Alice Bailey entered Theosophical circles as an ordinary member of the Esoteric Section, the Theosophical Society's inner teaching body, in the years around the First World War. What set her apart, and eventually set her against the Section's own leadership, was her claim to receive a large and growing body of esoteric teaching through telepathic dictation from a discarnate teacher she called the Tibetan, Djwhal Khul. The first of these dictated volumes, Initiation, Human and Solar, appeared in 1922, and more followed in a stream that would eventually run to over twenty books. The Esoteric Section's leadership did not accept the material on Bailey's own terms, and the resulting friction pushed her out of the Section rather than toward any accommodation within it.
Bailey did not respond by softening her claims to fit back inside Theosophical structures. In 1923, with her husband Foster Bailey, she founded the Arcane School as an independent vehicle for exactly the material the Esoteric Section had disputed, built around correspondence courses that any serious student, not only initiated Theosophists, could enrol in from wherever they lived. The school's association with the Baileys' own publishing venture meant the disputed dictation continued to appear in print under an independent imprint rather than being shelved, and the school's continued operation today, training students in essentially the same system Bailey set out a century ago, is itself evidence that the break produced a durable institution rather than a personal grievance that simply faded.