Alice Bailey’s Soul’s Purpose Formula:
Leo ascending with Mars in Leo conjunct the ascendant, ruled by Sun in Gemini in the eleventh house with Venus and Vulcan in Gemini in the eleventh and Pluto in Taurus on its cusp, ruled by Vulcan in Gemini in the eleventh house.
Born in 1880 in Manchester, England, to upper-class parents, Alice LaTrobe-Bateman led a childhood existence that was quite disciplined and regimented, yet free from material anxiety. With the early death of both of her parents, she and her younger sister went to live with their grandparents, continuing their upper-class life.
As a child, Alice was temperamental, vain, vengeful, and somewhat prankish (Mars in Leo conjunct the ascendant). Once, in anger at her governess, she stole her jewelry and flushed it down the toilet. Upon secretly reading her governess’s private journal the next day, Alice learned that her governess knew exactly who the thief was, but was going to wait until Alice took the initiative and confessed before she would do anything about it. Alice then went to her governess and confessed about both the stealing of the jewelry and the reading of the journal. To Alice’s surprise, her governess was much more outraged about the reading of the journal than about the disposal of the jewelry. The shock of learning this was Alice’s first lesson in material-versus-spiritual values, which would later prove to be an important factor in her soul work.
True to her Gemini Sun, Alice never resided in one place for very long, living in England, Canada, and Switzerland before she was nine years old. After her grandfather died, she and her sister would spend half the year with her grandmother in London, and the other half with her aunt in Scotland. In one country she attended the High Church, similar to Catholicism with its ceremony and ritual, while in the other she attended the Low Church, which was more like Protestantism with its vengeful God and hellfire punishment. Alice had found herself torn, in typical Gemini fashion, between two seemingly irreconcilable opposites.
Mars, which conjoins Alice Bailey’s ascendant, is the ruler of Scorpio, where the personality battles the soul, and this battle was Bailey’s “major life conflict”. As a child, she often hated herself and everyone else and felt as if life were worthless. She attempted suicide three times between the ages of five and fifteen by such dramatic means as throwing herself down the stone kitchen steps, attempting to smother herself with sand, and trying to drown in the river. With all of the drama of her Leo ascendant, her personality was engaged in striking out against the will of her soul to be in her physical body.
Alice’s self-torture and unpleasantness continued until the age of fifteen when she was sitting in the drawing room one Sunday, with the rest of the family having gone to church. A man dressed in European clothing and wearing a turban walked into the drawing room and sat down beside her. He told her that she would eventually have the opportunity to do some important work in the world if she would change her disposition and gain some control over herself. He promptly left, saying that he would be in touch with her again. Alice then began to control her cross nature and sharp tongue to the extent that her family thought that she was ill because she had changed so much.
Having been raised as a devout Christian, Alice went to Ireland as a young adult to work in a soldiers’ home where much of her duty was to lead gospel meetings and convert people who were not already “saved”. Speaking in front of a few hundred soldiers terrified and embarrassed her so much at first that she would burst into tears and not be able to continue her talks. She then began to realize that the root cause of her embarrassment had been her own selfishness and ego-centeredness. Her major concern had been what the soldiers would think of her, and she had put this concern over that of actually performing her job well. She was learning one of the lessons of her Leo ascendant, that of overcoming vanity. With this realization, she was able to continue her talks in front of the soldiers.
Still in her early twenties, she next went to India to fill a position as director of several soldiers’ homes there. After several years of hard work, she fell in love with one of the soldiers, Walter Evans. This produced an intense conflict for her because a woman of her social status could not marry an ordinary soldier. While her emotions pulled her one way, her mind pulled her another, leading her into a classical, but most difficult, Gemininian, “head versus heart” conflict.
She became so distressed over this situation that she was unable to sleep and did not care if she lived or died. This led to a nervous breakdown, and she was sent home to Scotland, weeping all the way. There she sought the advice of relatives and friends, one of whom, an old family friend whom she had always called “Aunt Alice”, was a deaconess in the church. Aunt Alice listened sympathetically to her story and assured her that she would take care of the situation. Alice LaTrobe-Bateman then returned to India, and Aunt Alice proceeded to pay Walter Evans’ way to America where he would attend an Episcopal Seminary in Ohio. As a clergyman, he would have the proper social status to marry an upper-class Englishwoman.
When Walter was shortly to be ordained, he married Alice, who later described this turning point in her life as leaving “caste and social position behind” in order to discover Humanity. In America she found herself face-to-face with deep-seated, societal prejudice against African-Americans, and she was deeply disturbed by it. In her autobiography, she devotes several pages to a sympathetic understanding of the plight of African-Americans, as well as Jews, in the twentieth century. This concern about cultural prejudices is one of the foremost characteristics of Gemini, the sign of universal brother- and sisterhood. According, Bailey wrote that behind all man-made class distinctions there lies “a great entity which we call Humanity”.
The newly married couple lived in Cincinnati, Ohio, until Walter was ordained, then moved to California where he was assigned a church. They established a home and had three children, but Walter proved to have an outrageous temper and would sometimes throw things at Alice and push her. It eventually became so dangerous for Alice to be at home with him that she would often seek refuge in the home of a friend. The news eventually spread to the local bishop, who responded to the situation by taking Walter’s church from him. After six months he was given a church in Montana with the stipulation that he would send a portion of his monthly salary to Alice and the small children, who were to stay behind in California.
Walter took up residence in Montana, but rarely sent his wife any funds. By this time World War I had begun, and Alice’s small monthly allotments from England would sometimes not arrive because of the sinking of a ship. When they did arrive, they had been heavily taxed. For the first time in her life, the upper-class woman who had never before known a material care was experiencing dire poverty. At one point she lived for three weeks on dry bread and tea so that her children would have enough to eat. She went to work in a factory as a sardine packer, creating quite a sensation because of her high-society background. With Taurus as part of her Soul’s Purpose Formula, she was learning resourcefulness and detachment from material desire.
For years Alice had begun to doubt many of the Christian doctrines which she had been taught as a child. She made some friends who were studying Theosophy, the new spiritual science that had emerged from Helena Blavatsky’s writings. Alice acquainted herself with Blavatsky’s Secret Doctrine, began to study with her friends, and joined the local Theosophical Society (T.S.). She found that the Ageless Wisdom, which Theosophy expounded, “threw clear light on … Christian theology” and began to teach at the Lodge. In 1917 Walter was sent to France, and the local bishop in California arranged for Alice to receive an allotment of $100 per month from his stipend. Alice then dropped her job in the sardine factory and moved to Hollywood with her children in the vicinity of the T.S. headquarters.
In 1918 Alice was admitted into the Society’s Esoteric Section which controlled the policies of the organization. She was then allowed into the Shrine Room where she learned, for the first time, the identity of the man who had visited her in the drawing room when she was fifteen years of age. From one of the pictures hanging on the wall, she recognized her visitor of twenty-three years previously as the Master Koot Hoomi.
The Esoteric Section was the “inner sanctum” of the T.S., and here Alice learned much that displeased her. She found the Society to be surprisingly sectarian in nature, with a “reactionary and old-fashioned” management. For example, in order for one to become a member of the Esoteric Section (E.S.), one had to have been a member of the T.S. for at least two years. With this requirement fulfilled, one would be required to sever connections with all other groups, pledging loyalty only to the E.S. The T.S. also claimed that only its members could be disciples of the Masters of Wisdom. In her autobiography,* Alice Bailey expressed her disagreement with these self-righteous policies, common to the structures of many organizations, by stating that the “average head of a group” poses as if to be “the anointed of the Lord” when, in reality, he/she is only a human being simply trying to help his/her fellow man/woman. This is one of the realizations of the Leo on the Path. Leadership is seen not as a means to power or as an ego-trip, but as a way of serving Humanity, channeling the Christ Light, and helping to further the Divine Plan.
In 1919, through her work in the T.S., Alice Evans met Foster Bailey and began working with him on the projects of the Society. Having been granted a divorce from Walter Evans, she and Foster soon became engaged to be married. They both became officers of the Society, leading to much involvement in its internal disputes. At its 1920 convention, the T.S. elected a new executive, and both Alice and Foster, who had been pushing for egalitarian reform, were ousted from their positions.
In November 1919 Alice was first contacted by the Master Djwhal, called the Tibetan, who asked her if she would write some books for the public. In those days there was much fraud and charlatanism in the field of the occult, and Alice wanted no part of any work of a psychic nature. The Tibetan asked her to reconsider her decision during the next three weeks, assuring her that she had a certain gift for higher telepathy and that this work would not at all be related to lower psychism. When the Tibetan contacted her three weeks later, she reluctantly agreed to give it a try for a short period of time. Over the next few weeks, Alice began transcribing, in full waking consciousness, the beginning of Initiation Human and Solar, the concepts of which were dictated by the Tibetan. She finally decided to continue the work, which proved to last thirty years, with the last dictation occurring shortly before her death.
After Alice and Foster lost their positions at the T.S. in California, Foster was offered a job at the New York headquarters. Shortly after settling in New York, they were married, and Foster became an excellent stepfather to the three children. Alice Bailey began teaching classes on The Secret Doctrine, and in 1923 she and Foster organized the Arcane School. This school was set up to be completely free from any requirements of allegiance to it or to anyone except to one’s own inner soul. Its workers were all volunteer, and there was no charge for the work done, which primarily involved distributing information and offering correspondence courses. In Alice Bailey’s chart, Pluto in Taurus is on the cusp of the house which contains the esoteric ruler of her ascendant. Pluto in Taurus destroys old thought forms which have been the basis of earthbound attachments. On the cusp of the eleventh house, it works to eliminate that which has been blocking the true spiritual purpose of a group from being manifested.
Taurus esoterically represents the consciousness of illuminating maya, revealing the essential beauty and Light inherent in all things. The esoteric ruler of Taurus is Vulcan, which, in Mrs. Bailey’s chart, is in Gemini, the sign of communication, education, and Love-Wisdom. Vulcan is in the eleventh house in Bailey’s chart in a conjunction with Venus and the Sun, both also in Gemini. Vulcan in Gemini frees the expression of Love as expressed through the sharing of wisdom on a universal scale. It involves the concept of free information – information that is not withheld from anyone who seeks it. Alice Bailey was following her soul’s plan to create (Leo) a center (Sun) of education (Gemini) that was free from personal desire and attachment (Taurus), thus helping to destroy the idea of personal ownership of knowledge that often occurs within a closed group. The eleventh house is the house of mass communication and world service, two significators of the Aquarian Age. With Pluto in Taurus on her eleventh cusp and Vulcan within the eleventh house, Mrs. Bailey did not even charge for her counseling work in the course of which she often saw a new person every twenty minutes of the day.
Also with her husband, Alice Bailey organized the International Goodwill Movement which had Units of Service in nineteen countries by 1939. These Units would receive certain teachings and be given guidance for service and the spreading of goodwill throughout the world. It had been decided to emphasize goodwill instead of peace because when peace is present without goodwill, there can be unhappy conditions which could potentially lead to war at any time.
The formation of the Goodwill Movement was an attempt to anchor the work of the Spiritual Hierarchy of Masters onto the planet. This work involves helping to manifest the Divine Plan on Earth by channeling Light, Love, and Higher Purpose into the minds, hearts, and wills of Humanity. The planet of bringing Spirit into matter is Venus, which is found in Gemini in Bailey’s eleventh house, and is thus part of her Soul’s Purpose Formula. Venus in Gemini works to spread the light of knowledge among all cultures, classes, and nationalities in order to help them realize their connection and work together as one human family. Again, Alice Bailey was acting out her soul’s purpose by being in the center (Leo) of non-profit (Taurus) Aquarian Age work (eleventh house) to help link people together, worldwide, (Gemini) through the proliferation of spiritual knowledge (Venus).
In Leo, the personality is formed in its three aspects: physical, emotional, and mental. The last stage of personality formation is the mental stage, and it is with developing the intellect that much of the work of Leo lies. Once the intellect is developed to the point where it balances the physical and emotional development, Leo becomes totally aware of, and secure in, his/her individuality. The Leo on the Path then proceeds to first, become aware of the Divinity within, and second, to use his/her individuality as a tool in furthering Divine purposes. Bailey wrote four books in her own words, without dictation from the Tibetan, for the purpose of demonstrating her mind. She desired to prove that it was possible to engage in psychic/telepathic work and, at the same time, be of high intelligence. In doing this she planted a seed for the Aquarian Age in which all psychism will be totally conscious and come through the mind. This New Age psychism is known as intuition, and it will be fostered by a society in which the mind can expand and proliferate, much as we are seeing today with the expansion of technology which enables greater mental cultivation. Thus, the writing of her own books not only gave Alice Bailey an opportunity to express herself (Leo), but also to demonstrate her mental focus, which is a characteristic of all New Age intuitive work.
With the ruler of her ascendant in the eleventh house of world service, Bailey states in her autobiography* that in the next lifetime she plans “to find the same group of workers”, pick up the threads of her present life, and “go on with the job.” This concept reflects that of the “New Group of World Servers”, a group of souls united on the subjective planes, although not necessarily on the outer planes. This Group serves the Spiritual Hierarchy, headed by the Christ, and acts in a mediating role between It and Humanity in order to help enlighten the entire planet.
In 1949, after having left the world with over twenty books, the Arcane School, and the International Goodwill Movement, Alice Bailey was met by the Master Koot Hoomi as she left her physical body. She lives on, however, in the Light and Love which she helped spread as she endeavored to introduce the world to the Masters, their Wisdom, and their Work.
Summary:
Alice Bailey’s Soul’s Purpose Formula: Leo ascending with Mars in Leo conjunct the ascendant, ruled by Sun in Gemini in the eleventh house with Venus and Vulcan in Gemini and Pluto in Taurus on its cusp, ruled by Vulcan in Gemini in the eleventh house.
Two suggested interpretations of Alice Bailey’s Soul’s Purpose Formula:
(1) Through the power of Will (Mars in Leo), destroy old ideas of group greed (Pluto in Taurus on the eleventh house cusp) by manifesting (Leo ascending) a center of education (Sun in Gemini) that is free from personal desire and attachment (Vulcan) and that will serve the entire planet (eleventh house) by bringing forth spiritual knowledge (Venus) that will connect all members of Humanity (Gemini).
(2) Eradicate the egocentric concept of leadership (Mars in Leo) by creating (Leo ascending), and being the central coordinator (Sun in Gemini) of, a revolutionary (Pluto) type of non-profit, educational (Vulcan in Gemini with Taurus on the cusp) association (eleventh house) that will bring awareness of the true brother- and sisterhood of Humanity (Venus in Gemini).
*Source: The Unfinished Autobiography by Alice A. Bailey, Lucis Publishing Company, New York, 1981. (return to first asterisk in text; return to second asterisk in text; return to third asterisk in text)
