Conversations With Devas, and a Departure in 1973

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Maclean's specific contribution to Findhorn's identity, distinct from Peter's organizing and Eileen's guidance, was a reported practice of communicating with devas, intelligences she described as overseeing the growth of plants and the wider natural world. She presented this work as complementary to the garden's cultivation rather than as separate from it, and her book To Hear the Angels Sing later documented both the practice and her own life alongside it, part of an eventual ten books she published on spiritual themes. By 1972 the community around the original caravan had formalized into the Findhorn Foundation, and Maclean left it the following year, in 1973, to help found an educational organization in North America together with David Spangler, a fellow spiritual teacher associated with the settlement's early development. She continued writing and teaching for decades afterward and eventually returned to live at Findhorn, where she died on 12 March 2020 at the age of one hundred, the last surviving member of the community's three founding adults. The connection that put her in the caravan in the first place ran back further than Findhorn: a chance 1941 meeting in New York with Sheena Govan introduced her to Peter Caddy, and by the time she rejoined the Caddys as their hotel secretary in Scotland in the 1950s the acquaintance was already more than a decade old, well before any of them had heard of devas or Findhorn.