Alice Bailey

Bailey was a Theosophist who fell out with the Society's leadership and left in 1920 to found her own organisation, the Arcane School, with her husband Foster Bailey.

She said that from 1919 almost all of her books were dictated telepathically by a Tibetan adept she named Djwhal Khul, and that only a few of the twenty-four were her own. This is her account, and there is no way to test it; what can be observed is that the writing is continuous in style with the books she signed herself, and that the material develops Theosophical doctrine along lines Blavatsky had already laid down, the spiritual Hierarchy, the Masters, root races, the sevenfold constitution of the human being, with additions of her own, chiefly the seven rays as a typology of soul and personality.

Her influence on the later New Age movement is larger than her name recognition suggests. The phrase New Age itself, the Great Invocation, the idea of a coming world teacher, the Wesak festival observance, the vocabulary of meditation as world service, and much of the ambient language about the Aquarian age come through her writings and her school.

Two things in that legacy need stating plainly rather than being left to a footnote. Her cosmology retains the Theosophical scheme of root races and includes passages ranking human groups on a spiritual hierarchy, and her writings on Judaism contain sustained hostile generalisation about the Jewish people. Her defenders read these as period idiom or as referring to principles rather than peoples. That reading is available but it is strained, and readers coming to the books should know what is in them.

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.