FOUR
Later Theosophists
A. P. SINNETT AND “MARY”
Just as the “Two Chelas” had offered their version of “man’s forgotten history” when the ink of the Mahatma Letters was scarcely dry, so later Theosophists continued to improve on it according to their lights. A. P. Sinnett, to whom Koot Hoomi and Morya had addressed most of their letters, ceased to receive any after 1885, when Blavatksy settled in Germany to write The Secret Doctrine. But the socially and psychically ambitious Sinnett was not going to be dropped so easily. He immediately started holding “mesmeric sittings” with a woman he called “Mary,” keeping them secret from Blavatsky and other Theosophists.1 By 1888, these sessions were taking place almost daily, as Sinnett wrote in his unpublished autobiography, with “the Masters talking to me through her in most cases. In this way I gathered a great deal of miscellaneous occult information.”2 This included Sinnett’s own past lives in Egypt and Rome, during which he discovered that he had been involved with the previous incarnations of his wife, of Mary the medium, and of his son’s tutor, Charles Leadbeater.
In 1892 Sinnett revealed the existence of his new channel of communication to an elite group from his London Lodge, which began meeting for “special work in which the Master undertook to help us.”3 Some of the results of this work, presumably based on Mary’s mediumship, were given out in lectures to the rest of the lodge and published in booklets. Such was a lecture that Sinnett gave on December 19, 1893, on “Stonehenge and the Pyramids.” He explained that, helped “by psychometric power of a very high order,” he had been able to build up a proper conception of Egyptian civilization that was quite unlike the gropings of the archaeologists. Egypt had been gradually settled by Atlantean adepts during the long period when the Atlantean continent was breaking up. The pyramids were built a little more than 200,000 years ago, primarily as temples or chambers of initiation and secondarily to protect from future Earth-changes “some tangible objects of great importance having to do with the occult mysteries.”4 Later the land sank, the sea rose, and the pyramids were submerged. After they reemerged, Egyptian civilization reached its golden age. Finally, the land was swept by an immense flood when the last of Atlantis sank, 11,500 years ago.
Sinnett’s sources declared that Stonehenge, too, was the work of Atlantean adept immigrants. They had come to the British Isles and established a civilization there about 100,000 years ago. They made Stonehenge crude and unroofed “as a mute protest against the corrupt luxury of the perishing civilization they had left behind.”5 But their building method was not crude in the least. In this and other megalithic structures, “the adepts who directed their construction facilitated the process by the partial levitation of the stones used.”6 Clairvoyant observers, Sinnett assures us, have seen the process going on. Only much later was Stonehenge taken over by the Druids of the fifth root race and made the scene of bloody sacrifices.
WILLIAM SCOTT-ELLIOT AND HIS SOURCES
While Sinnett’s lecture on the pyramids and Stonehenge was only heard or read by a small coterie, the next wave of Atlantean revelation was destined for widespread and lasting fame. Its vehicle was William Scott-Elliot (1849–1919), Tenth Laird of Arkleton. We know almost nothing about him, but one gets a sense of his milieu from the fact that his father held the record for attending the opening of the grouse-shooting season, and his son fell victim to a multiple murder plot hatched by the family butler.7
By some unknown but surely interesting route, this Scottish aristocrat had made his way into Sinnett’s special research group, which only numbered about ten people.8 By February 17, 1893, Scott-Elliot had assimilated enough Theosophical lore to address the London Lodge on “The Evolution of Humanity.” On October 10 he married an Irish physician’s daughter called Maude Boyle-Travers. Research by Daniel Caldwell and Michelle Graye has proved that Maude was none other than the “Mary” who had been serving A. P. Sinnett for years as a medium.9
On February 29, 1896, Scott-Elliot gave another paper at the London Lodge entitled “Atlantis—A Geographical, Historical, and Ethnological Sketch.” It was published with a preface by Sinnett, who assures the reader, “Every fact stated in the present volume has been picked up bit by bit with watchful and attentive care, in the course of an investigation on which more than one qualified person has been engaged, in the intervals of other activity, for some years past. And to promote the success of their work they have been allowed access to some maps and other records physically preserved from the remote periods concerned.”10
More than one qualified person? Who, other than “Mary,” now Mrs. Scott-Elliot, was involved? The curtain rises on Charles Webster Leadbeater (1854–1934), who would become, with Annie Besant, the most prominent of the second-generation Theosophists. Before considering his contribution to Scott-Elliot’s work, we need to sketch his career up to this point. Sinnett had admitted him to the Theosophical Society in 1883, albeit reluctantly, since Leadbeater was a Church of England priest. The next year he left the church, and, spurred by a letter from Koot Hoomi, joined Blavatsky on her voyage to India. There he received occult training from Koot Hoomi,11 Djwal Khul, and the more tangible Subba Row.12 A period of lonely and menial labor for the society followed, ending in 1889 when Sinnett summoned Leadbeater back to England to tutor his son Denny. After Blavatksy’s death in 1891, he was taken up by the society’s rising star, Annie Besant.
Leadbeater’s occult training had not been for nothing. He could access knowledge about the etheric and astral planes, even ascending to Devachan, home of demigods. He knew the faculties of the human being that correspond to these planes, and had solved the enigmas of sleep, death, and rebirth. Already a member of Sinnett’s special group, he now began one of his favorite activities: psychically reading the past lives of his friends and others of note. His method was very different from that of “Mary,” who spoke from a mesmeric trance. As his biographer, Gregory Tillett, writes, “For these researches Leadbeater did not find it necessary to leave the physical body, and carried out his investigations whilst fully conscious and awake.”13 Apparently he was able, in normal social settings, to call up astral visions and describe them, just as the rest of us can make conversation based on our own visual memories. Annie Besant’s biographer, Arthur Nethercot, adds that most of the sessions “were held after dinner in the drawing-room of Mr and Mrs Varley, but . . . some took place on Saturday or Sunday afternoons while they were all seated in a small park in Wormwood Scrubs, in the west of London.”14 In these unglamorous surroundings, Leadbeater recounted to Varley the tale of his sixteen previous lives.
Such researches yielded incidental information about the times and places in which the previous lives had occurred, and this led to a concentrated effort to discover more about the distant past. In August 1895, Besant, Leadbeater, and two others (Bertram Keightley and Curuppumullage Jinarajadasa) retreated for this purpose to Box Hill, Surrey. Leadbeater wrote to a friend that, in addition to discoveries about Devachan,
we also made further investigations into the different orders of atoms and molecules, the arrival of the first class pitris from the Moon, and the manners, customs, religion and history of some Lemurian and early Atlantean races, to say nothing of a few casual incarnation hints. During the latter we witnessed the first birth of Mahatma Morya on this earth, on arrival from the spiritual state following the Lunar Chain, and found him again about a million years ago as one of the great dynasty of the Divine Rulers of the Golden Gate in Atlantis.15
These “manners, customs, religion and history” went to form the core of Scott-Elliot’s Story of Atlantis. The small book had an attractive supplement of four folding maps printed in pink and green, showing the world (1) as it had been for many ages up to 1 million years ago, (2) after the catastrophe of 800,000 years ago, (3) after the catastrophe of 200,000 years ago, and (4) after the catastrophe of 80,000 years ago until the final submergence of Poseidonis in 9564 BCE. So the two Atlantean catastrophes of the Mahatma Letters and the three of The Secret Doctrine have now become four. Years later, Jinarajadasa wrote about how Leadbeater had obtained these maps. Apparently Koot Hoomi, among his many other responsibilities, was Keeper of the Records for the Museum of Records of the Great White Brotherhood. When Leadbeater gave his lecture on “The Astral Plane” to the London Lodge in November 1894, Koot Hoomi thought it so epoch-making that he asked if its manuscript might be donated to the museum. It was duly sent to him, vanishing in London and presumably appearing in Shigatse.16 Jinarajadasa, who had compiled the actual manuscript from Leadbeater’s notes and witnessed the phenomenon, explained:
This Museum contains a careful selection of various objects of historical importance to the Masters and Their pupils in connection with their higher studies, and it is especially a record of the progress of humanity in various fields of activity. It contains, for instance, globes modelled to show the configuration of the Earth at various epochs of time; it was from these globes that Bishop Leadbeater drew the maps which were published in another transaction of the London Lodge, that on Atlantis by W. Scott-Elliot.17
These, then, were the “records physically preserved” mentioned in Sinnett’s preface. I do not understand why Leadbeater entrusted all this valuable information to Scott-Elliot, first to reveal in his lecture, then to publish under his own name with Sinnett’s preface.18 Since one of the main points of the book is to argue and demonstrate the value of clairvoyance to archaeology, it may have been thought more convincing not coming from the clairvoyant himself.
The first part of The Story of Atlantis was probably by Scott-Elliot, as it summarizes the standard Theosophical teachings on the root races and supplies well-worn arguments of the Donnellian type, based on cross-Atlantic parallels. Then we learn the names of the seven sub-races of the Atlantean root race, which surely came from Leadbeater. Nos. 3–7 are named for later peoples descended from them, but the first and second are “the names by which they called themselves,”19 which may explain why we have difficulty pronouncing them:
1. Rmoahal
2. Tlavatli
3. Toltec
4. First Turanian
5. Original Semite
6. Akkadian
7. Mongolian
These Atlantean sub-races seem to have uniformly loathed one another. They suffered constant wars and forced migrations, befitting their status as the lowest of the seven root races, the most sunk in materiality. One respite was a golden age of 100,000 years under the “divine dynasty” of the Toltecs.20 After that came the sorcerers and their black arts, and the first breakup of the continent, 800,000 years ago.
Scott-Elliot seems to have drawn on Sinnett for his Egyptian material. He, too, relates that the first colonists came to Egypt about 210,000 years ago, and thereupon built just the two great pyramids of Giza, the third, presumably, coming later. The pyramids had a dual purpose, “partly to provide permanent Halls of Initiation, but also to act as treasure house and shrine for some great talisman of power during the submergence which the Initiates knew to be impending.”21 In Scott-Elliot’s version, Egypt was a casualty of the Atlantean catastrophes, being first sunk beneath the seas 200,000 years ago; secondly 80,000 years ago, after which the great Temple of Karnak was built; and thirdly swept by a tidal wave when Plato’s Atlantis went down. Not only were those pyramids ancient beyond modern imagining: Stonehenge with its “rude simplicity”22 was built by a colony that landed in early Akkadian days, about 100,000 years ago. Nineteenth-century utopianism colors the part of the book dealing with Atlantean life. In its heyday, temple worship did not abet superstition but focused on the sun-disk as symbol of “the nameless and all-pervading essence of the Kosmos.”23 Women had rights and education equal to men; there were no slaves. Each child was psychically examined to determine its abilities and placed in the appropriate educational stream; not all needed to learn to read and write. The common people ate meat and even drank blood, but the high officials, being more spiritually advanced, were vegetarian. When strong liquor became a social problem, prohibition was enforced. All the land belonged to the emperor and was divided into collective farms that shared their bounty out fairly. The eugenic improvement of animals and crops, combined with manipulation of the weather, ensured plenty for everybody. Instead of money, the Atlanteans issued tokens that functioned as IOUs. They never issued these in excess of their capital, for their creditors could see through any deception by focusing their clairvoyant powers.
Of the technological achievements that Scott-Elliot describes, the Atlantean “air-boats” are the most intriguing.24 At their highest development they were made of an alloy of two white-colored metals and one red one that was even lighter than aluminum. Their outside surface was apparently seamless and perfectly smooth, and they shone in the dark as if coated with luminous paint. They were boat-shaped but invariably decked over, with propelling and steering gear at both ends. Their motive power was an etheric force made in a generator and passed through adjustable tubes, which then operated like a modern jet. The course of flight was never straight, but in long waves. Do not the phrases I have italicized evoke a classic UFO? Or perhaps a preclassic one, for apparently its maximum speed was only 100 m.p.h., and its ceiling under 1,000 feet.
Maude Scott-Elliot had stopped acting as Sinnett’s medium in 1898, as she became more worldly in her interests and “anxious to conceal her connection with Theosophy from her husband’s relations.”25 Nonetheless, in 1904 William Scott-Elliot put his name to The Lost Lemuria,26 a companion to the Atlantis book.27 Unlike Atlantis, the existence of a Lemurian continent was acceptable to contemporary scientists, and Scott-Elliot quotes from Wallace, Haeckel, Blandford, and Hartlaub to prove it. Some scientists still entertained the possibility of a Tertiary Man, whose absence from the fossil record could now be explained by the not-quite-physical nature of the early third root race. As for occult sources, The Secret Doctrine had contained much more on Lemuria than on Atlantis, and this fills out Scott-Elliot’s work. He describes how the Lemurians evolved from sexless giants into a sturdy Stone Age people, cultivating the wheat that their preceptors had brought from Venus, building cities on a cyclopean scale, and still endowed with the third eye of psychic vision. Then came the volcanic upheavals in which almost all of them perished, and the dawn, some five million years ago, of a new race on a new land. He also disclosed something of the sources for the maps that both books contained. Whereas for Atlantis, “there was a globe, a good bas-relief in terra-cotta, and a well-preserved map on parchment, or skin of some sort, to copy from,” for the earlier continent “there was only a broken terra-cotta model and a very badly preserved and crumpled map.”28 Still, Leadbeater did his best and was able to produce two maps of Lemuria for the new work, as well as a florid description of a Lemurian hunter leading his pet dinosaur.
A CHILD’S STORY
The Theosophists’ clairvoyant reading of the past was not entirely new. The Mesmerists had experimented with it, and among Spiritualists psychometry (holding an object and reading its past) was almost a parlor game. Children also took part; they were believed to be purer channels than adults, less apt to project their own ideas onto what they saw in magic mirrors or with the inner eye. Such was the case with an unnamed Theosophical family in the early 1900s, whose nine-year-old son Laurie was frequently visited and instructed by what he called “angels.” He dictated what they told him to his mother, who showed the material to William Kingsland (1855–1936), an electrical engineer and long-time member of the Theosophical Society.29 Kingsland was excited enough to edit it for publication by the society’s own press as A Child’s Story of Atlantis.30
Laurie’s “angel” informant was called Jonathan Er-Whaler, “because he has to do with the greatest Fish of the sea.” Jonathan had been a spiritual ruler on Atlantis, where he had known the previous incarnations of Laurie and his mother, Mr. Kingsland, and many other friends. He took Laurie in spirit down under the ocean to see what was left of the continent. Everything they saw there was petrified: houses, tables, chairs, and even a statue of the former Laurie himself. Laurie also learned of the hollows beneath the ocean floor.
There is more Hollow than what is on top of the earth. There is a lot of Lava inside much of the Hollow. Suppose you had a great Orange with an inch-thick skin, and a yard inside after that—well, then, this World is something like that. There are all sorts of “Forces” inside the World as well as outside. . . . In tunnelling through the mountains for railways, men should watch and look for all these valuable and strange Forces.31
Laurie was able to view and describe his former life in Atlantis, its “churches” and their rites (very Anglican in flavor), and especially the ubiquitous airships. As he was a nine-year-old boy, this was his major interest, and it occupies much of the small book. As the ultimate wish fulfillment, the former Laurie has his own airship and pilots it from the age of five onward. The airships come in many forms, but are strictly of the Wright Brothers and zeppelin era: most of them have balloons and propellers, and they dock on high masts. Their motive power is “Scear-Force,” which is “something between Electricity and Radium,” but none in the least resembles Scott-Elliot’s luminous vessels.
As to the method of these revelations, Kingsland explains, “Laurie does not at any time go into a trance. He is in full possession of his physical consciousness all the time.”32 There seems to have been no prompting or questioning: Laurie followed where Jonathan took him and told his mother what he saw. On comparing Laurie’s diction, as quoted above, with William Kingsland’s at the end of this paragraph, one concludes that the editing was minimal. As Kingsland admits, “Some of the things he describes are what he himself sees at the time he is describing them, and it is tolerably evident that in many instances—as is so often the case with ‘clairvoyant’ vision—there is a good deal of what we may call personal colour, that is to say, a good deal of admixture with normal brain impressions and mental images.”33
Some chapters of A Child’s Story of Atlantis make tiresome reading today, such as the list of competitors in an airship race, or the Atlantean romance of a present-day gentleman called “Mr. N,” who won his fifteenyear-old bride by fighting all the other boys who wanted her, one by one. However, when it comes to the wedding, Laurie has an eye for costume and social mores worthy of Daisy Ashford.34 Other cringeworthy episodes are the death and burial of Laurie’s grandmother and the flood in which he himself perished at nine years of age. Potentially the best chapter, called “Secrets,” was suppressed for the time being at Jonathan’s wish, to which Kingsland submitted “however much we should like to share with our readers certain information of scientific value given therein.”35 This must be why the title page says “Book 1.” These disclosures never saw the light of day, probably to Kingsland’s chagrin.
The suppressed “Secrets” apart, nothing in A Child’s Story of Atlantis exceeds the imaginative powers of a child raised in a Theosophical family. But for that very reason, this minor work casts a particular light, or should we say shadow, on the other channeled communications with which we have to deal. I do not think that Laurie was deliberately putting one over on his mother. The phenomenon of “invisible companions” is evidence enough that children from quite ordinary families can live partially in a world that is real to them alone. Some parents find this infuriating; others treat it as a harmless phase or even play along with it. Theosophists in 1908 might well have interpreted it as a breakthrough into higher consciousness. Laurie could only have been encouraged in his flights of active imagination by these adoring and admiring adults.
LEADBEATER AGAIN
For “adults,” we should now read “disciples” as we return to Charles Leadbeater and examine his 500-page treatise on prehistory, Man: Whence, How and Whither (1913), nominally written with Annie Besant.36 Some of it derived from sessions held in the 1890s by the authors and other unnamed Theosophists, other parts from “investigations” in the summer of 1910.37 Much of it was prepublished piecemeal in The Theosophist. Their story is not substantially different from those of Blavatsky and her Masters, Sinnett, or Scott-Elliot, but it gives a sense of the great evolutionary adventure that lies both behind and before the human race. Half of the book deals with the post-Atlantean period: first with the current fifth root race, then, skipping to the future, with a vision of the coming sixth root race. This was by Leadbeater alone. It deserves a place in any survey of utopian or futuristic literature but cannot delay us here.
Man: Whence, How and Whither is quite similar in concept to Fabre d’Olivet’s “Philosophical History of the Human Race.” It mixes narrative in the style of a history book with scenes in which the writer exercises his power of imagination (however we understand that term). Here is one such scene, describing creatures that lived at a time while the earth’s surface was still hot enough to melt copper:
The pudding-bag creatures did not seem to mind the heat, but floated about indifferently, reminding one in their shape of wounded soldiers who had lost their legs and had had their clothes sewn round the trunk; a blow made an indentation, which slowly filled up again, like the flesh of a person suffering from dropsy; the fore part of the thing had a kind of sucking mouth, through which it drew in food, and it would fasten on another and draw it in, as though sucking an egg through a hole, whereupon the sucked one grew flabby and died; a struggle was noticed in which each had fixed its mouth on the other, and sucked away diligently. They had a kind of flap-hand, like the flap of a seal, and they made a cheerful kind of chirruping trumpeting noise, expressing pleasure—pleasure being a sort of general sense of bien-être, and pain a massive discomfort, nothing acute, only faint likes and dislikes. The skin was sometimes serrated, giving shades of colour. Later on, they became a little less shapeless and more human, and crawled on the ground like caterpillars. Later still, near the North Pole, on the cap of land there, these creatures were developing hands and feet, though unable to stand up, and more intelligence was noticeable. A Lord of the Moon—an Arhat who had attained on globe F of the Moon Chain—was observed, who had magnetised an island and shepherded on to it a flock of these creatures, reminding one of sea-cows or porpoises, though with no formed heads; they were taught to browse, instead of sucking each other, and when they did eat each other they chose some parts in preference to others, as though developing taste.38
One imagines Leadbeater dictating this from an easy chair, his magnetic blue eyes fixed on the middle distance, while Annie Besant eagerly looks on and contributes her occasional mite, and a disciple scribbles down every word.39 Freudian undertones apart, they must have been able to laugh at this kind of thing without doubting its veracity. Leadbeater regularly adopts an archly humorous tone when dealing with disgusting habits, ugly people, or lowly human types.
The Lemurian root race, as Blavatsky had explained, was the evolutionary turning point when higher beings incarnated themselves as the human egos. This took place about six-and-a-half million years ago. The astrological conditions were just right, the earth in the optimum magnetic state:
Then, with the mighty roar of swift descent from incalculable heights, surrounded by blazing masses of fire which filled the sky with shooting tongues of flame, flashed through the aerial spaces the chariot of the Sons of the Fire, the Lords of the Flame from Venus; it halted, hovering over the ‘White Island,’ which lay smiling in the bosom of the Gobi Sea; green was it, and radiant with masses of fragrant many-coloured blossoms.40
So the “Chariots of the Gods” did not begin with Eric von Däniken or Zecharia Sitchin! They are already here: the Mother Ship descends, and out steps Sanat Kumāra, the new Ruler of Earth, with his thirty helpers. Some Theosophists would consider this grossly materialistic; likewise the process by which the Manu, founder and presiding director of the Atlantean root race, bred the latter from Lemurian stock. This, too, anticipates the later popularity of the idea that Homo sapiens is the result of genetic interference by some higher or more advanced entity. (Note the imitation of Christian writers in capitalizing pronouns.)
Subba Rao distinguished the Lemurians as blue-black, the Atlanteans as red-yellow, and the Aryans as brown-white. We find the fourth Race Manu eliminating the blue from the colour of His people, passing through purple into the red of the Rmoahal sub-race, and then, by mixing in the blue-white of the seventh Lemurian sub-race, He obtained the first sub-race which seemed to be fully human, and that we could imagine as living among ourselves.41
This matter of breeding a better race should be seen in a context of Leadbeater’s preoccupation with past lives. He was engaged, at this period, on a massive project of tracing the former incarnations of all the prominent Theosophists.42 Central to this was his recent discovery of Jiddu Krishnamurti (1895–1986), an Indian boy whom Leadbeater and Besant were now preparing to become the “World Teacher.” As other occultists might cast a horoscope, Leadbeater had been investigating the past lives of the boy he called “Alcyone,” every one of them crucial to the grand design. In the process, he came across the past lives of a “Clan” that had been involved with Alcyone ever since they were monkeylike beings on the moon.43 They included Sirius (currently incarnated as Leadbeater himself), Herakles (Besant), Ulysses (Olcott), Mars (Morya), Mercury (Koot Hoomi), Vajra (Blavatsky), and Siva (Subba Row). Others were not currently incarnated, such as Corona, who had been Julius Caesar.44 Many Theosophists clamored more or less loudly to be included and were gathered into a gigantic genealogical table, kept in ledger form by Leadbeater’s assistants.45 The series of incarnations showed these pioneers going through their own evolution from subhumans to worldly and spiritual leaders of the race. In a way, the whole project was an alternative to Darwinian evolutionary theory, not so much under intelligent design as under inexorable cyclical law, in which all beings played their appropriate roles.
Here is an episode from the latter days of Atlantis, around 100,000 BCE, that is interesting for several reasons. First, it assumes the dualistic commonplaces of white and dark, good and evil, solar and chthonic, that put it somewhere between The Magic Flute and The Boy’s Own Paper. Second, it shows the satyrs of mythology as actual beings, an idea that will recur with Edgar Cayce in chapter 9. Third is the implicit disavowal of the literary cult of the Great God Pan.46 During the decades around 1900, Pan stood for paganism, sexual (especially homosexual) license, and a general rejection of Victorian values.
Corona was then the White Emperor at the City of the Golden Gates; Mars was a general under him, and Herakles was the wife of Mars. A great rebellion was being plotted, and a man of strange and evil knowledge—a “Lord of the Dark Face,” leagued with the dark Earth-Spirits who form the “Kingdom of Pan,” the semi-human, semi-animal creatures who are the originals of the Greek satyrs—was gradually gathering round himself a huge army which followed him as Emperor, the Emperor of the Midnight Sun, the Dark Emperor, set over against the White. The worship he established, with himself as central idol—huge images of himself being placed in the temples—was sensual and riotous, holding men through the gratification of their animal passions. Against the White Cave of Initiation in the City of the Golden Gates was set up the Dark Cave in which the mysteries of Pan, the Earth-God, were celebrated. All was working up toward another great catastrophe.47
Leadbeater revels in descriptions of the hand-to-hand combats that accompanied the wars between Atlantean factions, in which members of the Clan often perished heroically and their enemies shamefully. The catastrophe in question is the one of 75,025 BCE, in which the islands of Ru.Daitya (note the pseudo-Sanskrit diacritics!) were destroyed by gas explosions, floods, and earthquakes. Here a correction to The Secret Doctrine becomes necessary, for this occurred not long after the Manu of the fifth root race had led his people out of Atlantis in 79,997 BCE.48 (Blavatsky, following Koot Hoomi, had written that the fifth root race began 1 million years ago.) They sailed over the Sahara Sea to Egypt, then trudged on foot to a high plateau in Arabia. As the millennia passed, their numbers grew into several millions and their religion became oppressively orthodox. This necessitated a second exodus of 700 people who were all the Manu’s own descendants, for he kept reincarnating to improve the stock with his own genetic input. As Leadbeater puts it, “As bodies died, He packed the egos into new and improved ones.”49 Through this means, and a general survival of the fittest through the privations that followed, the Manu bred the fifth root race.
The home of the race, as we know from Blavatsky, was the sea occupying the present Gobi Desert, and their great city was built beside it. The White Island was not far offshore, joined to the city by a cantilever bridge. Leadbeater gives to this city, or perhaps to the general region, the traditional Buddhist name of Shambhala, adding, in a footnote, “Shamballa is still the Imperishable Sacred Land, where dwell the four Kumāras, and where gather, every seven years, Initiates of all nations.”50
Finally come the familiar events that the Egyptians recounted to Solon, and Plato to us. The Emperor of Poseidonis (the rump state that was all remaining of Atlantis) decided to bolster his empire by invading the Mediterranean, and after conquering the western lands was repulsed by the plucky Pelasgians. (Leadbeater draws a patriotic parallel with the fate of the Spanish Armada in 1588, routed by the more agile English vessels.)51 Then came the final catastrophe of 9564 BCE. Poseidonis collapsed, and dry lands emerged from the Sahara and Gobi Seas. The Manu, as always foreseeing the future, had already emptied the Central Asian Kingdom of its inhabitants, leading the elect into India. To keep their Aryan blood pure and unmixed with that of the indigenous peoples, he instituted the caste system.52 With that, Leadbeater’s tale joins seamlessly with the traditional history of the subcontinent, which seems to have returned the compliment. No less a figure than Ramana Maharshi stated that the lost continent of Lemuria had once stretched all the way across the Indian Ocean, embracing Egypt, Abyssinia, and south India in its confines, implicitly attributing his own Dravidian roots to it.53
RUDOLF STEINER AND THEOSOPHY
Rudolf Steiner (1861–1925), the founder of the Anthroposophical movement, never knew Blavatsky or the first generation of Theosophists, nor was he originally drawn to them. As a young man he had experienced the rich mixture of avant-garde art, Wagnerism, spiritualism, psychical research, and Theosophy that swirled around in Vienna; in 1888 he read Sinnett’s Esoteric Buddhism in German and found its materialistic outlook repellent. A dozen years later, now in Berlin and a recognized figure in the intellectual world, he consented to lecture at a Theosophical library.
Steiner seldom did anything by halves. During the two winters of 1900–1902 he gave fifty-two lectures that covered the history of mysticism, its links to German philosophy, and most especially “Christianity as a Fact of Mystical Experience.” Although the library’s patrons were Theosophists, Steiner insisted that his lectures were drawn exclusively from his own experiences in the spiritual world,54 and this would remain his position throughout his life.
One of the lectures was attended by Steiner’s future wife, Marie von Sivers. She was an actress with a sophisticated cosmopolitan background who knew Edouard Schuré (see chapter 3) and had translated his work. She was also a keen Theosophist and soon drew Steiner into the movement. With his charisma, Steiner did not need to rise through the ranks. A German section was founded with him as its general secretary, and he attended the London congress in July 1902, lodging with Blavatsky’s old friend Bertram Keightley and meeting Annie Besant, Sinnett, G. R. S. Mead, and other worthies. On Steiner’s return to Germany he took over the entire central European branch and started his own journal, first called Lucifer*3 (just like Blavatsky’s London journal), then Lucifer-Gnosis.
Even so, Steiner asserted his independence from prevailing trends in the Theosophical Society. He rejected the cult of the Mahatmas, any hint of spiritualism or mediumship, and any engagement with oriental philosophy. Instead he brought along a whole subcontinent of German thought that had been vital to his own intellectual formation. One detail says it all: when Steiner organized the Theosophical Congress in Munich in 1907, he decorated the hall not with portraits of the Masters but with busts of the German idealist philosophers Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel.55 Most of all, his cosmology was centered on Christ, and in a very different way from the “esoteric Christianity” of Besant and Leadbeater, which was largely a matter of reading Theosophical ideas into Christian myths and symbols. Rather as Saint-Yves d’Alveydre took Fabre d’Olivet’s work and Christianized it (see chapter 2), Steiner recast Theosophy in a Christocentric mold; and that might serve as a pocket definition of Anthroposophy.
Steiner lost little time in establishing his Theosophical authority for the German-speaking audience. In 1904 he published Theosophie,56 a book that might have been taken for the canonical document of the movement, but which expounds a peculiarly Steinerian system of human consciousness and the process of reincarnation. In the same year, Lucifer-Gnosis carried two important series of articles, on “How One Obtains Knowledge of the Higher Worlds,”57 and “From the Akashic Records: Our Atlantean Ancestors.”58 Material on Lemuria followed and was included in The Submerged Continents of Atlantis and Lemuria, a book first published by Steiner’s English admirers.59 Like Scott-Elliot and Leadbeater before him, Steiner began by defending supersensible knowledge as a supplement and corrective to the material sciences of the past.
These present essays will also show that at a certain high level of his cognitive power, man can penetrate to the eternal origins of the things which vanish with time. . . . The one who has acquired the ability to perceive in the spiritual world comes to know past events in their eternal character. The events do not stand before him like the dead testimony of history, but appear in full life. In a certain sense, what has happened takes place before him.60
Steiner does allow that this kind of spiritual perception is fallible, but says that it is much more dependable than sense perception, and that “what various initiates can relate about history and prehistory will be in essential agreement.” He refers the reader approvingly to Scott-Elliot’s Story of Atlantis, with its information about the civilization that existed for a million years on the floor of the Atlantic Ocean. Steiner’s stated intention is to supplement Scott-Elliot’s information, and especially to tell more about the spiritual character of the Atlanteans. 61
Scott-Elliot’s book had been published in German the year before (1903), and his companion work Lost Lemuria in 1905. The specialist on Anthroposophy Helmut Zander surmises that Steiner’s Lemurian information, which began to emerge in October 1904, was gleaned instead from Blavatsky and Sinnett.62 This raises the question of exactly what were Steiner’s sources. “Today,” he writes in the same preface, “I am still obliged to remain silent about the sources of the information given here. One who knows anything at all about such sources will understand why this has to be so. But events can occur that will make a breaking of this silence possible very soon.”63
Why the mystification? Steiner had already described how a person can penetrate to a direct perception of the past; he had defended the veracity of what is thus seen; and he had promised to tell more than the English Theosophists had to offer. No reader could possibly expect the source to be other than himself, otherwise why should one believe a word of it? But then, why should he mention Scott-Elliot at all? If we hold Steiner to his own principles, it must have been because initiates are in “essential agreement” about the past. Therefore any agreement between Steiner and the Theosophists would have been due to the fact that they both “saw” the same things. This implies a massive compliment to the Theosophists, and more especially to Charles Leadbeater, who as we know was the source of most of the material in question.
Steiner was not ungenerous with such compliments. In 1907, in an important statement to Schuré, he admitted that “true initiates” stood at the Theosophical Society’s cradle.64 Even after his resignation, whenever he spoke on the anniversaries of Madame Blavatsky’s death (May 8, 1891) he did not fail to “evoke feelings of admiration, veneration, and gratitude”65 toward her. He conceded that “The Secret Doctrine contains the greatest revelations of this order that humanity was able to receive at the time,” and that in the Mahatma Letters “we may find some of the greatest wisdom given to humankind.”66 But he could not stand Leadbeater.
From the start of his involvement with the Theosophical Society, Steiner had made it plain to Annie Besant that the society’s general attitude to Christianity was not his own, and they agreed to differ on the subject. This worked for almost a decade, while Steiner went his own way in almost total independence from the parent society. But the scandals surrounding Leadbeater, and Besant’s reinstatement of him against many Theosophists’ objections, sorely tried Steiner’s puritanical principles. In 1911, when Besant and Leadbeater founded the Order of the Star in the East to prepare the world for the return of Christ-Maitreya in the form of Krishnamurti, it was the last straw. Steiner called on Besant to resign; she responded by withdrawing his charter for the German branch; and he founded the Anthroposophical Society.
Once freed from obligatory courtesy, Steiner was more outspoken about the Theosophists’ methods and materials. He took up the allegation of a Christian esotericist, C. G. Harrison (see chapter 12), that Blavatsky had been subjected to “occult imprisonment” for teaching false doctrines.67 He dismissed Sinnett’s The Occult World and Esoteric Buddhism as having been produced by “precipitation” by the spirit of John King, a pirate well known to Spiritualist séances.68 He claimed that the Theosophists’ information on the world of Atlantis had been obtained through putting a person into a mediumistic state, and that all their communications from the spiritual world, including those in Scott-Elliot’s book, came in that way. As for Steiner’s own path, he insisted that it was entirely different from anything the society had known: it was “to reject all earlier ways of investigation and, admittedly by means of supersensible perception, to investigate by making use only of what can be revealed to the one who is himself the investigator.”69
Here Steiner was mistaken. He may have heard about Sinnett’s séances with Maude Scott-Elliot (see chapter 4), but he seems to have known very little about Leadbeater, whose reading of the Akashic Records was not mediumistic at all but done in full consciousness, as we assume Steiner’s to have been. The two cases are closely parallel, even to the point that Steiner, in his last year, spun out long chains of reincarnations,70 just as Leadbeater had done with the lives of Alcyone and his Clan. Moreover, Steiner’s story of the past concurs with the Theosophical one in most of its fundamental principles. It includes the progressive materialization of the human body; the seven root races, and, after the first two (Polarian and Hyperborean), seven sub-races in each; the separation of the sexes during the Lemurian root race; the role of the Manu, assisted by other divine messengers, in managing the development of the Aryan root race and gradually entrusting it to human initiates.71 Steiner hints at the dark arts of the Atlantean sorcerers but coyly breaks off, saying in a footnote, “For the present it is not permitted to make public communications about the origin of this knowledge and these arts. A passage from the Akasha Chronicle must therefore be omitted here.”72 As though any well-read Theosophist didn’t already know about them!
Building on this foundation, Steiner goes beyond the Theosophists in several respects. This is not the place to elaborate on their concept of “Rounds,” which first came up in the Mahatma Letters: it is sufficient to know that our present Manvantara (large-scale time cycle), with its seven root races, is the fourth of seven such cycles, the other six taking place on other planets. Blavatsky said very little about these, but Steiner discourses freely about the evolution of protohumans on Saturn, the sun, and the moon,73 and even the developments that will take place far in the future on Jupiter, Venus, and Vulcan.74 Moving to our own round on Earth, we learn some surprising things about the Polarian and Hyperborean epochs. As the cycle began, there was no material separation between sun, Earth, and moon. During the Polarian epoch, the sun was “extruded from the earth,” taking with it the more subtle elements, and during the Hyperborean, the moon was extruded, taking the coarsest ones.75 Human beings were present throughout the whole process, their form and consciousness changing along with the cosmic process.
If any astronomers or physicists should object to the above, they should know that in Steiner’s cosmology there is a continuum that runs from the spiritual world to the astral, from there to the etheric, and from that to the gaseous, fluid, and solid states of matter. Human life is viable in any of these states, and in earlier times, it took place entirely in the former ones. The same applies to the earth, which has gradually solidified during the present Manvantara. Before the separation of the sexes, the human body was a soft, malleable mass, controlled not by muscle but by the will. The future cartilages and bones were latent in the etheric body, but not present physically. Humans had the senses of hearing and of hot and cold, but sight came later.76 Parts of the earth were still not solidified, and that is where human and similar animals lived. Other animals that had already developed sexual differentiation and senses, such as the reptiles, lived in the more solid parts, but having solidified too soon, their evolution stopped there.77
It is hardly surprising that Steiner’s Lemurians related to nature, and to the laws of physics, in a way very different from our own. They had an intuitive understanding of natural forces and could control the weather, the growth of plants, and even the evolution of animal into human forms, just by applying the will. They used this power to remodel the hills, and in later periods built cities in stone,78 but what they perceived was blurred to their dawning sight, because the atmosphere was filled with mist and the sun never shone through the clouds. Gradually the Lemurian body formed cartilages, and then, with the Atlantean period, a bony skeleton appeared. But there was still a lot of leeway for the force of will. An early Atlantean could break an iron rail or stop a cannonball, had such things existed, through psychic force alone. His physical form also adjusted to his will and soul quality, so that the more intelligent beings became smaller and neater in stature, the stupider ones giants.79 Later in Atlantis, the perversion of magical powers led to the creation of grotesque human monsters, but these were not able to survive into the next epoch.
Under the supervision of higher beings, the Atlanteans developed from the elite of the Lemurian race, saved from the cataclysm that destroyed the southern continent. At first they passed much of their lives in the spiritual world, with spiritual beings for companions. They would spend the night busily there, then at daybreak would return to their bodies to rest, like snails into their shells.80 As the seven sub-races succeeded each other, their consciousness and habits changed to become steadily more like our own. Stated very briefly, the Rmoahals developed a memory of vivid sense impressions and feelings and began to use language. The Tlvatlis began to form groups and acquire a sense of self, from which came the awareness and worship of their ancestors. The Toltecs had larger communities, led by initiate kings, that helped create common memories, and these in turn made for harmonious group relations. The Turanians began to misuse the newly gained powers for selfish ends. The Original Semites developed logical thinking and the presence of an inner voice. The Akkadians took the development of thinking further, replacing the natural harmony of the Toltecs with constrictive laws. Finally the seventh sub-race, the Mongols, preferred to trust in the life force rather than in thinking, and to reverence everything that was old rather than new. As Steiner remarks, their descendants still have this characteristic.81
Steiner does not say at what stage the Atlanteans took to the air, but when they did, their airships were powered by harnessing the energy in growing things. To this end, they stocked great quantities of seeds in the sheds where these contraptions were kept and somehow extracted motive power from them. Their airships could only float a short distance above the ground and would not work at all today, because in those days the air was thicker, the water thinner.82 The power of growth and reproduction, which Steiner also does not explain, was what the Atlanteans now abused, turning it to selfish ends; initiates were as guilty of this as anyone. Because this power is intimately linked to air and water, meddling with it had repercussions in the environment, first as storms and eventually as the cataclysm with which we are familiar.83
Before the final fall, however, the Manu, who was a divine being in charge of human development, had gathered the core of the future fifth root race.84 He and his kind had already reached the human state in previous cycles; they could take on human form, or not, as it suited their purposes. Now they deliberately chose people from the fifth sub-race who were poor in clairvoyant and magical powers, but more developed in the novel faculty of thinking. The divine being called by Steiner “the great initiate of the Sun Oracle” led these pioneers to a place in central Asia (elsewhere he mentions the Gobi Desert) where they could be isolated from other human groups and work intensively on their evolution. They needed to put their Atlantean psychic powers behind them and learn to think. This is the primary task of the Aryan root race, but it should be devoted to higher rather than selfish purposes.85
Once Steiner’s reading of the Akashic Records reaches the fifth root race, his revelations revolve around the occult Christology that had been his central concern ever since his early vision of what he called the “Mystery of Golgotha.” Our interest is in his prehistory, and in how it fits into the broader context of this study. In the end, it seems to be a variation on the Theosophists’ themes. Steiner’s Atlanteans and Lemurians differ from Leadbeater’s, but much less than the two occultists differed in character and style. Steiner is less a master of the bizarre detail; there is very little sense of humor in him, but more psychological insight. Consequently, all the questions that may trouble us about Leadbeater’s methods, sources, motivation, and ethics apply to Steiner, too. Both seers claimed to be reading the Akashic Records, but as it turned out, Leadbeater’s reading confirmed that of Blavatsky and the Mahatmas, and Steiner’s confirmed all of them.
As for later influence, Steiner’s death at sixty-four and the rise of the Nazi party deprived Anthroposophy of the role he had had in mind for it. For example, he had a political theory called the “Threefold Commonwealth,” much resembling Saint-Yves d’Alveydre’s Synarchy. His ambitions were not slight. In one of the lectures drawn on for the above digest, titled “Rosicrucian Esotericism,” he likens the pioneers of the Aryan root race to the early Christians huddling in the Roman catacombs, then to the Anthroposophists, equally despised by their contemporaries but by implication as momentous in their future influence. Nowadays his followers are more ignored than despised, and Steiner’s prehistory belongs to those aspects of his teaching that they prefer to play down. If Anthroposophy has an influence on society today, it is through its educational system, practiced worldwide in the Waldorf Schools, and to a lesser extent in alternative medicine and agriculture (e.g., Weleda products; biodynamic farming). Many people who make use of these schools and products are not Anthroposophists, and talk of Lemurians or the extrusion of the moon might not bolster their confidence.
Rudolf Steiner is a phenomenon: a man of seemingly superhuman knowledge, abilities, and energy who poured out a torrent of information that would take a lifetime to encompass. Besides his many books, he gave almost daily lectures that were taken down in shorthand. Many of them were published later, unrevised, but they are perfectly cogent, and the resulting system is consistent through and through. He had the perfect answer to critics: that what he was practicing was spiritual science, and if they took the trouble to work at it, they would achieve similar results and confirm his findings with their own. In contrast, our next Theosophical offshoot never claimed to have seen anything herself, yet when it came to prehistory, she too held firmly to the party line.
ALICE BAILEY AND “THE TIBETAN”
In November 1919, Alice A. Bailey (1880–1949) was snatching a moment of peace and solitude when she heard a disembodied voice: “There are some books which it is desired should be written for the public. You can write them. Will you do so?” it said. “Certainly not,” she replied. “I’m not a darned psychic and I don’t want to be drawn into anything like that.”86
She had reason to be wary. Born to a prosperous Scottish family, she had descended via missionary work in India to become the battered wife of a clergyman, thence to working in a sardine factory to support her three daughters. A period spent at the Theosophical community in Krotona, Hollywood, had given her an appreciation of its principles and of The Secret Doctrine, but also disillusionment with the competitive and bickering atmosphere; it also brought her Foster Bailey, her second husband.
After this mysterious summons was repeated, she decided to give it a try. The process of dictation by a being who called himself “The Tibetan” scared her, and she again backed out, but was encouraged to contact Koot Hoomi to discuss her doubts. This she did, “following the very definite technique He had taught me,” and was reassured that the plan came from him: she had nothing to fear by acting as the Tibetan’s “amanuensis and secretary.”87 The result was the first chapters of Initiation, Human and Solar.
The communicator (whom Carl Jung allegedly took to be Alice Bailey’s higher self 88) identified himself privately as the Master Djwal Khul, a junior member of the group to which Koot Hoomi and Morya belonged and who figures frequently in their letters. Bailey, still a member of the Theosophical Society, submitted her material to the Indian headquarters for publication in The Theosophist.89 But with Besant and Leadbeater’s clairvoyant activities in full swing, the society did not approve of individuals claiming their own contacts with the Masters. The Baileys started their own publishing company, at first following the examples of Blavatsky and Steiner in styling it “Lucifer.” In 1922 it issued Initiation90 along with two other books.91
Bailey thereafter followed her own path, independently of the Theosophists but with a basic commonality of doctrine and outlook. Through her, Djwal Khul poured forth a whole shelf of books on cosmic evolution, the hierarchy of masters and initiations, the subtle worlds and the ways of working with them, esoteric Christianity, astrology, and the political problems of the twentieth century. To a nonenthusiast, his writing is turgid and textbook-like, lacking the color that Blavatsky or Leadbeater could lend to their equally pretentious works. Initiation, Human and Solar is a fresh approach to familiar Theosophical themes, notably the hierarchy of beings supervising evolution and their relationship to the individual. Leadbeater, too, had become interested in these matters and in the “seven rays” on which Blavatsky had briefly touched. Gregory Tillett points out that although Bailey’s material was unacceptable to official Theosophy, Leadbeater never criticized her and held her early books in high regard. His own book The Masters and the Path (1925) is so similar in substance to Bailey’s Initiation that Tillett writes, “One wonders which came first.”92 The two of them together are at the root of all the later channeled material and lore concerning “ascended masters.”
Bailey’s hierarchy seems like a parody of corporate bureaucracy—or of the Masters’ purported creation, the United Nations. At the head of affairs is Sanat Kumāra, the Lord of the World, with three advisers who, like himself, were perfected in an earlier solar system. Beneath them are officers responsible for adjusting karma from the global down to the individual level, and for the care and tabulation of the Akashic Records. Then come three departmental heads: the Manu, the Christ, and the Maha Chohan, with familiar Theosophical masters like Koot Hoomi and Morya attached to one or the other of them. The hierarchy itself is in perpetual evolution: its members pass through a series of initiations and get promoted, leaving behind vacancies that are filled by newcomers. It holds regular meetings in the council chamber of the Lord of the World and apportions jobs to each member according to his (and it is always “his”) specialization. There they pass resolutions that decide the degree and manner of their intervention in human affairs.
The hierarchy’s center is Shamballa, called in ancient books the “White Island” and located in the Gobi Desert. It exists in etheric matter and is perceptible only through the corresponding vision. (This, incidentally, accords with Tibetan Buddhist teachings on the subject.93) There the Lord of the World resides and receives daily reports from the three departmental heads. The first of these is the Manu of the fifth root race, who lives in Shigatse. We may remember him described by Leadbeater as manipulating the racial stock like an artist blending colors, with a generous input from his own DNA. Bailey gives his job description in more sober style:
Largely concerned with planetary politics, and with the founding direction, and dissolution of racial types and forms . . . to Him is given the work of setting the race type, of segregating the groups out of which races will develop, of manipulating the forces which move the earth’s crust, of raising and lowering continents, of directing the minds of statesmen everywhere so that racial government will proceed as desired, and conditions be brought about which will produce those needed for the fostering of any particular type.94
The second departmental head is the Christ, otherwise called the World Teacher and identified with the Buddhists’ Maitreya and the Muslims’ Mahdi. Leadbeater and Bailey have a great deal to say about this figure, but he is not relevant to our theme, having only come to Earth in 600 BCE. The third head is the Maha Chohan who arrived during the second sub-race of the Atlantean root race. From Bailey we learn that he was responsible for the changes that took place halfway through that root race, at which other Theosophists have hinted. First, she says that the Maha Chohan arranged at that time for many of the present more advanced humans to come into incarnation.95 Second, the hierarchy decided that the time was ripe to open its door to admit humans, so that its ranks could be filled by those suitably qualified. At the same time the border between humans and animals was closed, so that animals will have to wait for another great cycle to move up to the human state.96 But the most interesting thing is that to further human progress, “The problem of good or evil, light or darkness, right or wrong, was enunciated solely for the benefit of humanity, and to enable men to cast off the fetters which imprisoned spirit, and thus achieve spiritual freedom.”97 This problem does not exist either for higher or lower beings, but in Atlantis it led to the famous struggle between the forces of light and the forces of darkness. Bailey’s informant adds, referring to the recent First World War, that on every side were found “those who fought for an ideal as they saw it, for the highest that they knew, and those who fought for material and selfish advantage. In the struggle of these influential idealists or materialists many were swept in who fought blindly and ignorantly, being thus overwhelmed with racial karma and disaster.”98 Like the choice of the title “Lucifer,” this was a declaration of independence from Christian and every other orthodoxy that believes in an evil principle. It was also a challenge to those who looked on the war—or any war—in terms of absolute good versus absolute evil.
Later, after the Second World War, Bailey would return to the theme of Shamballa and its role in world affairs. Writing not long before her death in 1949, she announced that Shamballa was now intervening for only the third time in human history. The first time had been in Lemuria, when humans became individualized (presumably at the “separation of the sexes”); the second, during the great struggle in Atlantis between the “Lords of Light and the Lords of Material Expression.” And now for a third time it was producing radical changes in the consciousness of the race, “which will completely alter man’s attitude to life and his grasp of the spiritual, esoteric and subjective essentials of living.”99 However, the process had far to go because even now, “the masses of people are today Atlantean in their consciousness and are only slowly emerging into the Aryan point of view.”100
Alice Bailey had much in common with Besant and Leadbeater, especially the respects in which their teaching and style diverged from those of Blavatsky and her Mahatmas. These included a devotional tone unknown in early Theosophy, especially regarding the Masters. Blavatsky had left Theosophists free to believe in them, or not; now they were shown to have been central to the whole cosmic enterprise and personally responsible for matters like the influx of human incarnations and Earth changes, which The Secret Doctrine left to nature’s harmonious regulation.101 Emotions were stirred up by expectation of the coming World Teacher, whether he was supposed to take over Krishnamurti, or return to Earth in his own form, as Bailey gave to believe. Discipleship was presented in terms of initiations to be passed like school examinations. Finally there was the unspoken assumption that Blavatsky’s work had been superseded by the dicta of the new chosen ones.
While Leadbeater and Besant’s Theosophy suffered a severe loss of membership and prestige after Krishnamurti’s resignation in 1929, Bailey’s movement was on the upswing, untouched by scandal or ridicule. After the war her books were faithfully kept in print by the Lucis Trust, their indigo covers conspicuous in every occult bookstore during the 1960s. Though the six volumes of A Treatise on Cosmic Fire may have found few buyers and fewer readers, the energetic “Group of World Servers” promoting Bailey’s work ensured a new lease on life for many Theosophical concepts. As Wouter Hanegraaff writes, “Bailey’s influence on the New Age movement, especially in its early phases, is pervasive; it is she who is also generally credited with having introduced the term ‘New Age’.”102