Alice Bailey: Arcane School

Alice Bailey is the person most responsible for the vocabulary of the New Age, and almost nobody in the New Age has read her.

She was born Alice La Trobe-Bateman in Manchester in 1880, raised in evangelical Christianity, and spent her twenties running soldiers' homes in India for a Christian mission. A bad marriage took her to California, and in 1915 she found the Theosophical Society at Krotona, where she read The Secret Doctrine and, by her account, recognised the man she had met as a fifteen-year-old, when a stranger in a turban walked into her family's parlour and told her she had work to do. She identified him as the Master Koot Hoomi. In 1919 a second Master, the Tibetan Djwhal Khul, began dictating to her telepathically, and over the next thirty years she produced some twenty-four books in his name: Initiation, Human and Solar (1922), A Treatise on Cosmic Fire (1925), Esoteric Astrology (1951), and the rest.

The Theosophical Society did not welcome a second channel for its Masters, and Besant forced her out in 1920. She left with Foster Bailey, whom she married the following year. Foster was a Freemason and a member of Co-Masonry, the mixed-sex Masonic body that Besant led, and he wrote The Spirit of Masonry to argue that the Craft was the outer form of the Mysteries. Through him, and through Co-Masonry's overlap with Adyar, Masonic structure entered the Bailey teaching; it is fair to mark the line as contested, because the influence is one of framing rather than ritual. Together they founded the Lucis Trust in 1922 (originally Lucifer Publishing, a name they changed within three years and have been explaining ever since) and the Arcane School in 1923, a correspondence school of esoteric training that still operates from London, New York and Geneva.

Bailey's system is Adyar Theosophy systematised and pointed at the future. The cosmos is governed by seven Rays, qualities of divine energy that condition every soul, nation and age. Humanity is guided by a Hierarchy of Masters who have a Plan for its evolution, and the Plan is now entering the stage of externalisation, when the Hierarchy will work openly through a New Group of World Servers. The age of Pisces is giving way to the age of Aquarius. The Christ, understood as an office held by the Master Maitreya rather than as Jesus, will reappear. The Great Invocation of 1945 was written to hasten it. Her esoteric astrology gave each sign a hidden ruler, and her work is why the phrase "the New Age" means what it does; she used it as a technical term decades before it became a bookshop section.

Almost every word of that lexicon is now common property. Rays, ascension, lightworkers, planetary hierarchy, service, the Plan, Aquarius, the Christ consciousness: this is Bailey, carried into the 1970s by the Findhorn community, by Benjamin Creme's announcements of Maitreya, and by a thousand smaller teachers who took the vocabulary without the footnotes. The Lucis Trust holds consultative status at the United Nations, which has fed a generation of conspiracy literature on both the left and the right. Her books also contain passages on the Jews that are indefensible and that her own organisations have had to address.

You can recognise this branch by its diction. Where a school speaks of rays, of service to the Plan, of the coming age and the returning Christ who is not quite Jesus, it is speaking Bailey, whether it knows it or not. She is the last of the great Theosophical channels and the first of the New Age, and the seam between them runs straight through her books.