saw them take shape on screen and reach mass audiences. And, tragically, he ended his life in the shadow of intrigue and violence, as a victim of one of the Southland’s many officially unsolved murders.

Like his fellow Angeleno avatar Aimee Semple McPherson, Hall was an Ontarian Canadian by birth. Abandoned by his mother in infancy, Hall was raised by his grandmother, and spent his childhood crisscrossing the United States with her. A voracious reader from an early age, Hall nevertheless ended his formal schooling after the sixth grade, and wound up in New York during his teens, where he found work as a Wall Street clerk. There, he also hung out at the Martinka Brothers’ “House of a Thousand Memories” store, a stage-magician’s supply emporium where the great illusionist Harry Houdini held court. At the store, Hall often debated the famed conjurer about magic, insisting that Houdini’s hard-nosed, materialistic approach to phenomenology failed to explain all that was truly mysterious and miraculous in the world.

When his grandmother died in 1919, the 18-year old Hall quit his job, and moved to Los Angeles. There, he reunited with his mother, who had remarried after a career as a chiropractic healer in the Alaskan gold fields, and settled in Santa Monica.

In Los Angeles, Hall met Sydney J. Brownson, an elderly phrenologist who had dedicated his life to esoteric studies after having a mystical experience in the midst of a Civil War battle. Impressed by Hall’s interest in spiritual arcana, as well as his obvious intelligence, Brownson took on Hall as a personal student, and taught him a wide variety of occult lore.

Noting that the handsome, articulate, quick-thinking young man had a natural gift for speaking, Brownson invited him to give a talk before a small meeting in Santa Monica. At the gathering, Hall spoke on reincarnation, and then passed the hat, collecting sixty-five cents from the eight attendees. It was the first of Hall’s thousands of paid lectures.

Weeks later, Hall got a chance to speak at the Church of the People, a liberal, neo-Transcendentalist sect based in downtown Los Angeles. He was an immediate hit with the congregation, who had just been abandoned by their regular minister and desperately needed a new leader who shared their metaphysical interests. When they offered him leadership of the church, the teenaged occult scholar accepted the post, and soon not only manned the pulpit, but counseled elderly church members.

A young Manly P. Hall, sporting his Rosicrucian cross.

Although wholly untrained in pastoral work, Hall discharged his ministerial duties with aplomb. Years later, he recalled: “I didn’t know exactly why I was leading a church, but it was one of those accidents or circumstances of fortune that you do not question…[W]hen these people came to me with their problems, I sat back with the supreme wisdom of a teenager and told them what I thought common sense would dictate, what seemed to me reasonable. And it worked in many cases.” The faithful at Church of the People must been satisfied, since they soon gave their young pastor a Rosicrucian cross of gold, platinum and diamonds as a gift for his services.

At the Church, Hall began to develop both the metaphysical philosophy and speaking style that would characterize his life’s work. In his 90-minute talks to the congregation, he would stick to one topic, yet draw on Egyptian mythology, Christian mysticism, Classical philosophy, Theosophy, and many other sources of spiritual wisdom to illustrate points. He portrayed God as an invisible creative principle permeating the universe and expressing itself in the material world, with its essential nature veiled in the symbols and rituals of humanity’s religious faiths and secret societies. This God rewarded balance, moderation, and healthy habits, and punished evildoers with karmic retribution. Sometimes, he said, God would bring forth special people – saints, mystics, Boddhisattvas – to teach these principles to the rest of humanity through their words and actions.

Around this time, Hall began to assemble a private library of religious and spiritual lore. His aim was to create a comprehensive survey of occult teachings across the centuries, from different civilizations and faith traditions, and find the common themes in them. Using both these writings and his own talks for material, he also started publishing a monthly periodical, All-Seeing Eye, as well as illustrated booklets on topics like shamanism, ancient mystery schools, and Freemasonry.

The All-Seeing Eye, Hall's monthly journal of occult teachings.

 The printed matters, and his popular weekly talks at the Church, brought Hall attention in influential circles. Augusta Heindel, the widow of Rosicrucian Fellowship founder Max Heindel, noted the young scholar’s interest in and knowledge about the Fraternitas Rosae Crucis, and made him welcome at the sect’s hilltop compound in Oceanside. More importantly, Hall befriended oil heiress Caroline A. Lloyd and her daughter Alma Estelle, who hosted his lectures at their palatial home in L.A.’s Los Feliz district, and paid him a generous stipend for his work. They would also leave him handsome legacies in their wills.

The Lloyd money freed Hall for full-time research and writing, and allowed him to travel the world, seeking arcane lore and lecturing audiences in Asia and Europe. When he returned, he made All-Seeing Eye a weekly publication that featured news of mysterious and miraculous doings from around the globe. He also ramped up his work on a full-length book about the wisdom traditions of the world, and spent four hours each day dictating it to a stenographer. Hall promised that when it was published, the book would be “the most elaborate and most beautiful volume ever printed on the West Coast.”

After seven years of work on the book, he pitched it to San Francisco publisher H.S. Crocker. The firm agreed to publish it, assigned famed book designer John Henry Nash to do the graphics, and then sank an estimated $150,000 into the project. Much of the initial publishing cost was raised from advance sales.

When the book finally appeared in 1928, it stunned the publishing and metaphysical worlds. Published as Encyclopedic Outline of Masonic, Hermetic, Qabbalistic and Rosicrucian Symbolical Philosophy, it would become better known by the title The Secret Teachings of All Ages.

Hall's masterwork. Over one million copies are in print.

 An atlas-sized tome with dense script, and Roman numerals for page numbers, The Secret Teachings of All Ages was an exhaustive survey of esoteric teachings and lore. The book covered a dazzling variety of topics: ancient Egypt, the Pythagorean School, Freemasonry, Christian mysticism, Kabbalah, alchemy, Rosicrucianism, Native American traditions, symbolism, and the occult powers of gemstones and precious metals, to name a few. The volume also featured over 200 black-and-white illustrations copied from rare alchemical manuscripts and similar curiosa, and 54 full-color plates by famed illustrator J. Augustus Knapp that depicted Gnostic deities, glowing angelic beings, Atlantean temples, alchemical rituals, mystery-school initiations, Buddhist mandalas, and similarly fantastic subjects.

Nobody had ever seen anything like The Secret Teachings of All Ages. It was almost as if a fairy-tale wizard’s Book of Secrets and Spells had been published, and could be had by anyone with $100 in their pocket. The book’s first two editions quickly sold out, and it garnered rave reviews, as well as reams of media attention for its 27-year old author, who had suddenly become the hottest property on the late-Twenties American lecture circuit.  

By 1930, Hall was being hailed as one of the world’s most promising young thinkers and scholars. It didn’t hurt that he had not only a considerable intellect and writing talent, and a commanding presence as a speaker, but also movie-star good looks. Photos of him from the time show a tall, powerfully-built man with a high forehead and long, wavy dark hair, fixing the camera with a piercing stare worthy of a Blavatsky or a Rasputin. Hall often played up his Byronesque image by wearing a cape, and an observer from that time remembered the young autodidact sweeping into a bookstore one day with his entourage in tow, nodding to books on the shelves that his acolytes would instantly fetch for his perusal.

That year, he married Fay B. de Ravenne, his secretary of five years who had transcribed The Secret Teachings of All Ages from his dictation. But the marriage proved to be an unhappy one, as Hall was away much of the time, speaking to capacity audiences in Chicago, New York and other distant cities while his young wife suffered from various physical ailments and depression. (Eventually Fay committed suicide, leaving behind a note that said she was heartsick, sleepless, and desired only death. After her passing, Hall never mentioned her in public again.)

Sample page from the Ripley Scroll (Yale University copy)

Still, the young scholar pressed on. Now flush with cash from lectures and book sales, he traveled through Depression-era Europe and bought up rare alchemical manuscripts and occult treatises at cut-rate prices. Hall picked up original works by legendary mages like the Comte de Ste. Germain, Nicolas Flamel, and Michael Maier, and also obtained a copy of the fabulous Ripley Scroll – a 20-foot long, hand-painted 17^th century alchemical treatise packed with colorful esoteric symbolism.

Hall didn’t obtain such items merely as collectible investment pieces to be hidden in some vault or closet. He wanted to bring their doctrines to the Twentieth Century, which in his opinion, had casually discarded far too much historical teaching in the name of modernization, and desperately needed to hear the ancient spiritual traditions’ perennial truths. Mainstream academia, he said, was dominated by scientism and materialism – a new University of Wisdom was needed to create “the center of a new way of life in the midst of the great Pacific theater of the future.”

To realize this ideal, Hall founded the Philosophical Research Society in 1934. The Society’s stated purpose was to assist “thoughtful persons to live more graciously and constructively in a confused and troubled world. The Society is entirely free from educational, political, or ecclesiastical control. Dedicated to an idealistic approach to the solution of human problems, the Society's program stresses the need for the integration of religion, philosophy, and the science of psychology into one system of instruction. The goal of this instruction is to enable the individual to develop a mature philosophy of life, to recognize his proper responsibilities and opportunities, and to understand and appreciate his place in the unfolding universal pattern.”

That year, the PRS bought a ¾-acre lot in Los Angeles’ fashionable Los Feliz district from a holding company for a paltry ten dollars. British architect Robert B. Stacy-Judd, famed for his quasi-ancient-Egyptian/Mayan structures which dotted Southern California’s landscape, contributed the design for the site’s main building. In a midnight ceremony timed to coincide with an astrological alignment, Hall laid the cornerstone for the building; when it was eventually completed it became the library and publishing center for the Society, and also housed his personal office.

Color publicity still from When Were You Born? starring Anna May Wong

 But Hall’s ambitions reached beyond the lecture circuit and library reading room. By the late 1930s, he was writing screenplays based on occult lore, hoping to take messages of ancient wisdom to Hollywood and a movie-going audience. Warner Brothers took his cinematic aspirations seriously enough to hire him as a story-developer, and even produced one of his scripts – When Were You Born? – as a feature movie. The film, which starred Anna May Wong as a detective, was an astrological mystery story whose twelve main characters each represented a different sign of the Zodiac. Although the movie had a gala premiere that featured movie starts mingling with psychics and holistic healers at Hall’s Frank Lloyd Wright-designed home, it was a box-office dud. 

Still, Hall retained enough movieland moxie to work with Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi on stories and screenplays. Lugosi eventually became a close friend of Hall’s, sought his help to cure his morphine addiction with hypnosis, and accepted the PRS head’s largesse during lean periods in his movie career. In 1955, Hall even performed the private ceremony where Lugosi married his fifth and final wife, Hope Lininger.

Hall officiating at the wedding of Bela and Hope Lugosi

World War II brought a distinctly flag-waving flavor to PRS. Years earlier, Hall had predicted that the USA and Great Britain would face serious troubles between 1940 and 1942, and when Axis bombs rained down on London and Pearl Harbor, he saw it as a confirmation of his prophetic skills. An immigrant who’d worked his way to wealth and fame in his adopted land, Hall was an unabashed pro-war patriot, and wrote in the Society’s new quarterly magazine, Horizon, that the rigors of boot camp endured by millions of American men could effectively discipline them for the even more strenuous demands of spiritual discipleship.

Hall’s own biggest contribution to war-era patriotic propaganda was The Secret Destiny of America, a book that portrayed America as the physical embodiment of ancient esoteric ideals about democracy and freedom – Lord Francis Bacon’s “New Atlantis” here to lead the world to a new Golden Age.

Lord Bacon, and his alleged doings in the New World, figured heavily in the life of one of Hall’s most enthusiastic supporters, Marie Bauer. A married mother of two, Bauer saw Hall speak in New York City in 1937, and was so taken by his message that she soon had read all of his books. Eventually she convinced her family to move from the East Coast to Southern California just to be near him.

Marie Bauer Hall

While volunteering at the PRS Library, Bauer met a Shakespearean scholar there who told her the story of the so-called “Bruton Vault” The scholar, who firmly believed that Lord Bacon had written the works ascribed to the Bard of Stratford, maintained that his plays contained hidden codes that revealed the existence of a fabulous treasure hoard buried by Bacon in a vault beneath Bruton Episcopal Church in Williamsburg, Virginia. The vault supposedly held copper cylinders containing unpublished “Shakespearian” plays, gold chalices, and keys to more treasures secreted across the globe, as well as a Bacon-designed blueprint for civilization that would establish Utopia on earth.

Bauer became absolutely obsessed with the Bruton Vault, and spent years enlisting supporters and sponsors to help find the Williamsburg cache. In 1938, she actually conducted a Rockefeller-Foundation endorsed excavation of the Bruton churchyard, which failed to unearth the vault, and was called off when diggers started hitting seventeenth-century coffins. Still, she wrote several books about the Bacon treasure, and discussed it endlessly with friends and strangers alike for the rest of her life. Largely because of the obsession, her marriage collapsed.

Scene from the fruitless 1938 excavation of the "Bruton Vault".

A colorful woman, who often wore brightly-hued clothes and serpent-shaped metal bracelets, and painted turned-up eyebrows onto her face, Bauer turned her amorous attentions to Hall, who himself had recently buried his wife. If Hall was put off by her Bruton-vault obsession, her claims of receiving secret messages from billboard signs and similarly unlikely oracles, or her generally loud and overbearing manner, it didn’t seem to matter, and he was smitten by the woman. Finally, the couple married in December 1950, at the home of Hollywood astrologer Blanca Holmes.

Although Hall and Bauer worked as a team, hosting parties and gatherings at their house, it soon became obvious who was the dominant member of the couple. Friends of Hall’s said Marie often bullied and berated her husband in public, and commandeered social events so that she could deliver hours-long rants about Francis Bacon’s alleged treasure-trove. Throughout the Fifties and Sixties, Marie endlessly pestered the FBI by letter and in person about the Bruton Vault’s immeasurable importance to national security; eventually the Feds labeled her a “chronic nuisance,” and ordered her to cease communications with them.

Hall himself lacked both the time and energy to rein in his monomaniacal spouse. Now in his fifties, the middle-aged mage, who was still writing and lecturing at a feverish pace, was suffering from glandular problems and weight troubles (despite his advocacy of living a healthy, active life, Hall himself was a junk-food addict and a physically inert bookworm). He countered his health complaints with the unorthodox treatments popular in Fifties Los Angeles, such as chiropractor James Sabia’s “electro-stimulating machine,” and William E. Gray’s “healing touch” cure that could supposedly “blow out” cancers from the body. Hall was especially fond of Biblical pseudo-scholar Edmond Bordeaux Szekely’s “water angel” – a colonic-irrigation technique that Szekely claimed Jesus Christ had advocated in the apocryphal “Secret Essene Gospel.”

The Philosophical Research Society building, circa 1965.

Meanwhile, the PRS was slowly inching towards its goal of becoming a degree-granting institution. Don Ingalls, a Los Angeles policeman and Society member who later became a successful Hollywood producer and screenwriter, designed a PRS course called “The Basic Ideas of Man,” which would teach philosophy, psychology, and comparative religion as accredited academic studies. And Robert Stacy-Judd drew up a immense Mayan-temple-style building to building to serve as the Society’s lecture hall; the city planning commission eventually forced him and the Society to scale it down to a modest 400-seat theatre, but Hall once again commemorated the erection by laying the corner stone at an astrologically-auspicious moment.

Despite the grand buildings and plans, at the beginning of the Sixties the PRS’ visibility and influence was fading. Hall’s lecture audiences and students were aging, and even though occult and paranormal themes permeated the Sixties pop culture, few young people found their way to the Society’s headquarters on Los Feliz Boulevard. Although the PRS’ dynamic Vice President Henry Drake got noted figures like religious-scholar Huston Smith, parapsychologist Stanley Krippner, and experimental psychologist Bruno Bettelheim to speak at the Society, Hall himself remained badly out of synch with the times, and was widely perceived as a relic of the pre-war Los Angeles metaphysical scene.

Hall did little to dispel this image. He counted among his celebrity supporters not the movie stars and pop idols boasted by other gurus, but such staid figures as former Republican governor Goodwin Knight, and Los Angeles’ hard-Right mayor Sam Yorty, who once presented Hall with an official plaque of appreciation in a private ceremony. Hall may have even inspired the greatest American conservative politician of the 20^th Century; Occult America author Mitch Horowitz heard much of The Secret Destiny of America’s mystical-nationalist rhetoric echoed in Ronald Reagan’s speeches, and has speculated that the future California governor and U.S. president read and absorbed the 1944 work back when he was still a liberal film-star.

Hall in 1962. He rejected Sixties "Aquarian" occultism, and influenced noted conservative political figures of the era.

Unlike the optimistic Aquarian Sixties occultists, Hall predicted doom and disaster for civilization and the planet, and felt that the hippie counterculture was escapist, immature and anti-intellectual. He especially opposed the psychedelic subculture, comparing drug-users to Homer’s “lotus eaters” and claiming that LSD was worthless for consciousness expansion. Despite this, his Secret Teachings of All Ages remained a perennial best-seller at metaphysical bookstores and the more cerebral head-shops, and a few hipsters glommed onto Hall’s teachings despite his seeming disdain for their kind.

One of Secret Teachings’ biggest latter-day fans was Elvis Presley, who, like Hall, was a self-taught student of esoteric doctrines. According to Larry Geller, Elvis’ hairstylist and spiritual adviser, the King desperately wanted to go to the PRS and meet Hall, but was afraid he’d be mobbed if he set foot in the building. (He sent his wife Priscilla instead, who was bored stiff by Hall’s lectures.) However, Geller scored a deluxe copy of Secret Teachings and had a flattered Hall personally inscribe it to Elvis; according to him, the rock legend once spent a night in an L.A. recording studio showing the big book to his musicians, and lecturing them about its teachings.

By the 1970s, Hall was a sick, aging man. He stopped lecturing outside of Los Angeles, since he was usually too frail to travel. Arthritis and his weight problem made it almost impossible to walk without pain. His gall bladder malfunctioned, and was eventually removed. And his eyesight was failing; only surgery on a detached retina slowed the advance of blindness.

In his eighties, Hall was granted high honors by both John F. Kennedy University and the Freemasons.

Still, Hall was well enough to accept two major accolades around the time of his 80^th birthday. In 1981, John F Kennedy University granted the self-taught middle-school dropout an honorary Doctorate. And the Scottish Rite of Freemasonry presented Hall with its highest honor, the Grand Cross. (Hall, who had spoken and written extensively about Masonic secret teachings since his late teens, finally became a Mason in 1954, and eventually attained the Scottish Rite’s elite 33^rd Degree. True to his Masonic oaths, once he became a member, he ceased discussing the Brotherhood around non-Masons.)

And Hall even retained a slight celebrity cachet through the 1980s. His Masonic Brother, folksinger and actor Burl Ives, became a close friend, although their wives often clashed (reportedly, the troubles started when both Marie Hall and Dorothy Ives claimed to have been the Comte de St. Germain’s mistress in their former lives.) Another notable, singer-songwriter John Denver, befriended the Halls and often hung out at their house after his Los Angeles concerts. And Hall’s hipness quotient rose appreciably in July 1985 when he presided over the wedding of hard-drinking and –living writer Charles Bukowski to his longtime girlfriend Linda Lee Beighle.

But none of these figures became as close to Hall as one Daniel Henry Fritz. A former banker and computer salesman, Fritz was an L.A. New-Age fringe-figure who ran a colonic-therapy center in Santa Monica and a “water-birthing” retreat in Hawaii, hung out with Bulgarian mystic Omraam Mikhael Aivanhov, and held a Bishopric in a breakaway faction of the Church of Antioch (q.v.)

Initially, Hall distrusted Fritz, and labeled him a phony. But Marie was smitten by him, and invited him along with the couple on a 1987 trip to Sedona, Arizona, where she spoke at a “Harmonic Convergence” gathering. Hall endured the flu throughout the trip, and may have suffered a stroke during it; at any rate, he was never the same afterwards.

When the trio returned to L.A., Fritz volunteered his services to Marie as a live-in caregiver for the aging sage. She accepted his offer, and the would-be male nurse and his teenage son moved into the Hall residence.

Although Marie thought that Fritz was caring for Hall merely in return for room and board, later evidence proved he was milking them for a fortune. Fritz became a co-signer on the Halls’ checking account and credit cards, and charged thousands of dollars worth of personal expenses alongside his employers’, never keeping records of such expenditures. He also talked the couple into loaning him $25,000 for his Biogenics Health Foundation, and thousands more for the Independent Church of Antioch. And he convinced them to invest $200,000 in a colon-cleaning and air-purifying business, of which only about $70,000 was ever accounted for as business expenses. Fritz never created business plans or partnerships for any of these ventures, and never paid the Halls back a dime on their loans and investments.

To many PRS staffers, Fritz looked like nothing less than a con artist attempting to take over not only the Hall estate, but the Society itself, both of which were worth many millions in real estate, collectibles, and intellectual property. Society employees who tried to meet with Hall were either ignored by the ailing octogenarian, or shooed away by Fritz, who had also taken on the roles of personal secretary and bodyguard. Back at the Society, rare books, artworks, photographs, and even gold coins started disappearing from the premises whenever the ostensible caregiver was around. At one point, some PRS employees bugged the phone of Fritz’ associate Mogens Brandt, desperate to get incriminating info about the caregiver and his shady operations. Their efforts were for naught; Fritz and Brandt deftly maneuvered their way into PRS’ Presidency and Vice-Presidency, and became the Society’s effective leaders.

Hall, who by now was mostly confined to a wheelchair and never strayed far from an oxygen tank, bonded strangely with Fritz. Marie, who’d once called Fritz “my angel from heaven” for his seemingly selfless work with her husband, now looked with alarm on their odd doings. She said that the two men regularly performed a “healing ritual” where they would urinate together at dawn, mix the liquids, and then pour the concoction down the side of a backyard tree. Worse still, she claimed that during his daily colonic irrigations, Fritz masturbated her husband (Marie had long suspected that Hall was bisexual). The regular colonic treatments also worried the Halls’ regular doctor, Sterling Pollack, who believed they were destroying the sick old man’s intestinal lining and leaving him vulnerable to infection and disease. But Hall refused to hear any criticism of Fritz.

Hall at 89. Though sick and bedridden, he still lectured regularly at the PRS.

By mid-1990 Hall was mostly bedridden, yet still lectured regularly at PRS. That year, the frail scholar also published his first serious book in many years: Meditation Symbols in Eastern and Western Mysticism: Mysteries of the Mandala, which got rave reviews and attracted new attention to Hall and the Society. Shortly after it appeared, The Los Angeles Times published its first major story on Hall in decades – a human-interest piece titled “Last Western Mystic Thrives in Los Feliz.”

The story’s title was grimly ironic. By midsummer 1990, Hall was near death, and there was much ugly speculation on August 23^rd, when he rewrote his will to make the PRS his beneficiary. This made Fritz and Brandt, who occupied the PRS’ top posts, effective heirs to not only Hall’s personal $2.3 million estate, but also to the vast wealth held by the Society.

Five days after the will was rewritten, Fritz urged the Halls to travel to Santa Barbara. He told Marie that he would take Hall up in his motor home, while she could travel separately in her own car. While Marie was on the road, Fritz called her and told him that his vehicle was overheating and that they were turning back to L.A. for repairs. He assured her that he’d stay with Hall at the house during the night, and would ferry the ailing octogenarian and himself up to Santa Barbara when they obtained reliable transportation.

At about 6:30 AM on August 29^th, Fritz walked into Hall’s bedroom, noticed he wasn’t breathing well, and claimed he smelled a “sweet odor of high frequency” around his body. Instead of calling 911 or attempting to resuscitate the old man, Fritz instead chanted and prayed, hoping to ease Hall’s “transition” into death. Minutes later he called Dr. Pollack and said that Hall was dead, but then called him again to say Hall was merely “dying”. He followed this with a third call claiming that Hall was, indeed, deceased.

Dr. Pollack arrived to a most curious death scene. Although Hall had only been dead an hour, according to Fritz’s initial call, his body was already stone-cold, with rigor mortis setting in. Lines of ants streamed out of the corpse’s ears, nose and mouth as if he’d been lying for many hours on open ground. Pollack also noted that housecleaners were furiously scrubbing strange reddish-brown stains off the bedroom floor, and that Fritz’ son David was busily emptying out Hall’s closets. Suspicious, the doctor refused to issue an on-site death certificate, and instead authorized an autopsy for the body.

Hall’s initial autopsy was a sloppy, error-ridden work. Among over 60 other glaring mistakes, it mentioned the presence of Hall’s gall bladder, which had actually been removed decades earlier.  Later, a second, independently-commissioned autopsy not only corrected the errors of the first, but noted suspicious details such as bruises and needle marks on Hall’s body. The presence of the ants, as well as other clues, implied that Hall hadn’t died in bed, but had instead expired face-down on a dirt surface, probably from asphyxiation. Faced with the new information, the County Coroner eventually ruled his death was due “unknown causes” under “suspicious circumstances” that suggested “foul play.”

Infuriated, Marie Hall accused Fritz and his associates of murdering her husband in order to take over the Society and the Hall estate. Fritz countered, saying that Marie had badgered and bullied her second husband into his grave, and was a certified lunatic who’d been committed several times, once by Hall himself.  Although the Los Angeles police took an active interest in the case, and questioned Fritz about his actions, there was never enough hard evidence to charge him with murder, and Hall’s death remains officially unsolved.

Fritz tried to have Hall’s body cremated, but Marie and her extended family blocked him, thinking that the corpse might soon yield enough clues to bring charges of murder against the erstwhile caregiver. Hall’s body was put on ice at Forest Lawn cemetery, but began to rot after several months of storage, and was temporarily buried in an unmarked grave. Eventually it was disinterred in Marie’s presence, and cremated.

For the next few years, the nonagenarian widow pressed her case against Fritz in civil, rather than criminal court. She and the Hall faithful in the PRS fought a long, expensive and vicious legal battle to overturn Hall’s last will; after four years they prevailed, and accepted a settlement where Marie got the house, along with Hall’s art and stamp collections and a hoard of 214 rare alchemical manuscripts that the Getty Museum later bought for $750,000. Marie eventually lived to be 100, dying at a Los Angeles convalescent home on April 21, 2005.

Fritz, who’d been publically labeled a con artist by the judge in the will case, lost his PRS presidency in 1993 to Obadiah Harris, who occupies that post as of this writing. Forced completely out of the PRS along with Brandt, Fritz eventually ended up in Reno, Nevada, where he died in 2001 of adrenal cancer, still boasting of his close relationship and happy years with the legendary occult scholar.

The PRS' current main Web page.

Over twenty years after Manly Palmer Hall’s death, the PRS is once again thriving. It maintains a sophisticated Web site, publishes and sells scores of titles by Hall and other metaphysical figures, and holds regular lectures and classes at the Los Feliz headquarters. On the twelfth anniversary of Hall’s passing, the PRS achieved one of its founder’s dreams by achieving State accreditation for its Masters Program in Consciousness Studies; six years later, the Federal government followed suit.

But despite the Society’s success and prominence three-quarters of a century after its inception, it will never be the same without the living presence of its founder. A man who, despite a lack of formal education, spent seven straight decades researching, writing about, and lecturing on the most arcane of spiritual and philosophical topics. A man who, even though bedridden and near death, was still lifted onto his “throne” at the PRS lecture hall every week to speak clearly and insightfully about the deeper meanings of life and existence. And a man who, whatever his failings and weaknesses, inspired countless thousands of people across the world to delve into the world’s wisdom teachings so that they could live saner, healthier and fuller lives.

There will never be another Manly Palmer Hall. For that, the PRS, and the world, are much poorer.

Sources/Links:
The Philosophical Research Society

The Manly P. Hall Archive (huge collection of materials, including the complete The Secret Teachings of All Ages, and a video of When Were You Born?)

Horowitz, Mitch. "Ronald Reagan and the occultist: The amazing story of the thinker behind his sunny optimism". Salon, 2/15/2014.

Sahagun, Louis. Master of the Mysteries: The Life of Manly Palmer Hall (Port Townsend, WA: Process Media, 2008) (superb biography of Hall)

Harbin Hot Springs and the Heart Consciousness Church

Heart Consciousness Church ceremony at Harbin Hot Springs.

Most communal-religious groups start with a vision. Then they organize as a formal group. And finally, they sanctify a piece of land as their spiritual home.

The Heart Consciousness Church took exactly the opposite path. It emerged, first as an organized sect and then as a coherent spiritual vision, directly from the lands and waters of what are now known as Harbin Hot Springs.

Located 70 miles north of San Francisco, Harbin Hot Springs is a 5000-acre retreat and conference center, nestled in a narrow, brushy mountain canyon. At its heart are its hot springs: two volcanically-heated springs that pump 800 gallons of 113-degree water every hour into a series of hot and warm soaking pools. Several cold springs from an aquifer on nearby Boggs Mountain also provide water for a cold-plunge pool, as well as for drinking.

To the Miwok Indians, Harbin was ‘eetawyomi – the sacred “hot place” that welcomed all tribes, and whose warm mineral waters healed all manner of bathers’ complaints.  Near the springs, indigenous peoples gathered for shamanic rituals and seasonal celebrations at the creek-side “Grandmother’s Circle”, giving tribute to the land that produced the magic waters.

When the Miwoks retreated and faded in the face of the Spanish conquest, the springs were largely forgotten. The canyon that held them was part of a land grant passed around between different Spanish and Mexican owners far more interested in ranching than in soaking. Eventually the land grant was taken over in the 1850s by an American, Archibald Ritchie, who “discovered” the springs just before his death in 1856.

In Ritchie’s wake, James “Mat” Harbin acquired the land. A colorful character who claimed to have bought Central America’s Mosquito Kingdom for use as a Mormon refuge, Harbin was a successful frontier capitalist who later in life, inexplicably dropped out of California society to be a hermit in Mexico. Although he gave his name to the springs, as well as to several geographic features in the area, he never did much with the land, and in 1865 passed his claim on to two Welsh immigrants, Richard Williams and Hugh Hughes.

Williams and Hughes saw great potential in the springs, and in 1867 began to develop the land as a resort. They walled and pooled the springs’ flow, planted extensive gardens around them, and built a hotel on the property that could accommodate 100 guests. “Taking the waters” for health had become fashionable in Victorian America and Europe, and the two men advertised Harbin as Northern California’s answer to such famed spas as Marienbad or Saratoga Springs, and claimed that its mineral waters could cure everything from rheumatism to alcoholism.

Bathers at Harbin went through a day-long ritual that foreshadowed both modern spa treatment, and the New Age healing practices of today. First, they spent two hours soaking in the pools, alternating between hot and cold plunges. Then they received a massage, followed by various ablutions and perhaps a coiffure. A nap was next on the agenda, and then a relaxing stroll through the spa grounds. Finally came a hearty dinner made from locally-raised vegetables and livestock.

The Harbin Hot Springs resort, circa 1915.

Oddly enough, the “health resort” offered not only home-cooked locavore meals, but also a fully-stocked bar, as well as cigars and pipe tobacco for gentleman guests. When Lake County went “dry” and banned alcoholic beverages in 1912, Harbin continued to serve booze on the sly – a practice that it allegedly continued all the way through Federal Prohibition from 1919 to 1933. The hotel also sported illegal – but fully functional, and heavily-used – “decorative” slot machines through the late 1940s.

Legendary boxer Jim Jeffries was one of many athletes who trained at Harbin Hot Springs in the early 20th Century.

In 1894, disaster struck Harbin when a fire burned down most of the resort. Undaunted, the owners rebuilt the facilities, adding larger pools and other improvements. One of the new features was a gym, which quickly became a popular training arena for such boxers of the era as Jim Jeffries and Bob Fitzsimmons. Resident pugilists swore that the clean air, hot weather and relatively high altitude of Harbin gave them harder and healthier workouts than their city-bound rivals.

The celebrity athletes helped publicize Harbin, and it continued to expand and renovate through the early 1900s, especially when the coming of automobiles greatly eased access to the resort. Although a rival spa, the Stuparich Resort, opened just north of Harbin, it didn’t provide competition for long; after rumors circulated among Lake County’s Ku Klux Klansmen that its Jewish owner planned to sell it to an African-American social club, it mysteriously burned to the ground in 1928.

A 1935 postcard depicts Harbin's main plunge.

With the poverty of the Great Depression, and the gas rationing of World War II, Harbin’s visitors and revenue plummeted. The resort burned once again in 1943; when it was rebuilt three years later, the owners soft-pedaled its health aspects in favor of a new image as a relaxing weekend getaway for stressed-out Northern Californians. Along with the pools, postwar visitors could now enjoy live entertainment, music, dancing, and even (gender-segregated) nude sunbathing on the grounds.

Despite the new attractions, Harbin hit economic hard times in the 1950s. When the County Sheriff attached the property over unpaid back-taxes in October 1960, the hotel burned down just days later. Just who exactly owed the taxes, and owned Harbin, was unclear; throughout the early 1960s various claimants fought court battles for possession of the disputed title. Somehow, Harbin continued to operate as a resort until around 1966, when it closed to the public.

Harbin’s titular owners, and the locals in nearby Middletown, were wholly unprepared for what came next. In August 1968, one Donald James Hamrick arrived at the resort, and announced his plans to convert it into a combined research-center, spiritual-retreat and commune.

Donald James Hamrick - physicist, minister, and nascent counterculture guru

Hamrick was an independently-wealthy nuclear physicist and inventor, as well as a former Church of Christ minister who’d been lauded for turning teenagers off drugs and onto meditation. He claimed that during a near-death-experience in 1966, entities he described variously as angels or extraterrestrials had given him a mission to save the world.

Towards that end, in 1967 the 32 year-old Californian founded the Frontiers of Science Fellowship in San Rafael. The Fellowship aimed to bring together the worlds of science and religion, as well as the various academic disciplines, so as to “[e]xtend the frontiers of knowledge through research and to disseminate knowledge and guidance in the preparation of humanity for a distinguished civilization…” as well as “[t]o promote the synthesis of the physical, life and social sciences.…[and to] actively influence the personal, social and economic development of the World Community.” Hamrick lectured on these topics at both the College of Marin and San Francisco’s Glide Memorial Church, and soon became one of the Bay Area counterculture’s resident gurus, claiming a following of over 11,000 seekers.

One of Hamrich's visionary graphics, which combined hard-science concepts with Utopian spiritual ideals.

When the Fellowship ran afoul of its neighbors in San Rafael, it relocated to Harbin in August 1968. Hamrick wanted to rename the resort “Harbinger,” and turn it into a retreat for technological, social and spiritual visionaries to create new modes of working and living. One of his main projects was to develop inventions like the “Zendyne Zapper”: a six-foot long, copper-wired metal bar that would allegedly increase the IQ of anyone on its business end. Hamrick also envisioned a “Harbinger University” on the grounds, where he and other counterculture figures could teach classes and seminars like “Codification of Consciousness” and “Physiology of Higher Bodies” in a nontraditional learning environment.

Harbin from the air, around the time Harbinger University occupied the grounds.

At first, the isolated resort seemed ideal for the Fellowship’s purposes, and the neighboring town of Middletown welcomed Hamrick and his followers (the local paper speculated that with their presence at Harbin, “the average IQ of Middletown people will shoot up by about 50 points.”) But the Fellowship and Harbinger University also promoted Harbin as a place to expand consciousness – a concept that, in late-Sixties California, was synonymous with psychedelic drug use.

Even though Hamrick claimed he abstained from LSD and didn’t advocate its use, he and the University produced Harbinger: a 24-page tabloid that blatantly pandered to psychedelic sensibilities. Modeled on the legendary San Francisco Oracle underground paper, Harbinger was a hallucinogenic hash of multicolored text, mandalas, and illustrations that featured articles by drug-culture luminaries like Timothy Leary and Alan Watts, reprinted accounts of LSD-fueled visions, and solicited readers’ contributions about their personal “projections along the perennial trip.”

An open-air class at Harbinger University

Not surprisingly, Harbin soon became a hippie haven, where academic and technological doings took a back seat to sex, drugs, and quasi-Eastern spirituality among its increasingly younger and more bohemian visitors. San Francisco hippies, fleeing the now-dangerous and heroin-plagued Haight-Ashbury district, flocked to the resort, and continued the endless party there during the latter half of 1968. At any given time, hundreds of colorfully-clad (or unclad) young people could be found at Harbin strumming guitars under the sycamore trees, sunbathing on the lawns, cooking vegetable soup in the kitchen, or soaking in the hot pools. To them, it was the Summer of Love redux, albeit in a sylvan, private setting where one could smoke weed, frolic in the nude, and generally Freak Freely without incurring the wrath of urban squares or cops.

Casual nudity, drug use, and even public sex soon became common at Harbin.

Drugs were plentiful. One former resident remembered that in the afternoons, a tray piled high with marijuana joints, lumps of hashish, tabs of LSD, and fistfuls of various pills, was passed around the lawns and porches, with nary a charge for the goodies. Rock bands jammed around the clock in the hotel rooms, many of which had their walls knocked down to accommodate acoustics and dancers. And there were frequent all-night orgies in the hot pools, where gangs of wet, naked hippies copulated openly in the waters.

Harbinger, the community's underground newspaper

The ordered community that Hamrick envisioned soon degenerated into anarchy. There were no requirements for residency; generally, if a visitor demonstrated “hip” appearance, speech and demeanor, s/he was accepted into “the Family” and could live there for months without contributing a nickel of funds or a lick of work. Bills went unpaid and buildings and pools went unmaintained while Hamrick flew around the country in a private plane, lecturing on his visions of a new world. In his stead, various organizers tried to grab the reins of power and impose order, but they seldom lasted more than a week or two, their ever-changing and contradictory edicts going unheeded by Harbin’s dope-addled denizens.

At one point, Harbin even sported a homegrown monarchy: two young hippies who styled themselves “King” and “Queen” of the retreat, and surveyed their domain from eight-foot tall thrones. Like the rest of the aspiring administrators, their pronouncements were ignored, and they were soon supplanted by other would-be leaders.

The Harbinger project quickly wore out its welcome in Middletown as well. For over a century, townies had welcomed resort visitors so long as they spent money at the local businesses, and didn’t bother the residents. Harbin’s penniless, flamboyant hippies, on the other hand, saw the entire region as their personal playground, and created chaotic scenes in the little burg with increasing frequency.

The local Establishment fought back. The Sheriff’s department began to visit Harbin regularly, ostensibly looking for underage runaways, but always with County and State narcotics agents in tow. Then in January 1969, the Lake County Health Department staged a surprise inspection of the facilities, found numerous violations of health and building codes, and quarantined Harbin, setting up roadblocks and forbidding anyone from entering or leaving the property. Although the quarantine lasted only six days, scores of residents departed in its wake, leaving fewer than 50 people living on the grounds. The remaining residents, unable or unwilling to address the Health Department’s countless concerns, faced eviction.

Perhaps sensing that the end was near, Donald Hamrick and followers staged what was to be Harbin’s most outrageous and extreme event – the Frontiers of Science Celestial Synapse. This was a combined conference/concert/ritual/party that was a last-ditch effort to unite Hamrick’s technological, educational and spiritual visions, as well as forestall a seismic apocalypse. Said a Rolling Stone article of the time:

…[it had] to do with the crystal in the center of the living Earth, which is affected by human vibrations and which may either change shape (a creative change) or change size (a destructive change, since it would cause earthquakes). The idea [was] to send down good vibrations to change the shape of the crystal, and the Celestial Synapse may very well have done that.

Collage of materials about Harbinger's 1969 "Celestial Synapse" Fillmore concert, featuring the Grateful Dead 

At the very least, the Celestial Synapse’s “good vibrations” blew minds across the Bay Area. On February 19, 1969, onstage at Bill Graham’s Fillmore West music hall, Hamrick blessed the assembled Synapse crowd of over 3,000 hippies, entreating that from the event, “something new may emerge. Let the barriers fall. Let there be a merging.” Then San Francisco’s own Grateful Dead played a four-hour set of their distinctive psychedelic-rock jams, while the acid-soaked audience members danced, chanted “OM” en masse, stripped naked, climbed onto the stage, greeted and hugged total strangers, and passed out hits of acid and joints. Bill Graham oversaw the joyful anarchy from the stage, shooing security guards away from the naked dancers and hanging out with LSD guru Timothy Leary behind the Dead’s speakers. When the show ended in the wee hours, the blissed-out revelers spilled onto Market Street and got the word: “After-party up at Harbin – enjoy it now, before the pigs close down the place!”

Soon, a great caravan of colorfully-painted microbuses and battered sedans converged on the Lake County resort for the event that would sound Harbinger University’s death knell. As The Golden Toad, a band in the Grateful Dead “family” scene, jammed in the hotel, hundreds of hippies thronged the resort, dancing all over the grounds and splashing through the pools. Virtually everyone was tripping; acid chemists had donated thousands of doses to the event, and LSD-spiked punch was ladled out like lemonade to the naked, ecstatic celebrants.

Nobody was particularly surprised, or even bothered, when the Sheriff arrived. According to one account, the lawmen “found six or seven hundred naked freaks, dancing and swilling acid punch, setting up a soaring cry which set the leaves on the trees to spinning.” Bewildered by the butt-naked bacchanalia, the deputies quickly busted about a dozen people on drug charges, and then hastily departed, leaving the rest of the freaks to party until dawn. (One account claims that a thirsty deputy innocently drank a cup of the spiked punch, promptly freaked out, and spent the rest of the night curled up in a fetal ball, and surrounded by a knot of nude hippies talking him down from the bad trip.)

By March, the party was well and truly over. A final raid that month cleared out the remaining members of the community, and closed Harbin to human occupancy until further notice. Hamrick, who’d lost a fortune investing in Harbinger University, as well as an infant son who’d arrived stillborn the night of the Celestial Synapse, moved on to the United Kingdom, where he treated Beatle John Lennon for his nicotine addiction and helped organize the first Glastonbury Festival. Eventually Hamrick changed his name to Zee Charnoe and continued to lecture and research on the frontiers of science and consciousness.

For the next three years, Harbin’s decrepit buildings and stagnant pools lay dormant. Its only visitors were local teens, who snuck onto the grounds late at night to drink beer and use the buildings for target practice. The Lake County D.A. vowed that nobody would occupy the resort until all the buildings were restored, and the facilities were compliant with the Health Code. Harbin seemed fated to become yet another one of the abandoned health-resorts whose hulking ruins dotted the American West like little ghost towns.

Visionary financier Robert Hartley, later known as Ishvara.

By 1972, the relatively few people that knew of Harbin would never have guessed that it was not only about to be reopened, but would soon birth its own religious sect, and would enjoy its greatest fame and influence over the next forty years. That spring Robert Hartley, a wealthy 39 year-old investor and Berkeley resident, was in the market for a spiritual retreat. A devotee of Fritz Perls’ Gestalt Therapy, Hartley wanted to form a commune that replaced the traditional therapist/patient model with a community of coequals who applied interpersonal Gestalt techniques as a daily discipline. Believing the relatively remote, yet developed and accessible property was ideal for his purposes, Hartley purchased Harbin for $180,000 in May 1972, then placed a mobile home by the property entrance, and moved himself and his family into the dwelling. From there he controlled access to the land, and planned to rebuild and refurbish the retreat, and make it habitable again.

Hartley staffed the project with ads in the local alternative press that read:

Hot Springs in the country. Very rustic and unfurnished. $30 per month rent, or work exchange, 1 to 1 ½ hours per day.

Relatively few people answered the call. The party-hearty days of Harbinger University were long past; potential community members were promised not “consciousness expansion” on someone else’s dime, but long hours of hard work to make to make the abandoned buildings, lawns and pools habitable and usable. Many of the people who did commit to live and work there were more interested in laid-back rural living on the cheap, than in building a conscious community. And when Hartley left for a six-month stretch, restoration work ground to a near-halt. Obviously, the place needed both his constant oversight, and a strong organizational structure, if it was going to function as a retreat.

In the fall of 1974, Hartley met with a small group of Harbin residents to work out a common vision for the retreat. They decided they shared a commitment to three elements – universal spirituality, the Human Potential movement, and holistic practices – and that Harbin would be a place where all could be expressed and practiced as part of daily life. The retreat would honor the fundamental truths in all religions, sponsor humanistic psychology and personal-growth disciplines, and promote healthy practices to heal and sustain human and nonhuman life on the land. The common thread of all these activities was love – for oneself, for one’s brother and sister humans, and for the Earth and all its creatures. This loving vision was called Heart Consciousness, and the group “identif[ied] itself so completely with this new point of view that we call it religion, and ourselves a Church.”

In February 1975, the Heart Consciousness Church incorporated in the State of California as a non-profit religious organization, organized “to teach spiritual life and how it can be realized by individuals, manifested to others and made learnable by example, without this process requiring group conformity or adherence to a single teacher, method or creed.” The corporation then purchased Harbin from Robert Hartley for ten dollars, and became the legal owner of the 5,000-acre retreat.

The new organization soon faced serious difficulties. In 1976 a group of Harbin residents decided that the Church’s corporate structure, which vested power in a Board of Directors elected by designated “voting members,” was elitist and undemocratic. In protest, they created their own Board, and refused to pay the $50 a month dues then required of all residents. When talks between the two factions broke down, things got ugly, and the rent-strikers began to vandalize Harbin’s work sites, disrupt its workshops, and bring in squatters to live on the land.

Kerista founder Jud Presmont (center) with followers.

With Church loyalists outmaneuvered by the protestors, and the Sheriff unresponsive to his complaints about them, Hartley brought in support from an outside source: the Kerista Consciousness Church – a “polyfidelity”-based commune led by eccentric WWII veteran John “Jud” Presmont. At the time, the Keristans called themselves “The Utopians”, and jumped at the chance to promote their communal lifestyle at the bucolic retreat, as well as use their interpersonal techniques to mediate between its warring factions. Eventually, however, they lost the community’s trust: Church Board members believed the Keristans were dogmatic ideologues who were trying to co-opt Harbin, while the rebels saw them as strike-breaking scabs imported by Hartley. It didn’t help that in the Kerista’s Spring 1977 newsletter, Utopian Eye, the sect misrepresented Harbin as exclusive Kerista turf – “our first permanent rural base.”

Tiring of the struggles with both Keristans and rent-strikers, Hartley sought refuge in a new spiritual discipline: Kundalini Yoga. Accepting Natural Yoga leader Yogeshwar Muni (aka Robert Berner) as his guru, Hartley renounced his old identity, took on the spiritual name Ishvara, and spent the next ten years performing “surrender meditation”, sometimes up to twelve or more hours a day. Although some Harbinites feared he was planning to turn the retreat into a Yoga ashram, the Heart Consciousness Church remained firmly in control of the land, and eventually expelled the rent-strikers after a court ruled in its favor. With their departure, the Church’s loose alliance with the Keristans faded as well.

Things were looking up for Harbin and Ishvara. In 1978, macrobiotics practitioner Roger Windsor arrived at Harbin, became its General Manager, and took over most of the administrative work, freeing up Ishvara for full-time meditation marathons. Windsor streamlined HCC’s organization, started a five-year building project, and set up a system where paid guests could use the facilities. Visitors would pay a small annual dues charge, which made them members of the Church, and bound them to some basic rules: respect the land and the permanent residents; be quiet in and around the pools; leave your dogs at home; don’t smoke or leave trash; and similar strictures that would have been unheard of during the freewheeling Harbinger University days.

Accommodations at Harbin during that time were Spartan. Guest rooms were furnished with foam mattresses, and nothing else. Meals were exclusively vegetarian, and neither alcohol nor coffee was served. Still, a steadily-increasing stream of visitors found their way to the pools, providing the HCC with much-needed income.

Human Awareness Institute founder Stan Dale.

Many of the visitors were followers of relationship guru Stan Dale, and his Human Awareness Institute (HAI). Dale’s “Loving Relationship” weekend seminars, which promoted greater communication between individuals through body-freedom and erotic touch, were among Harbin’s most popular activities.  HAI, which required seminarians to strip naked en masse during one of its seminar exercises, was right at home in “clothing-optional” Harbin, where warm summer weekends would find scores of nude men and women soaking in the restored pools, sunbathing on the new redwood decks, and strolling the now-tended grounds.

New Age author and would-be Harbin settler Ken Keyes. Middletown locals feared he would become another Jim Jones.

Less successful was Ken Keyes’ attempt to found another spiritual community within Harbin. The author of the bestselling Handbook to Higher Consciousness, Keyes planned to lease 32 acres from the HCC, and establish the “Living Love Center” there – a model “eco-village” of circular huts and buildings where he would teach the principles of his book to both visitors and a resident community of followers. Unfortunately for Keyes, his proposal came before the county Planning Commission just weeks after the 1978 Jonestown massacre, and the local citizens, some of whom remembered Jim Jones’ antics in neighboring Redwood Valley and had lost family members in his Guyana Gotterdammerung, rejected the idea of another Personality Cult befouling the region. Eventually Keyes gave up trying to win over the locals, and established a center in Oregon.

Around this time, another more clandestine community on Harbin’s land got the heave-ho from both the HCC and the authorities. Rumors had circulated for years that a major marijuana-growing operation was hiding in the brushy, undeveloped back acreage, but nothing came of them until the morning of October 7, 1978, when Sheriff’s deputies got permission from Ishvara to search the property for illegal plants. When a non-Church squatter in Harbin’s so-called “upper property” spotted the lawmen approaching, he fired a warning shot into the air, and people scattered into the bushes as fifteen patrol cars roared up the dirt road to the back acreage. The officers seized 413 cannabis plants, and busted two young women who hadn’t fled the scene fast enough.

The local paper identified the marijuana plantation as belonging to the Heart Consciousness Church. Seeking to avert a potential public-relations disaster, Harbin’s Board responded that none of the growers were Church members, and that the HCC did not advocate or support any form of drug use or illegal activity. Eventually the paper printed a retraction, but the bust stoked memories of the Harbinger era’s druggy excesses, and chilled the Church’s relations with the townies.

Those relations began to thaw in the early 1980s, when the burgeoning New Age spiritual movement brought a new kind of visitor to Harbin. Gone (for the most part) were the shiftless hippies and dope-growers of years past; in their place came young professionals and well-heeled “bourgeois bohemians” seeking health and spiritual enhancement at the retreat’s ever-expanding variety of workshops and intensive classes. Unlike their penniless predecessors, the new Harbinites spent freely and lavishly at Middletown’s stores and restaurants; locals welcomed the new arrivals and their money, and began to think that perhaps the naked-weirdo cult down the road wasn’t such a bad neighbor after all.

The HCC upgraded Harbin to meet the new visitors’ needs. A permanent, in-house building and maintenance crew was formed to carry out all expansion and improvement projects, and to keep the building and pool infrastructures running smoothly.  A gatehouse was constructed at the entrance to collect fees, and keep crashers and troublemakers off the property.

The formerly-rugged accommodations improved radically. Guest rooms now featured not only real beds, but linens and pillows. A café opened in 1982; eventually, it would supplement its vegetarian fare with offerings of fish and fowl, and even wine and beer. As it had a century earlier, paid massage-therapy now often accompanied hot-water soakings. Some wondered if Heart Consciousness Church was nothing more than the corporate landlord of a weekend spa – albeit one that hosted naked workshops.

They had a point. At one level, the Church was a legal convenience that allowed Ishvara and his close cohorts to hold a 5000-acre, developed property free of the tax bills that had bedeviled earlier owners. Too, the fact that casual visitors signed up as “Church members” to use the facilities shark-proofed the leadership from legal liabilities that might have bankrupted them in a lawsuit.

But Harbin’s spiritual significance had since broadened and deepened far beyond the HCC’s quasi-Universalist corporate mission statement. In 1985, the New Age Church of Being emerged from Harbin as the more explicitly religious wing of Heart Consciousness. Its statement of purpose read:

The Purpose of the New Age Church of Being is to bring into being the New Age of Peace, Harmony, Truth and Love on the whole of Planet Earth.
The New Age Church of Being teaches a state of Pure Being, or union with Ultimate Reality…New persons are baptized into the Now as they enter the beingness of the New Age Church of Being, as though their slate is wiped clean as they start fresh as new-birthed souls and personalities.
Ultimate Reality is the essence of subtle energies known only to those gifted at birth or who have worked to purify awareness….

The New Age Church of Being trained Harbinites in a six-month ministerial program, grooming their spiritual, physical and intellectual abilities, and training others to do the same. Resident ministers performed regular Theosophical full-moon rituals, Hindu kirtan chants, Native American sweat-lodges and pipe ceremonies, and celebrated holidays drawn from the European Pagan calendar, as well as the occasional marriage or funeral. Eventually the NACOB took over Harbin’s sister resort: Sierra Hot Springs, a health retreat near Lake Tahoe that boasted both a Victorian-era hotel on its grounds, and a decidedly New-Age dress-code in its soaking pools.

Ishvara's Oneness in Living - the Church's unofficial Bible. 

NACOB’s principles were articulated most clearly in Ishvara’s book ONENESS IN LIVING (2002). Therein he dispensed the wisdom gleaned from 30-plus years of disciplined spiritual development, as well as the countless insights he’d collected from the retreat’s residents and visitors. Ishvara synthesized Harbin’s spiritual, holistic, and cultural visions and practices into a look at the roles non-traditional religions, the human-potential movement, and the counterculture had in the retreat’s development, and the possibilities presented by them.

One of Ishvara’s most intriguing ideas concerned Harbin’s “power spots.” According to him, a network of seven points of spiritual power formed a ring around Harbin, giving people who tapped into their arcane energies the power to dream, see visions, and reach “between the worlds.” He claimed that the Miwok Indian shamans knew of these power spots, which is why they considered the area around the springs sacred and healing.

So strong did this belief become among Church members, that Ishvara formed the Holy Lands Preservation Trust specifically to protect the sacred aspects of Harbin’s property. The Trust boasted that many of its trustees were Native Americans; in a sense, it was giving spiritual stewardship of the land to Indians for the first time since Spanish-colonial days.

Things were coming full circle. Certainly, the original Miwok Indians would have been nonplussed at latter-day Harbin’s paid admission and corporate organization. The Victorians would no doubt have been shocked at today’s mixed-gender nudity. And the Sixties hippies would’ve been bored by the quiet, low-key ambience typical of a current weekend at the retreat.

Harbin and the Churches' main Web page.

Yet all of them, and others, had helped nurture Harbin Hot Springs, and in turn inspire the Heart Consciousness Church and fuel the New Age Church of Being. The Miwok’s “hot place” would no doubt be a land of sacred visions for many years to come.

Sources/Links
Heart Consciousness Church Web page (part of the Harbin Hot Springs site)
Ishvara, Oneness in Living: Kundalini Yoga, the Spiritual Path, and the Intentional Community. (Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books, 2002). 
Klages, Ellen. Harbin Hot Springs; Healing Waters, Sacred Land. (Middletown, CA: Harbin Springs Publishing, 1991.)

Harbinger Revisted (1967 - 1969) (Facebook group dedicated to accounts and photos of the Harbinger University era at Harbin. Thanks to Susan Jennifer Gray Charnoe for allowing me to use photos from this source.)