The First Ray: Will and Power

The Seven Rays are a doctrine of modern Theosophy, not an ancient tradition: the framework was sketched by Helena Blavatsky in The Secret Doctrine of 1888 and developed into its familiar detailed form by Alice Bailey in her A Treatise on the Seven Rays, published from 1936, where the seven are streams of divine energy that condition all life, each with its own quality, planet, colour and presiding master. The First Ray, of Will and Power, is the ray of the ruler, the pioneer and the destroyer of outworn forms, dynamic, purposive, associated with leadership, courage and the breaking-down that clears the way for the new.

In Bailey's system it is linked to the planet Vulcan and to the colour red, and its shadow is the will turned to domination. The whole scheme is a twentieth-century esoteric construction; where it draws on older material it does so through the Theosophical synthesis rather than by direct descent from any classical source.