Who are some of the major figures in Los Angeles occult history?
We start off our evening with the most important early figure, Manly P. Hall, who founded the Philosophical Research Society. With our screening night, I’m really focusing on the occult, not just general spirituality. It’s really more about the Western mystery traditions, about majick, to some degree about psychedelics, so we start off with Hall, who is certainly the most important early figure. There’s a marvelous new biography coming out about Hall called Master of the Mysteries and the author of that, Louis Sahagun, writes for the L.A. Times. Hall acquired the largest mystical/occult library west of the Mississippi with tons and tons of very rare, very expensive alchemical manuscripts and he really began a whole culture of the occult, bringing it out of the backrooms of palm readers and astrologers and into a more historically informed but still very mystical approach to all the traditions of the world, east as well as west. So he did a lot of lectures and influenced a lot of people
