During the year 1922, the principal head of the Temple of the People entered into her final illness and died one night when my wife was attending her. After the funeral services and the various activities connected with this death, we severed our connection with the Temple of the People and went down to San Fernando and managed to purchase the largest portion of my father’s orchard. [Sarah] became interested in the work of one of the members of Krotona—which was at Hollywood at that time—and went to New York associated with that work while I continued with the orchard.[1]

As Wolff relates in this passage, he and Sarah left the Temple of the People at the end of 1922 and made their way to San Fernando, where he began to make a living from an orange grove the couple had purchased from his father.[2] In the meantime, Sarah began to investigate the work of Alice Bailey, the member of the Theosophical center to whom Wolff refers in this paragraph; the two women were prior acquaintances.[3]

Alice LaTrobe Bateman was born in Manchester, England in 1880; her parents were deceased by the time she was eight, and she was raised—under the supervision of her grandparents— in a fundamental Christian environment. Alice worked as an evangelical missionary in Ireland and also in India, where met Walter Evans. The couple were married and settled in the United States where Evans studied theology and was ordained in the Episcopal Church; Alice subsequently divorced her abusive husband and supported their three daughters by working in a California sardine cannery. In 1915, she was introduced to Theosophy and joined a Lodge in Pacific Grove, California; two years later, she moved to Los Angeles in order to be nearer to the national headquarters of the American Theosophical Society, which had been relocated to Hollywood in 1912 when the Theosophical colony of Krotona was established there.

In early 1919, Alice claimed to have made contact with an unknown master by the name of “Djwal Khul.” In 1920, after her fellow theosophists questioned the authenticity of her encounter and the reliability of her “received” messages, she left the Society and moved to New York, where she started her own Arcane School.[4] In 1921, she married Foster Bailey, a fellow member of Krotona whom she had met in 1919. The collaboration with “The Tibetan,” as Bailey often calls Djwal Khul, began  in the form of “letters” that provided information, advice, and encouragement of her teaching and writing activities. Some of these letters made it into her earliest books.

In her 1922 tome, Initiation, Human and Solar, Bailey introduces a pantheon of living masters, including Blavatsky’s Morya and Koot Hoomi, LaDue’s Hilarion and her own Djwal Khul.[5] Over the next three decades, she produced dozens of esoteric best-sellers filled with his messages, all of which reflect a reworking of Theosophy, with newly coined terms and theories of its own.[6] Blending evangelical piety and theosophical millennialism, we are told that “humanity is entering a new age and that the messiah of the new age is the Christ, who is about to make a reappearance.”[7]

Although Sarah kept in touch with Alice Bailey for a number of years, Bailey is never mentioned by Wolff and it may be the case that he never met her. He does mention the “Arcane School” and “Arcane Wisdom” in his unpublished work, “Death and After,” and he makes a passing reference to “Arcane Wisdom” and “Arcane Knowledge” in a correspondence course titled “The Gupta Vidya.” Alice Bailey would prove important in both of the lives of the couple, however, as it was she who facilitated their introduction to Pir-o-Murshid Inayat. As Wolff notes above, Sarah had gone to New York (in February 1923) to visit Bailey and was staying at the headquarters of the Arcane School; while there, she ran into Marya Cushing, an old acquaintance who was in charge of making the arrangements for Khan’s time in New York City during his second visit to the United States (as well as organizing part of his lecture tour in other cities). The two asked Bailey if would be possible to arrange for Khan to visit the Arcane School Headquarters and Bailey readily agreed. Soon Sarah was sipping tea with the head of the Sufi Order of the West.

Endnotes

[1] Franklin Merrell-Wolff, “Autobiographical Material: A Recollection of My Early Work with Sherifa,” audio recording.

[2] Wolff and his wife are listed in the 1923 San Fernando Valley Directory (Los Angeles: Los Angeles Directory Co., 1923) as “Wolff Franklin F (Sarah A) rancher h e end of 8th” and in the 1924 directory with the same names at “h1000 8th.”

[3] As evidenced by several of Bailey’s books in the Wolff Library that were inscribed to Sarah in 1922. In Letters on Occult Meditation (New York: Lucifer Publishing, 1922), Bailey penned “To Sarah, with love”; the copy of Initiation, Human and Solar (New York: Lucifer Publishing Company, 1922) has this note: “To ‘S’ and ‘A,’ Staunch Warriors of the Light and Faithful servants of the Hierarchic, as a token of my love and respect for your unflinching devotion to the Master’s Cause, and as an indication of my moral and spiritual support in your noble stand on behalf of Justice, Right and Truth. With the Master’s Strength and Benevolence, Your Comrade on the Path, E. A. B.” The Wolff Library contains about ten of Bailey’s books altogether, the two above (including an additional 1951 edition of the latter) as well as Alice Ann Bailey, The Consciousness of the Atom: A Series of Lectures delivered in New York City Winter of 1921-22 (New York: Lucis Publishing Company, 1922); Alice Ann Bailey, The Soul and Its Mechanism (The Problem of Psychology) (New York: Lucis Publishing Company, 1930); and Alice Ann Bailey, A Treatise on White Magic or the Way of the Disciple (New York: Lucis Publishing, 1934). Later works include Alice Ann Bailey, The Reappearance of the Christ (New York: Lucis Publishing Company, 1948); Alice Ann Bailey, Telepathy and the Etheric Vehicle (New York: Lucis Publishing Company, 1950; and The Externalisation of the Hierarchy (New York: Lucis Publishing, 1957).

[4] Steven J. Sutcliffe, Children of the New Age: A History of Spiritual Practices (London: Routledge, 2003), 45-49.

[5] Alice Ann Bailey, Initiation, Human and Solar (New York: Lucifer Publishing Company, 1922), 53-60.

[6] Bruce F. Campbell, Ancient Wisdom Revived: A History of the Theosophical Movement (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), 152-3.

[7] Ibid., 153.