Marie (nee Schweikert), born at the foot of the German Alps in 1904, would become the wife of the famous occultist Manly Palmer Hall who founded his Philosophical Research Society at the foot of Griffith Park, on Los Feliz Boulevard in Los Angeles. [source: Master of the Mysteries by Louis Sahagun].



Sunset over Hollywood, Sunday 6/8/2008.

There is a reason California ends up being home to visionaries and mystics.   Some say it has to do with the psychic energy of ancient lost civilizations lingering here.  Others say it's because the heart of the world has shifted from India to southern California.  Still others claim it's about the weather.  Whatever the cause, people on all kinds of quests, spiritual or the kind that involves a half-finished screenplay or a headshot and a dream, seem drawn here.  Marie Bauer Hall's quest was to obtain help in unearthing a vault of treasure and secret writings she believed Sir Francis Bacon had buried beneath Wlliamsburg, Virginia.  Marie was unsuccessful in her efforts but devoted much of her life as Manly Hall's wife to this end.  In the mystical scheme of things, it is not surprising to me that she was born in 1904 or that she wound up in L.A.

Marie is but one of the many 1904 associations I discovered this weekend on an Esotouric Tour of Visionary Hollywood, organized around Erik Davis's fascinating new book The Visionary State. Erik, author of "Techgnosis - myth, magic + mysticism in the age of information" (Harmony Books, 1998) maps "the peaks and faultlines" of mystical California and was a delightful guide to a few of the more arcane sites around town.  

In addition to Manly Hall's Philosophical Research Society, designed to look like a Mayan temple, we visited the Krotona Inn apartments (a Theosophical Society compound from 1912), the Vedanta Society of Christopher Isherwood, Aldous Huxley, and Gerald Heard fame, the Aetherius Society (a UFO-oriented spiritual group whose leader Rev. George King channeled aliens as well as Jesus) and by comparison the more down-to-earth cloistered nuns of the Dominican Monastery of the Angels, who sing and chant constant adoration of the Virgin Mary and make a delicious pumpkin bread.

More is to come on this magical mystery tour.  Suffice to say, however, that as I paused at the "Magic Hour" last night, after reading (devouring) Louis Sahagun's comprehensive new book on the life of Manly Hall, I reflected as I admired the view out my window that I truly do live in a strange and wondrous place.  For as you know, I have an abiding interest in the metaphysical and what one might describe as the Spiritual Path Less Traveled, and I too felt myself drawn to California, if not by some unseen mystical force then at least by someone willing to pay half the cost of the U-Haul truck.  To show my enthusiasm at the time and my commitment to the adventure, I even dispersed many of my earthly belongings after the fashion of a pioneer woman throwing things off the back of that Conestoga wagon to lighten the load and get us over the Rockies.  Without really understanding why, I was that anxious to get here. 

Now I understand that some of us will go to any length in our quest for self-realization, will sacrifice a great deal to achieve higher levels of consciousness, and risk nearly everything to know God.  

Or to find buried treasure, the secret doctrines of the ages, and Eternal Truth.

Or get a new boyfriend.  Or new girlfriend.  Or Fame.  Or Fortune.

Or Love.