From church work to Theosophy
Bailey’s early religious life centred on Christianity. She moved to the United States with her first husband, an Episcopal priest. After their marriage failed, she encountered the Theosophical Society in California in 1915 and became editor of its magazine, The Messenger. She later left the Society and developed an independent teaching practice with Foster Bailey.
Alice and Foster established their publishing company in 1922. The Arcane School followed in 1923, providing training in meditation and spiritual development. Bailey said that her contact with the Tibetan had begun in 1919 and continued through the writing of a series of books. Near the end of her life she began an autobiography to explain the journey from Christian evangelism to occult teaching. Her death in 1949 left it unfinished.
Rules, aphorisms and their interpretation
The Light of the Soul presents Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras through Bailey’s paraphrase and commentary. A short aphorism can lead to several pages explaining concentration, consciousness and the soul. A Treatise on White Magic uses fifteen rules as the starting points for discussions of spiritual energy and thought-forms. In both books, inner discipline is connected with the responsibility she believed a student owed to other people. Lumitheca holds the 1927 Light of the Soul and a 1951 fifth edition of White Magic, whose printing history dates its first edition to 1934.
