Bailey's organisational life began with a rupture. Working at the Theosophical Society's American headquarters, she and Foster Bailey, whom she later married, fell foul of the politics surrounding Annie Besant's leadership; by 1920 they had been squeezed out, and Bailey concluded that the society had hardened around persons rather than teaching. Her answer, founded in 1923, was the Arcane School: a correspondence school with no meetings to attend, no dues beyond voluntary gifts, no devotion to any leader, and a graded curriculum of meditation and study conducted entirely by mail from offices in New York and later Geneva and London. It grew into a network of thousands of students on several continents, serviced by volunteer secretaries. Around it accreted the service structures her books called for: the Lucis Trust as publisher, Triangles, in which groups of three linked daily in meditation, and World Goodwill, aimed at what she called the education of public opinion.
The Great Invocation, the prayer she issued in stages between 1935 and 1945, was distributed in millions of copies and translated into scores of languages, becoming the movement's one genuinely public artefact. The school deliberately built no temples and ordained no clergy; its wager, inherited from her quarrel with Adyar, was that a spiritual teaching could be institutionalised as pedagogy alone, and on its own terms the wager has now held for a century.