The Unlikely Occultist: A Biographical Novel of Alice A. Bailey

Foreword

"Isobel Blackthorn's insightful biographical novel The Unlikely Occultist evokes a rich immediacy to the life of Alice A. Bailey and her contemporaries as they forge 'New Age' thinking, in light of perceiving themselves in a new epoch where humans face unprecedented challenges. The novel offers the reader a glimpse into the little known and secretive world of Alice. A. Bailey and fellow contributors to Western Esotericism as they vie for power and influence. In so doing, it provides an important contribution to re-telling received and accepted accounts of historical figures and events. Isobel Blackthorn deftly raises for consideration an alternate historical interpretation of esoteric lineage.

In writing this biographical novel, it is wonderful to see how Isobel has brought the depth of scholarship applied to her doctoral thesis The Texts of Alice A. Bailey: An Inquiry into the Role of Esotericism in Transforming Consciousness, to the imaginative creation of this novel."

Lesley Kuhn

Author of Adventures in Complexity for Organisations Near the Edge of Chaos, Adjunct Fellow Western Sydney University.

Author Note

The Unlikely Occultist is a dramatization of Alice Bailey's life and influence, as it was known to the author via the historical record at the time of writing. Some of the minor characters are inventions. All of the major characters are based on real people, but their personalities, attitudes and opinions have been invented for the purposes of the narrative and may or may not resemble the real persons concerned.

This portrait of Alice A. Bailey is based on a deep and prolonged study of her life and teachings. No fictional character can ever convey the fullness of a real historical figure. The Unlikely Occultist is offered to the reader in good faith.

PART ONE

New York

What is it about a death that leaves those remaining at the mercy of time? A single moment, the release of a life, sending ripples through the universe. She hadn't contrived her visit to coincide with the first anniversary of her aunt's passing. Even if she had wanted to, with all of the organising involved—the scheduling of holiday leave, the booking of flights, the itinerary arranged to accommodate the wishes of her companion—such a feat of temporal intersection would have been impossible to pull off. Although another part of her couldn't resist wondering if some entity hadn't orchestrated the entire trip to serve some hidden agenda of its own. It was the part of her that felt connected to her great-grandmother, Katharine, who had died the day she was born.

That it was exactly a year since her aunt Hilary had passed away had only occurred to her as she had entered the building with the others and one of her tour party announced the date to settle some discrepancy of her own. The twenty-fourth, the woman said. And it was June.

They were visiting the United Nations in New York, and she was at last arriving at the key destination of her holiday. She might have come alone. She wished she had. The tour was for Suzanne's benefit.

Heather stood aside a few paces on and let the others file by. Faces rose to the grandeur, the grey concrete of the exterior of the building giving way to sweeping curves and a fluted ceiling high above. Turning, she beheld tall panels of glass evenly spaced between concrete columns newly painted in yellow ochre, dusky pink and black. A colour scheme reminiscent of Art Deco. The windows allowed in an abundance of natural light. To her left, a flight of stairs led to the upper levels. It was all as splendid as she had anticipated, the building exuding an aura of serious, enlightened humanity. At least, that's how it felt to her.

Her awe was shattered by a commotion nearby as one of her tour party raised his fist and yelled, 'Down with the globalist agenda!' over and again. Heads turned. People shuffled off, shaking their heads. Some ran, scared. The man, large, bearded and middle-aged, made full use of the space around him to pace and rant. 'Don't get sucked in by the power elite! It's a cabal!'

'Oh, shut up,' someone said to his back.

The man swung around and yelled in his face, 'Wake up!' He stabbed the air at others. 'You, you and you. Wake up! The United Nations is a conspiracy. Who funded this place? Rockefeller and the Rothschilds! You,' he said, his wild stare landing on Suzanne. 'You need to wake up.'

'I'm fully awake, thank you.'

Heather cringed inwardly, hoping he wouldn't use her reply to home in on her.

Security descended before he could utter another word, knocking him to the floor and pinning him down and shooing away the onlookers. People muttered and rolled their eyes.

'What a nut job.'

'Yeah, but he has a point.'

'What was that about?'

He was whisked away and the atmosphere soon settled. The rest of the tour party gathered around the guide. Heather hovered behind some stragglers. Suzanne, an inch or two taller than the rest, was huddled in with the pack. Heather caught her gaze.

'I'll be over there,' she mouthed, pointing.

Suzanne glanced in that direction then edged through the pack to say in Heather's ear, 'I thought you were joining the tour.'

'It's the meditation room that interests me. That's all.'

'It's part of the tour.'

'I'm well aware of that.'

Suzanne eyed her appraisingly. 'This has something to do with that woman, doesn't it?'

'That woman, as you call her, is Alice Bailey, and yes, yes it does.'

'You've developed an obsession, Heather, if you don't mind me saying.'

Heather did mind. She was not a nut job. She was also well aware that Alice Bailey sat at the helm of the United Nations version of the New World Order conspiracy theory that man had been ranting about. Were they right to put her there? Of course not. But they were not wrong to put her at the helm of the United Nations.

The meditation room represented to Heather the culmination of a mission, a silent memorial of a spiritual activist, a woman who had dedicated her life to righting the wrongs of power, only to be shafted and duly shunted into the margins of history. If Suzanne wanted to label her appreciation 'obsession' then so be it. She left Suzanne and the tour and headed off, divesting her mind of her chagrin with every footfall.

The meditation room was situated past the security desks on the eastern side of the lobby, discretely positioned to the left of The Peace Window. It was this mural of glass that drew the eye, an impressive artwork Marc Chagall had gifted the UN in memory of Dag Hammarskjöld. Heather didn't need to be told any of this by a tour guide. She knew more than she would ever have imagined possible about the second Secretary-General of the United Nations, given her complete lack of interest prior to last year. In the past few months she had come to admire Dag Hammarskjöld, not for his outward achievements, although they were remarkable by any measure, but for his spirituality, his dedication to the study of medieval mystics Meister Eckhart and Jan van Ruysbroeck, and, Heather strongly suspected, his affiliation with, or at least his sympathy for the mysterious occultist, Alice A. Bailey.

It was Donald Keys, a speechwriter for Hammarskjöld's successor U Thant, who had alerted Heather to the Bailey connection. By then she was eight months into dealing with the curious assortment of books, magazines, journals and notes associated with the unpublished manuscript of Professor Samantha Foyle, bequeathed to the State Library of Victoria upon her death. Chair of Religious Studies at a Melbourne university, Professor Foyle specialised in alternative spiritualities and the subject of her latest research was Alice Bailey.

Back at her desk in the manuscript office in the upper reaches of the library, in the thick of unravelling the life of the occult figure, Heather had stumbled on New Age activist Keys' speech – written in the 1970s and later posted online – in which he referred to Bailey's prediction that a leading Swedish disciple would soon be working in the world. Bailey had made her prediction in the 1930s, long before the birth of the UN. In his speech, Keys identified this individual as Dag Hammarskjöld.

Keys was one of the few notable figures who openly admitted to being part of Alice Bailey's coterie. He was almost brazen about it, given the secrecy of most. He even dedicated his book, Earth At Omega: Passage to Planetization, to Alice Bailey. When Heather made the discovery, she had succumbed to a frisson of satisfaction. It wasn't easy uncovering the identities of the occultist's notable followers and sympathizers. Unlike the glamorous mystique the charlatans enjoyed, Alice Bailey was the anathema of flamboyance. In true esoteric spirit, she had preferred obscurity, working behind the scenes to achieve her goals.

Which was more or less how Heather had found herself when working on Professor Foyle's collection, the secretive, almost furtive manner in which she had sifted through the contents of all those boxes cluttering her office, reinforced by her colleague Suzanne's dismissive attitude whenever she poked her head in and scanned about, taking in the chaos that was Heather's desk, and Heather's look of startled surprise as she peered at her colleague through her reading glasses.

The foyer felt like a zoo. She had to ease past a throng of tourists who were exiting the Meditation Room and making their way elsewhere, their voices rising behind her. She still wasn't sure what to make of Keys' claim, although it wouldn't have surprised her were it true, and it had added a measure of conviction to her decision to come and see for herself. What she did know was Dag Hammarskjöld had been single-minded in wanting to see the Meditation Room redesigned. He was adamant that the UN needed a place of stillness and silence that would resonate with the whole of humanity. He managed to gain the cooperation of the Laymen's Movement, who were behind the creation of the original room, and had fought a hard battle for its existence. The Laymen were a Christian organisation and they must have been bemused if not outraged by the new and distinctly non-Christian proposal. Heather had no idea how Hammarskjöld had persuaded them, but by the sound of things he would not be deterred. He set up a sort of petition, garnering the support of numerous Christians, Muslims and Jews, his Friends of the UN Meditation Room. Bolstered, he forged ahead, and once the project was approved he oversaw every detail of the renovation, in there with the painters as they coated the walls. Why such zeal, such imperiousness? Was it his own ego spurring him on, or a higher spiritual purpose as he himself would have it?

Finding herself alone, she stood before Chagall's Peace Window, taking in the complexity of the artist's vision, his tribute to the United Nations. The work was laden with religious symbolism from the Old and New Testaments, with its tree of knowledge cleaved in two, serpents rising up in the centre, an angel kissing a girl amid a dance of flowers, all rendered in the richest of hues, predominantly blue. The mural was enormous, taking up the height and breadth of an entire wall, there to invite love and harmony and denote the suffering of life without them. She was impressed by the sense of weight of the glass and imagined the effort and care taken during installation. For Heather, the piece was made all the more significant knowing Chagall was a Hassidic Jew.

She took a step back and expanded her vision to encompass the whole, blurring the details, inhaling as though to breathe in the beauty, to embody it, consume it as it consumed her. Then she blinked, the presence of others gathering behind her oppressive. People were murmuring to each other, sharing what they discovered in the mural. Wanting silence, needing stillness, she entered the meditation room.

Semi-darkness greeted her at the door. The room was small and V-shaped, long walls of off-white culminating at the apex where another artwork hung, a fresco backlit by diffused lighting. More lighting had been threaded along the walls in the place of cornice. The fresco drew the eyes. Centred lengthwise on the tiled floor before it, some four feet in height, was a rectangular block of magnetite, the altar. Heather scanned the small benches lined up in rows on a carpet of deep green for the transient congregation. All were empty. She chose one at the front nearest the wall. Despite the lack of a backrest, she found the bench comfortable enough with its rattan seat.

Hammarskjöld had invited his friend, Bo Beskow, to create the fresco. It was an abstract work, interlocking rectangles forming triangles in muted hues of yellow, blue, grey and brown. She noticed other elements, an arc of moon, and a circle, half black, half white. She thought it might be the sun. A blue rectangle, aligned to the horizontal and centred in the work, receded beneath her gaze. Taking up the foreground was a long and twisted thread that stretched down through the middle at a slight angle.

She let her gaze wander, enjoying the silence of the room. Behind her, those entering remaining for the briefest time.

Her attention drifted to the altar. She hadn't anticipated the enormity of the stone, its weight. For Hammarskjöld, the altar reflected timelessness and strength. She thought few, if any, would understand its significance beyond the magnetic properties of iron ore. If what Heather saw could be described 'significant', and not just an association made by her receptive mind.

For the altar's placement at the head of the V had jolted Heather's memory and suddenly Beskow's fresco became a depiction of a mountain range, and she was no longer in the meditation room of the United Nations building in New York. Instead, she found herself seated in a valley somewhere high in the Himalayas, reimagining a vision Alice Bailey had on two occasions when she was about fifteen years of age, a vision she described in full in her unfinished autobiography.

She was participating in a ceremony in a large, oval valley. The month was May and the moon full. She formed part of a crowd. She sensed that her position in the crowd indicated her spiritual status. There were high mountains all around and the terrain was rocky. She found she was facing east, where the valley narrowed to a bottleneck. Before the bottleneck stood an immense rock…

The similarities were striking. Heather half expected the Buddha to appear from behind the fresco and greet the Christ standing before the altar, the heads of a spiritual hierarchy of masters central to Alice Bailey's occult scheme.

In her autobiography, Alice Bailey recalled her vision vividly in every detail. For her, the ceremony represented the unity of all things. Although at the time of its occurrence, she hadn't known what to make of it. All she knew at the age of fifteen was she had had a strange vision that only became significant for her when it reoccurred, as it would have any impressionable child. It would be another twenty years before she found a satisfactory explanation of what she had seen, one that would form the essence of her esoteric worldview. She imbued the vision with meaning retrospectively, deciding it represented the inner spiritual realm that had become her life.

Was it possible the stone, the fresco, the entire shape of the meditation room had been designed to echo, not only Hammarskjöld's but Alice Bailey's vision, orchestrated by him as some sort of secret homage? Or were the room and the dream similar because they both pointed at the same higher truth, one shared by numerous others? If Hammarskjöld had contrived the meditation room in accordance with Alice Bailey's vision, what did that say about a woman no one in mainstream contemporary society had heard of?

Or was she reading too much into the similarity, adding twos and arriving at fives? Ever since those boxes of esoteric paraphernalia had landed on her desk, she had found herself open to seeing correspondences between this and that, connections one part of her latched onto, even as her rational self rejected them as contrivances.

Things just happened.

A speck of black fluff on the thigh of her beige capris caught her eye. She pinched the fluff between her fingers, hesitated, then deposited it in her pocket. Then she took a few photos with her phone and jotted down some notes.

She was small-framed and preferred her clothes close-fitting and plain. She thought the style went with her straight brown hair which she always kept short. She had the sort of face that was neither pretty nor plain, with a pert mouth and a chipmunk inquisitiveness about the eyes. Others might have labelled her nondescript, a mouse of a woman devoid of charm, but even a mouse deserves scrutiny and appreciation. An introvert, she had a tendency to draw the world into herself, a quality that befuddled and infuriated Suzanne.

A tour group wandered into the room. Many stood or sat down quietly, save for the two circling the altar stone. Irritation stirred in Heather's belly. Whatever gave that pair the idea that running their hands along its top and remarking to each other that the stone was cold and hard constituted acceptable behaviour? Besides, what did they expect? Fairy floss? The man's heels clomped on the tiled floor. The woman, garbed in a faux leather jacket, squeaked when she walked. There was no one to tell them to move away. She wondered if the room should even have been a tourist site. There were places, like churches or synagogues or mosques, places that ought to be sacrosanct, the sightseeing restricted.

She waited for the others to move on, which they soon did. Alone again she felt like an interloper, an imposter, a spy almost, even as she knew that was ridiculous. She had become something of an expert in a metaphysical milieu, and she was determined to express her discoveries. Publish. She could only hope others would take an interest beyond the genealogical details. Although the audience would not be found among her colleagues. Especially not Suzanne, who had zero tolerance for the non-rational. Nor at home. Throughout the archiving, Heather's father had only feigned polite interest in whatever new titbit was on her mind, responding with soft grunts. She never broached any of the occult with her mother, who would have swept it all aside with derision. She was forced to leave her new knowledge on the doorstep like soiled shoes whenever she arrived home from work.

Heather had little in common with her mother. The one time she had mused that her great-grandmother, Katharine, had died the day she was born, intimating that she felt bonded to her ancestor as a result, almost as though she contained her spirit, Joan had laughed mockingly. She said Heather had entered the world at two in the morning, and Katharine hadn't passed away until ten that night. She said she would never forget her own mother, Heather's grandmother Agnes, waking her in the middle of the night with the news.

Heather had tried to defend her position, citing her mother's choice of Katharine for her middle name, but Joan would hear none of it. Heather was fourteen at the time and she had felt stung. The dismissal of her sensibilities formed a wedge between them, a wedge that had held fast ever since, a wedge that had thickened upon the death of her aunt.

There had never been anyone Heather could talk to about deep and meaningful matters other than Hilary, who was no longer there. In the acknowledging, an all too familiar chasm opened in her. She was so thoroughly alone.

Summoning what fortitude she had she pushed the missing away, steering her mind to the revelation that had ushered her into the building, that she had unwittingly managed to arrange the visit to coincide with the first anniversary of Hilary's death. One whole year, a complete cycle of the sun, it seemed to be reflected in that fresco, although she couldn't work out how.

Despite her best efforts, a wave of sadness rose up to meet the path of her thoughts. Her aunt Hilary would have adored the space. Although adored wasn't the right word. Neither was space. Even the phrase 'Meditation Room' spoke nothing of its potency. That phrase conjured images of incense and yoga mats. Hilary would have known how to describe it. She was an adept when it came to the nuances of language. It troubled Heather that at such a critical moment words eluded her. She hadn't come all this way around the world to dwell on Hilary, but the realisation that it was the first anniversary of her death brought her back with force and she missed Hilary's refined, benevolent face, her wispy hair the colour of straw, the way she would turn towards her as she laughed, as if the amusement were theirs alone. Yet, the memory faded without a tear, and Heather realised she was able, just able to recall Hilary without caving in to that downward pull, that lurching into missing. The ache in her heart gave way to an appreciation of the woman, and their special bond. It was as though she was seated right there beside her, enjoying the atmosphere.

Hilary had never been religious. She called herself spiritual. Heather hadn't known what that meant, not deeply, not until she encountered Alice Bailey. What had begun as one of those dubious manuscript collections shunned by her colleagues as altogether lacking interest and therefore dumped in her office on some pretext or other, had unfolded, box by box, into a quest for understanding that led her first here, then there, as the figure that was Alice Bailey blossomed like a deep red rose.

Difficult, intense and isolating as it had been, looking back, Heather wouldn't have traded her immersion in the worlds of Professor Foyle and Alice Bailey, worlds that had brought her to New York to visit the United Nations, to sit in the meditation room and experience this interlude at once ineffable and grounded in art and stone. She was acutely aware that archiving the manuscript had forced her to question the foundations of her beliefs, catapulting her on a journey she wasn't prepared for, leaving her somewhat and significantly different.

It wasn't until she was dealing with the last of the boxes in Professor Foyle's collection that her interest in the United Nations was aroused. As Alice Bailey had neared the end of her life, in those war-ravaged years when the United Nations came into being, she had invested all her hope in the organisation. The United Nations had become something of a fixation for the ailing occultist, almost as though she had created the organisation herself.

For Alice Bailey, the United Nations was a potential vehicle for the expression of all she believed in and wanted to pass on, a unity of all nations coming together in cooperation to solve the world's problems. There could be no higher purpose for humanity. She had thrown her all at persuading her followers to adopt her point of view. Although Heather wondered if the insistent manner in which Bailey had urged her readers to act was the result of her infirmity. She was gravely ill throughout the 1940s, in enormous discomfort and pain, and emotionally worn out by the war. She had suffered as much as anyone in the face of the dark forces that had scourged the planet. More perhaps, she who had fought so desperately through the 1930s to avert a repetition of the previous world war. It was easy to see how the United Nations had given her hope. Like many at the time, she thought it would be humanity's salvation.

Heather knew that for Alice Bailey the United Nations had the potential to be much more. Through its auspices the externalisation of her Spiritual Hierarchy, something she had become so committed to making manifest, had a real chance of happening. Whacky as that seemed, there were plenty who believed it.

Despite her fondness for a figure she had initially found repellent, she wouldn't commit to believing in the existence of a Spiritual Hierarchy, that cohort of wise men—they were all men—overseeing the spiritual evolution of humanity. Privately, Heather thought the very notion ludicrous and an affront to her feminist sensibilities. Yet their existence was the cornerstone of Alice Bailey's thinking and the whole time she had been sifting through the collection, all she could do was suspend disbelief. She didn't want to dismiss the idea altogether, not in case she was wrong, but because that would have made her blinkered and too much like her mother.

Sitting upright in her seat with her knees pressed together and her hands resting open in her lap, Heather took in the altar and the fresco one last time. Had Alice Bailey been alive to see it, she would have been delighted.

She was about to leave when another tour entered the room and Suzanne was soon seated beside her.

'Enjoy the tour?'

'It isn't over yet.'

'I'll meet you in the foyer.'

'Better still, there's a memorial of Eleanor Roosevelt in the gardens. See you there.'

Heather needed no persuading. As she headed back through the foyer, she wondered how well Eleanor Roosevelt had known Alice Bailey. Well enough, she imagined. Well enough.

There could be no doubt Alice Bailey was influential in high circles. Eleanor Roosevelt had read out her special prayer, The Great Invocation, in the United Nations building. She read it on the inaugural World Invocation Day in May 1952, not three years after Bailey's death, a day contrived into being by Bailey's followers to call for spiritual leadership of humanity. In her preamble, Eleanor Roosevelt announced that someone had sent her the prayer. Who was that 'someone'? More, what was it about Alice Bailey that garnered the respect and support of such eminent figures? Heather had poured over Alice Bailey's life and works for an entire year and she felt far from fully understanding the attraction, but she sensed it. She more than sensed it. Alice Bailey had managed to touch a centre of benevolence among the world's most powerful women and men. As far as Heather was concerned that just about made her a saint.

The State Library of Victoria

Heather wouldn't look up from the clutter of manila folders, printed emails, scrap paper and sticky notes on her desk as the man in the shabby work coat wheeled in the last of the boxes.

Her sullen manner made the man awkward. He stacked the boxes on the floor beside the others in forced silence.

'All yours,' he said on his way out.

Only then did she lift her gaze. Sitting tall, craning, stabbing at the air, she counted one hundred boxes. They took up half the floor space in her already crowded office, fanning out in front of her desk, squashed against the wall below the window, and stacked untidily beside the longer wall that supported a low bench along its length.

She wasn't given to rudeness. Her eyes were all puffy and red from last night's tears and they still burned from those she had cried that morning. Her aunt's funeral, a small, family affair held at the Anglican Church in Hawthorn, had been as harrowing as she had anticipated. While her mother had stood at the graveside, her expressionless face matching the grey outfit she wore, Heather was opposite, shuddering with grief, her gaze fixed on that deep chasm of earth between them.

The wake back at her parents' house was equally gruelling. Various cousins huddled round the small buffet, sipping sherry. Heather had chosen to stand by a window overlooking the garden, avoiding contact with the others, riding out the ordeal with the large glass of whisky she had snaffled from the drinks cabinet in the other room.

With all the ceremony behind her, ahead lay only the missing.

She knew her grief would destabilise her but she couldn't have anticipated how all-consuming her feelings would be, how they seemed to change her entire point of view. Staring at those boxes she felt instantly irrational. When Ms Emily Prime, who had taken on the appraisal and acquisition, had asked around to see if anyone was into religious beliefs, she expressed a vague interest in Buddhism. That interest was thanks to her aunt, and she hadn't been religious either. Hilary had taken a lay interest in faiths of all kinds, in much the same way a spectator follows chess, all analysis and no participation.

She wished she had kept her mouth shut, not that it would have made a jot of difference. Resentment snaked around her abdomen as she realised the collection would have fallen to her regardless. She felt put upon, discriminated against in a department filled with assertive extroverts. At least, that was how her colleagues all came across. The dull projects, those doomed to be relegated to the backwaters of the library, always fell to her, the departmental doormat.

Eyeing the collection, she suspected Suzanne had been meddling behind the scenes as well. All week she had been going on about the grieving needing distractions, and there could be no better distraction than work.

Adding to her discontent, when Heather went over and pulled off the lid of the nearest box she was hit with that musty smell of paper left in damp conditions. She all but gasped. Inside, a pile of letters and papers was crammed to the top. It looked as though they had been tipped out of a drawer, shuffled about on some fetid floor and then scooped up in indifferent handfuls and tossed in. So much for the original order. She put back the lid and rummaged through her bag for her inhaler.

She might have opened the window but it was June and a winter wind was blowing off Port