The Secret Teachings made Hall famous at twenty seven; the Philosophical Research Society is what he did with the fame. Founded in Los Angeles in 1934 on a campus in Los Feliz whose buildings mix Mayan and Egyptian motifs, the PRS was designed as a working institution rather than a following: a hall where Hall lectured on Sunday mornings for half a century, a press that kept his writings in print, and above all a library. Hall was a serious and knowledgeable collector, and the library he assembled, tens of thousands of volumes with notable holdings in alchemy, Rosicrucianism, cabala and Eastern philosophy, including rarities acquired from the great auctions of the 1920s and 1930s, was opened to any reader without charge, an act of deliberate policy from a man whose own education had been public libraries. He lectured thousands of times, wrote steadily, and consulted on Hollywood's occasional flirtations with the esoteric.
Freemasonry honoured the outsider late: initiated only in 1954, he was crowned an honorary thirty third degree in 1973, a rare recognition for contribution to masonic literature rather than lodge service. He died in 1990 amid circumstances his biographers still argue over, but the institution held; the society continues on Griffith Park Boulevard, and the library remains what Hall built as his real monument, a private canon deliberately made public.