Who was Alice Bailey, and did she really channel a spirit called 'The Tibetan'?

Alice Bailey (1880-1949), born Alice La Trobe-Bateman in Manchester, England, had an unhappy first career as a YMCA worker before an unsuccessful marriage to an Episcopal clergyman, Walter Evans, left her divorced and raising three daughters in California. She found the Theosophical Society in 1917 and worked at its American headquarters at Krotona in the Hollywood Hills. In November 1919, she reported being contacted telepathically by an entity identifying himself as Djwhal Khul, or 'the Tibetan,' one of the hidden 'Masters of Wisdom' Theosophists believed guided human evolution from Tibet. She claimed the Tibetan dictated the first of what became twenty-four books, beginning with Initiation, Human and Solar (1922), to her over the following decades.

Bailey's rising authority put her at odds with Annie Besant, then president of the Theosophical Society, and Bailey and her second husband, Foster Bailey, left the Society around 1920. In 1922 they founded the Lucis Trust (originally the Lucifer Publishing Company, a name drawn from the Latin for 'light-bearer' that Bailey later changed after public backlash) to publish her books, and in 1923 they established the Arcane School as a correspondence-course training body for students of the Tibetan's teaching. Her system centers on the 'seven rays,' a scheme of cosmic energies she said underlie all matter, human psychology, and history, and on the coming of a messianic 'World Teacher' or Christ who would work through, not simply as, a single historical figure: a role she believed the historical Jesus once filled and which a future 'Avatar' would fill again. The Lucis Trust remains active today, notably running the annual 'World Invocation Day' observance and holding long-standing NGO status at the United Nations.

Bailey's system departs from orthodox Christianity at several load-bearing points: revelation is ongoing and delivered through a discarnate spirit guide rather than closed in Scripture; Christ is an office or cosmic principle that moves between bodies rather than the unique, once-for-all incarnation of the eternal Son (John 1:14; Hebrews 1:1-3); salvation proceeds through a graded hierarchy of spiritual masters and initiations rather than through faith in the finished work of the cross; and human beings evolve toward divinity across multiple lifetimes rather than facing a single life followed by resurrection and judgment (Hebrews 9:27). Scripture's own test for a spirit claiming to speak truth is whether it confesses Jesus Christ come in the flesh as the unique Son of God (1 John 4:1-3): a test Bailey's channeled cosmology, by her own account of its content, does not meet.