Alice A. Bailey - Life And Legacy
““A must-read for any Bailey student, anyone interested in the New Age movement, and for those who wonder, amidst our confused and divided world, where will it all end?””
“A generous, meticulous scholarly work with a fascinating subject”
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Alice A. Bailey - Life And Legacy: book excerpt
Introduction
It might be useful to know how a rabid, orthodox Christian worker could become a well-known occult teacher.
[and]
One of the things that I seek to bring out in this story is the fact of this inner direction of world affairs and to familiarise more people with the paralleling fact of the existence of Those Who are responsible (behind the scenes) for the spiritual guidance of humanity, and for the task of leading mankind out of darkness into Light, from the unreal to the Real and from death to Immortality.[i]
If there was a single word to sum up the character of Alice Bailey it would be devotion. Devotion in standing firm and acting with skill and strength when beyond her edifice of spiritual teachings and organisations attackers and detractors were armed and ready. That a woman and a body of work fundamentally spiritual should be subject to a whole century of vilification, derision, condemnation and dismissal is not surprising. What Alice Bailey set out to achieve was a complete global transformation of consciousness, a transformation of the way we think and act in the world. Little wonder then, that people would and will resist.
Alice Bailey was a leading occultist of the 20th century, well known and highly regarded in freethinking circles during her lifetime, although controversy surrounded her even then. The moment she began writing her corpus, she endured accusations of plagiarism and fraud, purists in the Theosophical milieu regarding her as a third generation Theosophist, a neo-Theosophist, or worse, a pseudo-Theosophist. These early attacks were harbingers of the blistering condemnations her work would later receive.
After her death, Alice Bailey drifted into obscurity, known beyond her own milieu only amongst Theosophists, some New Age adherents, the odd fundamentalist Christian, and more recently, conspiracy theorists. In the academic community, she has been overlooked, if not altogether snubbed by historians of religion.[ii] As a result, outside of her sphere of influence, her teachings are largely unheard of, misunderstood or misrepresented. Yet her body of work continues in various ways to influence seekers far and wide. Van Morrison’s entire album Beautiful Vision is a celebration of the Bailey teachings, especially Glamour: A World Problem. The Velvet Underground’s song ‘White Light White Heat’ is said to have been inspired by A Treatise on White Magic. And progressive rock instrumentalist Todd Rundgren’s album Initiation is an homage to A Treatise on Cosmic Fire. The album’s second side carries the same title. How many artists, writers, poets and other creative and critical thinkers have learnt from, drawn inspiration from and applied the Bailey teachings in their own fields is not known. Many prefer to keep their esoteric beliefs to themselves.
In her autobiography, Alice Bailey describes herself as a shy and intensely private woman who hated publicity. Yet she was an excellent public speaker, having honed her skills in her twenties leading Gospel meetings. She hailed from the British aristocracy. As a child and young adult, she endured immense loss and hardship. Around the age of thirty-five, she found Theosophy was for her an epiphany, one that aroused commitment second to none. She espoused her newfound wisdom just as she had her former Christian beliefs. She wrote every day for over thirty years as an amanuensis for the Tibetan, or Djwhal Khul, a Master in Theosophy’s Spiritual Hierarchy, a group of Masters of the Wisdom overseeing the evolution of consciousness of humanity. The result is an extraordinarily detailed and comprehensive outpouring of the Ageless Wisdom.
The Bailey teachings are thought to be the second of three outpourings, the first that of founder of the Theosophical Society Helena Blavatsky. Alice Bailey’s version serves to guide aspirants and disciples of the spiritual path into the twenty-first century. A third outpouring is predicted around 2025 along with the externalisation, or physical plane appearance of the Hierarchy in some form, along with the much-anticipated re-appearance of the World Teacher.
In the last months of her life, after much cajoling, Alice Bailey began to write her autobiography. She never finished it. Little has been written about her life since. Alice Bailey’s The Unfinished Autobiography remains the central source of information and insight into her life. It is an inspiring work and depicts honestly the tragedies and the triumphs of a woman dedicated to world service.
Alice Bailey was a contemporary of influential esoteric luminaries Rudolph Steiner, George Gurdjieff and P. D. Ouspensky who, along with a raft of notable figures including Indra Devi and Carl Gustav Jung, made significant contributions to the development of the New Age, a term Alice Bailey appropriated and made her own. Her contribution to the movement is outstanding. She’d reached the middle of her life when she took up the challenge and embarked on thirty years of work, for which she has been described as ‘the mother of the New Age’.[iii] Her writings, translated into many languages and read worldwide, remain in print. Among her organisations, she founded: The Arcane School, an esoteric school delivering training by correspondence for disciples on the spiritual path; World Goodwill, an organisation hosting regular seminars and conferences with the objective of spreading loving understanding and wellbeing for all; the global meditation network Triangles; The Beacon magazine; and her publishing house, the Lucis Trust. All are still active today.[iv]
One of the difficulties with Alice Bailey’s body of work is its inaccessibility. Pure esoteric knowledge is hard for the non-esoteric reader to grasp and even those esoterically inclined are known to find parts of her work challenging. The other is that Alice Bailey claims to have written most of her output in telepathic rapport with the Tibetan Djwhal Khul, an arrangement difficult for the sceptic to accept.
The Bailey texts are intended to serve as advice and teachings for aspirants and disciples of the spiritual path. The canon is vast, amounting to around eleven thousand pages of text, enough to fill a bookshelf, and includes slim volumes to weighty tomes such as A Treatise on Cosmic Fire, a work of pure esotericism that is impossible to grasp unless the reader has an appetite for it.
Before travelling along with Alice Bailey’s life and works, it’s worth pausing to put the teachings into context and gain a partial understanding of the terrain. The following concepts provide a frame through which to view the content of the following chapters.
The Esoteric Sense
Esotericism opens a door on an inner reality which lies behind the world we can see and hear and feel. Its primary aim is the creation of a unity between our inner or subjective reality and the outer world in which we find ourselves (extramental reality). To achieve this, esoteric practitioners cultivate within the self an intuitive way of knowing termed the esoteric sense – the ability to recognise and understand a metaphysical reality that can only be known or seen subjectively. This new reality to some extent displaces the ordinary, pre-existing inner life, reshaping the practitioner’s worldview. Through esoteric training, thoughts and actions begin to cohere with this metaphysical realm. An astrologer, for example, through many years of immersion, training and application, conjures in her imagination an entire cosmology of planets and signs of the zodiac and their complex interactions. The astrologer sees into and through this cosmology, derives meaning from it, and communicates what she finds in the form of storytelling. She sees in symbolic images another’s personality traits and foibles, talents and attributes, difficulties and challenges. She may even predict a thing or two. It is through these processes of immersion, absorption and interaction that hidden knowledge is transferred.
The main purpose of the training Alice Bailey offers in her spiritual school, the Arcane School, and in the bulk of her body of work, is the development of the esoteric sense, or ‘the power to live and function subjectively, to possess a constant inner contact with the soul and the world in which it is found’’.[v] Cultivating the esoteric sense involves continuous meditation and spiritual orientation until the individual lives in the seat of the observer, the soul. It is akin to the Buddhist practice of mindfulness but at a much more advanced level.
An active, open and responsive consciousness is required to interact in a synthetic way with metaphysical realities. In the process of interaction, the esotericist is practising gnosis. Leading scholar of Western Esotericism Wouter Hanegraaff is one of a small group of intellectuals concentrating their efforts on demystifying esotericism and affording the field of study some academic standing. Hanegraaff draws on Dutch theologian Gilles Quispel’s definition of gnosis as a third orientation towards meaning and reality. While faith finds truth in revelation as found in holy scripture, and reason in what can be rationally known and what can be discovered through science, gnosis relies on inner personal experiences often expressed in images, and is oriented ‘towards secret knowledge of the hidden coherence of the universe’.[vi]
The typical gnostic is an intellectual and a radical. Luminaries of a gnostic orientation include: abstract artist Wassily Kandinsky; designer of Canberra Walter Burley Griffin; poet W.B. Yeats; philosophers Gottfried Leibniz and Francis Bacon; composers Erik Satie and Claude Debussy; author and playwright Johann Goethe; physician Robert Fludd; and mathematician and physicist Isaac Newton. How their individual gnostic ways of knowing and approaches to knowledge influenced their ideas and creativity would form an interesting discussion.
Alice Bailey’s aim was not only to foster the esoteric sense – an inner contact with the soul – in those with a gnostic disposition, but also to make esoteric activists out of armchair enthusiasts, to steer her students away from the allure of esotericism as a form of knowledge per se, and towards esoteric practice in group formation oriented towards the betterment of humanity.
Western Esotericism
The keynote of esotericism is inaccessibility. Esotericism goes out of its way not to be understood. Knowledge is kept secret, there only for the few prepared to undergo specialised training.[vii] Western Esotericism refers to those variants emerging in the West, including Astrology, Gnosticism, the Kabbalah, Alchemy, Rosicrucianism, Illuminism and Freemasonry. Each variant carries its own unique style but shares similar views on the existence of unseen or metaphysical realities inhabited by energies, forces and spiritual entities. All variants involve: the practice of correspondence, based on the belief that everything in the universe is interconnected; belief in the existence of the soul and its evolutionary journey back to the Source; a commitment to personal transformation; transmission of an Ageless wisdom; and the use of the imagination as the point of entry into esotericism.
Esotericism resides on the margins of mainstream culture and society and this is mirrored in the type of personality drawn towards esoteric practice. Yet marginality does not denote powerlessness. Esotericism is far from ineffectual. It’s a powerful shadow player, more likely to influence particular kinds of intellectually gifted individuals located at the centre of society and culture. A good example of such influence can be found in Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke’s Hitler’s Priestess, which explores the influence of occult thought upon Adolph Hitler. More uplifting examples can be found in art, literature, music, science, and psychology as noted above. Within Bailey’s circle of influence are: prominent New Age precursor Vera Stanley Alder; assistant secretary-general to the United Nations for forty years, Robert Muller; and eminent psychiatrist, Roberto Assagioli.
[i] Introduction
Alice A. Bailey, The Unfinished Autobiography (Albany, NY: Lucis Trust, 1951), p.1.
[ii] Olav Hammer, Claiming Knowledge: Strategies of Epistemology from Theosophy to the New Age (Leiden: Brill, 2000), p. xiii.
[iii] See Wouter J. Hanegraaff, New Age Religion and Western Culture: Esotericism in the Mirror of Secular Thought (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1998).
[iv] Bailey’s Arcane School (established in 1923), is a non-sectarian international school of esoteric training by correspondence. Men of Goodwill, established in 1932, is a non-government organization recognized by the United Nations. The Lucis Trust was incorporated in 1922, as a tax-exempt, religious, education corporation. The Lucis Publishing Company, a non-profit organization owned by the Lucis Trust continues to keep Bailey’s texts in print. Finally, Triangles is a network under the auspices of the Lucis Trust, and described by its own literature as ‘a service activity for men and women of goodwill who believe in the power of thought. Working in groups of three, they establish right human relationships by creating a worldwide network of light and goodwill’ (Triangles Pamphlet). Bailey’s intention underpinning these organizations was not simply to promote her own views, but to help to improve the human condition. See <https://www.lucistrust.org/> Accessed 3 September 2017.
[v] Alice A. Bailey, A Treatise on White Magic: or The Way of the Disciple, (New York: Lucis Trust, 1991), p. 603.
[vi] Wouter J. Hanegraaff, “A Dynamic Typological Approach to the Problem of “Post-Gnostic” Gnosticism,” in ARIES, 16: 5-43.
[vii] Lee Irwin, “Western Esotericism, Eastern Spirituality, and the Global Future,” Esoterica, Vol III, 2001: 1-47.
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