1880 – 1949 · A portrait
A British-American writer said a Tibetan teacher, Djwal Khul, contacted her telepathically and dictated twenty-four books over three decades, including a detailed system of seven rays behind all creation.
She said a being she called the Tibetan, Djwal Khul, began contacting her telepathically, dictating thoughts she rendered into English prose. Over the next three decades this grew into twenty-four books.
She and her husband, Foster Bailey, founded a publishing house for the books, first named after an old theosophical journal. Public confusion with the devil forced a rename to Lucis Publishing two years later.
The Baileys opened a correspondence school to train students in meditation and the ray system she said Djwal Khul had given her. It still runs today, organized under the Lucis Trust.
The first volume of what became a five-book series on the seven rays appeared — the fullest statement of the energies she said underlie personality, purpose and evolution. The series wasn't finished until after her death.
The Lucis Trust still operates from New York and Geneva, running the Arcane School and World Goodwill, an affiliated group with consultative status at the United Nations. Her twenty-four books remain in print, still studied as a structured map of esoteric psychology within the Arcane School and related groups today.
The source she named cannot be checked; only what she published can be read. Some of that writing draws on antisemitic ideas, including framing Jewish tradition as something to be spiritually overcome — a strand a 1998 academic study of antisemitism singled out, distinct from her own stated opposition to Nazi persecution of Jews.