Toward Ecosophy

Today's mail brought a small but welcome package from Los Angeles, courtesy of the Philosophical Research Society, the educational nonprofit founded most of a century ago by the redoubtable Manly P. Hall. In the package were two copies of the recent reprint of the Tarot deck that Hall designed and his friend and favorite artist Augustus Knapp painted, and three pamphlets adapted from Hall's godzillions of lectures. 

I never met Hall, which is a pity; our lives overlapped by some decades -- he died in 1990 -- and even in advanced old age, by all accounts, he was a brilliant speaker and a gifted teacher of occultism. It's a topic for a good brisk debate as to whether Hall or the equally redoubtable William Walker Atkinson (aka Yogi Ramacharaka, Theron Q. Dumont, and all three of the Three Initiates who wrote The Kybalion, for starters) was the most influential American occultist of the twentieth century, but The Manly One is certainly a robust contender. He combined an encyclopedic knowledge of Western occult tradition with something a lot of people talked about in his day but almost nobody actually had -- initiation into an Asian esoteric tradition. In his case it was Shingon Buddhism, one of the two Japanese esoteric sects -- think of Tibetan Buddhism with a Japanese accent and you won't be too far off. He knew a lot about Shingon, including the kinds of things that were very hard to learn at all back in the day if you were a white American guy; his writings on the two primary Shingon mandalas, the Kongokai (Diamond/Thunderbolt Assembly) and Taizokai (Womb Assembly), were as far as I know the most complete discussions of these in English until fairly recently. 

His most famous book, The Secret Teachings of All Ages, was a young man's book, brash and enthusiastic. The books of his I value the most come from later in his career: Self-Unfoldment Through Disciplines of Realization and Meditation Symbols in Eastern and Western Mysticism are among these. It was in these two books, more than anywhere else, that I caught the trail of bread crumbs he left. 

It used to be very common for occult teachers to hide their practical teachings in various ways, so that you could find them in their books if you worked at it but would skate right past them if you didn't. W.E. Butler, another occultist I studied eagerly in my youth, did this all the time -- for something like twenty years I read Butler's book The Magician: His Training and Work once every year or so, and every time kicked myself for having missed yet another round of obvious hints the time before! Most of what Butler had to teach has seen print, though, and that's not true of Hall. 

Hall had a method of meditation that, to my knowledge, he never put into print in any one place. Some of his mature books hint broadly at it, then veer away. That was why I ordered my copy of the tarot deck Hall designed. (Sara wanted hers because she trained as an art historian and has put many years into studying symbolic images.) The pamphlets were mostly for fun -- I enjoy Hall's writing, and even his lightweight stuff often has things well worth learning in them -- but the deck was serious. I have a copy of the older edition of the deck, and its LWB ("Little White Book") had a couple of crucial clues in it; the new edition is larger, better suited to meditative use...and the LWB has several more clues not found in the older version. 

Another nod and wink from Manly P. Hall duly picked up. The pieces come together...