The following essay is found in Revenge of the Mystery Cults volume 2. Half of this essay is available in this location for free. To access the full story, consider becoming a paid subscriber to this Substack (which comes with access to all live events and PDFs) or just pick up a copy of Revenge of the Mystery Cults volume 2.
Who was Alice Bailey?
Alice Bailey had been born of an English aristocratic family in 1880, and her parents were friends of Queen Victoria.
However, her childhood was an unhappy one, and according to her own testimony, young Bailey attempted to commit suicide on no fewer than three separate occasions BEFORE THE AGE OF 12!
Although the story is apocryphal, Bailey tells the tale of a secret meeting that took place at the age of 15 with a strange figure dressed in European clothing and wearing a turban who appeared to her as if out of thin air, and explained:
“He told me there was some work that it was planned that I could do in the world but that it would entail changing my disposition considerably; I would have to give up being such an unpleasant little girl and must try to get some measure of self-control. My future usefulness to Him and to the world was dependent on how I handled myself and the changes I could manage to make. He said that if I could achieve real self-control I could then be trusted and that I would travel all over the world and visit many countries, “doing your Master’s work all the time” … He added that He would be in touch with me at intervals of seven years apart.”[1]
When she first began telling this tale later in years, the obvious inference was that this mystery man was the same Ascended Master Koot Hoomi who would supposedly communicate telepathically (along with another Ascended Master named Djual Kool) throughout her career as a Theosophical high priestess.
Whatever the truth of the story, this experience was apparently enough for Bailey to transform her outlook and she began to embrace missionary work, taking her around the world under the rubric of the YMCA, and even serving as an Anglican missionary in India for a period. Sometime during this period, Bailey had an awakening and began hearing voices.
Whether these voices were the Ascended Masters of Blavatsky or something more schizophrenic remains to be seen.
What is known is that upon her arrival in the USA in 1907, Bailey got a divorce from her first husband, and floated mysteriously around the USA for several years.
In 1917, Bailey joined the American Theosophical Society’s Krotona Lodge in Hollywood, and almost immediately found herself in the center of the elite Esoteric Section and editor of the society’s official journal. By 1919, Bailey began publishing mystical books featuring supposed messages from the Ascended Master Djual Kool, and slowly began challenging official stature of Annie Besant as leader of the Theosophists. 1919 was the same year she met her second husband, Foster Bailey, National Secretary of the Theosophical Society.
Together, the Baileys began winning over a large array of supporters to their anti-Besant vision for Theosophy accusing Besant of authoritarianism and breaking from the teachings of Madame Blavatsky. After Besant expelled the Baileys in 1922, they quickly set up their own breakaway Theosophy Lodge called ‘The New Group of World Servers’ who would lead her new ‘The Arcane School’.
Writing of The Arcane School’s role in ushering in a new civilization under a new form of behaviorism dubbed ‘group dynamics’ Bailey said:
“The presentation of the teaching adapted to the rapidly emerging new civilization stresses the training of disciples in group formation, a technique which will characterize the discipleship service in the Aquarian Age.”
Just as Carl Jung and Bailey’s disciple Olga Froebe-Kapteyn intended to create a new society based on hive minds managed by high priests when they created the Eranos Conferences in Switzerland in 1933[2], the intention behind Bailey’s Arcane School and broader Universal Brotherhood involved remaking human society around the dissolution of individualism, in favor of an all-encompassing hive mind that would be influenced by an elite class of high priests.
Under the Eranos Conferences launched in 1933 which later shaped the Esalen Institute, Stanford Research Institute and broader counter-culture revolution of the 1960s, the form this dissolution of the self hinged on concepts derived from Jung’s writings on Archetypes and the unification of moral opposites.
And as we saw in volume one of The Revenge of the Mystery Cults, it was Bailey’s disciple Froebe-Kapteyn who was initiated into the Arcane School and was guided by Bailey and Jung to launch the Eranos Conferences in 1933.
The Eranos Conferences
The first Eranos conference took place over the course of several weeks at Monte Verita, Switzerland, and was the initiative of Dutch theosophist Olga Fröbe-Kapteyn following the directions of Carl Jung.
The intention of Eranos was to form the nucleus of a new world religion based on a very strange unification of the most deranged eastern and western mystery cult traditions in post-modern clothing. It was also enmeshed with notions of Grail myths that had animated the gnostic templars and Roundtable movement of Cecil Rhodes as exemplified by Fröbe-Kapteyn’s March 11, 1960 letter to Carl Jung:
“You once talked about the Eranos Round Table, as you came down the path to my house, and you spoke of a Grail, suspended between heaven and earth. The festival table resembled a picture that one might see in some old manuscript. That was right at the beginning of Eranos, and I have not forgotten your words.”[1]
Jungian historian Dirk Dunbar writes of the Eranos conferences:
“Many of the period’s contributors—such as Carl Jung, Erich Neumann, Daisetz Suzuki, Mircea Eliade, and Joseph Campbell—converged at the Eranos proceedings beginning in 1933 in, befittingly, Ascona, Switzerland. Seeking ways to avoid the fragmentation and foreboding dissociation of the newly developing postmodern mind, the colleagues undertook, as Campbell testified, the “common task of understanding the present period of cultural catastrophe . . . and of prelude.”
Olga Frobe-Kapteyn was close to the Ramakrishna movement (which had shaped the teachings of Swami Vivekananda) and enjoyed a close personal friendship to both Annie Besant and Jiddu Krishnamurti prior to the latter’s break from his loudly heralded position as ‘World Teacher’ in 1929.
In 1930, Fröbe-Kapteyn and Alice Bailey jointly created a “nondenominational spiritual center open to all scholars of esotericism of any geographical origin and religious faith” which they named The International Center for Spiritual Research which operated between 1930 to 1933 near Monte Verita.
From Monte Verità to Esalen: The Revenge of the Mystery Cults
Along with the Crowley-Reuss OTO ceremony of 1917, Bailey’s Arcane School would become the basis for the formation of Eranos in 1933.
Despite the fact that Allied forces were kind enough to destroy her OSS records after World War 2 (on the request of Carl Jung, himself an OSS agent and advisor to Allan Dulles), much information about Frobe-Kapteyn’s pro-Nazi proclivities still exists, including one particular entry in her diary after an Eranos meeting where her Tarot profile was read at an Eranos conference by Heinrich Zimmer (1890 – 1943). She writes:
“The Golden Swastika is a Sun symbol = a symbol of sun-energy and power. The black swastika or the left-hand swastika, as it is in Germany = a symbol of dark power = destruction. With both these symbols I was identified!!! Here lies the root, the deepest root of my identification with Germany!!! Both these black symbols of highest but destructive power mean possession by the Devil. Just as Germany is possessed by him, the dark aspect of the Self. Or by Kali the Destroyer.”[3]
Just as Frobe was giddy to be diagnosed as a conduit for ‘the dark aspect of the self’ and the destructive force of Kali, Carl Jung had earlier carried out an invocation ceremony which caused her to believe that none other than Jung’s demonic entity Abraxas had taken control of her soul.
Carl Jung’s Gnostic Revival, Abraxas, and the 20th Century Cult of Mithra (part 5)
In Eranos: An Alternative Intellectual History of the 20th Century, Hans Thomas Hakl writes:
“One day, when the two of them were invited to the house of some friends in Ascona, Jung had drunk rather more than usual and induced her to drink quite a bit as well. Then Jung carried out a ritual. Taking his ring, inscribed with the word Abraxa, from his finger, he placed it in a glass filled with wine, uttered some mysterious formulae, and then slipped the ring on to her finger. The next day, Frobe said to him that he, as a psychologist, had done something grave with this gesture, and she told him: ‘You have bound me to you!’ Jung, however, is said to have answered: ‘It was not I that did it, but the Self.”[4]
As I demonstrated in Revenge of the Mystery Cults volume 1, Carl Jung himself was less of a psychologist and more of an occultist obsessed with dismantling Judeo Christian culture, while reviving ancient mystery religions.
His commitment to a pagan revival of ‘authentic’ pre-Christian mystery cults brought him into the highest corridors of influence within Nazi Germany.
Just as Jung argued that the individual German people were possessed by the “Volk spirit” energy of the collective unconscious, and just as Hitler was possessed by the demonic force of Wotan/Odin, and the collective energy of the zeitgeist [see volume 1], no one was accountable for their sins in this new Aquarian/Jungian paradigm.
Lucifer Rebranded
Following the template of Blavatsky’s earlier Lucifer Magazine of 1888, the Baileys set up Lucifer Trust in 1922 and Lucifer Publishing in 1923…
[For the rest of this essay refer here.]
