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A modern system · Alice A. Bailey, 1936 to 1960

Seven Rays

after Alice A. Bailey

Seven qualities of energy in Alice A. Bailey's teaching, with a ray for your soul, your personality, your mind, your emotions and your body.

Your Seven Rays reading, $4.99. Includes this system's raw data. Written for you by AI. Read a sample. Charts and the written text are free in every account.

Your Seven Rays profile is two columns kept apart: what your birth chart indicates by Alice A. Bailey's tables, and the five rays you confirm for yourself after a questionnaire, one each for the soul, the personality, the mind, the emotions and the body, with how sure you were of each.

The seven rays, from Will or Power to Ceremonial Order or Magic, are Bailey's teaching, set out in books from 1936 to 1960 on a doctrine the Theosophists of the 1880s had made before her.

Rays they confirmed

2 · 7 · 5 · 6 · 3

soul · personality · mind · emotions · body

  • Soul Ray 2, Love-Wisdom (sure)
  • Personality Ray 7, Ceremonial Order or Magic (fairly sure)
  • Mind Ray 5, Concrete Knowledge or Science (sure)
  • Emotions Ray 6, Devotion or Idealism (unsure)
  • Body Ray 3, Active Intelligence (fairly sure)

What the birth chart indicates

By Bailey's tables: rays acting on the person, not their rays.

Sun in Capricorn 29°55′

Capricorn's rays 1 3 7

Orthodox ruler 3 Saturn

Rising sign in Leo 21°03′

Leo's rays 1 5

Esoteric ruler 2 Sun

Figure 1. A sample profile for a fictional person. On the left, the five rays they confirmed after the questionnaire, with how sure they were; on the right, what their birth chart indicates by Bailey's tables. The two are never merged. Method: Bailey's sign and planet tables (Esoteric Astrology, 1951) applied to the true positions; the rays are the person's own answers to EsoTerrier's questionnaire.
On this page
  1. How it works
  2. Origins and history
  3. The seven rays
  4. Variants and what we leave out
  5. Myths and disputed claims
  6. Stories and lore
  7. Evidence and criticism
  8. Terms
  9. Sample reading
  10. Sources

How it works

Bailey gives no way to calculate a person's rays. In Esoteric Psychology I she treats arriving at an understanding of one's five rays as a work of self-knowledge, and in Esoteric Astrology she writes that an astrologer cannot speak with confidence about a chart until sure of the two major rays, the soul's and the personality's. The schools that teach her system today find rays by guided self-assessment and observation over time, not by arithmetic.

EsoTerrier therefore shows two things side by side and never lets one stand in for the other.

What the birth chart indicates. Bailey gives every sign of the zodiac one to three rays (Aries 1 and 7, Taurus 4, Gemini 2, and so on through Pisces 2 and 6) and every planet one ray, seven of them sacred and five not. She also gives each sign three sets of ruling planets: orthodox, esoteric and hierarchical. We apply her tables to the true positions in your chart, computed from an astronomical ephemeris rather than fixed date ranges, which give the wrong Sun sign on hundreds of days between 1900 and 2030. With a known birth time and place you see the Sun sign, the rising sign and the ten planets; without a time, each body is shown across the day and there is no rising sign. Bailey links the Sun sign and its orthodox rulers to the personality and the rising sign and its esoteric rulers to the soul's purpose, as energies acting on a person. Everything in this part is labelled an indication.

The rays you confirm. The questionnaire is EsoTerrier's own: seventy statements, written from the qualities Bailey gives each ray and modelled on no one else's instrument. It suggests a ray for each of the five levels and says how clear the lead is; you then confirm or change each one, and say how sure you are. For the mind, the emotions and the body it asks about the rays Bailey says normally govern them: the mind on the first, fourth or fifth ray, the emotions on the second or sixth, the physical body on the third or seventh. You can still choose another ray, and it is marked as the exception Bailey allows, which she says appears sometimes on the path of discipleship.

The result is written as Bailey wrote her students' rays, in a fixed order: soul, personality, mind, emotions, body, for example 2-7-5-6-3. We do not offer the ray of the monad, which she says matters only at a late stage of development. Each ray opens to Bailey's own three short lists for it, its special virtues, its vices and the virtues to be acquired, credited to her book and page. The colours in the chart only help to tell the rays apart, and the numeral is always shown beside them.

Origins and history

The image is old; the doctrine is from the 1880s; the five personal rays are from the 1930s and 1940s.

When Who What happened
Second millennium BC The poets of the Rigveda Hymns speak of the sun's seven rays and of a chariot drawn by seven horses. An image, not a doctrine.
1875 Blavatsky, Olcott and others, New York The Theosophical Society is founded; "the seven rays" enter its vocabulary over the next decade.
1880s T. Subba Row, Madras Writes of seven classes of adepts corresponding to seven rays, and that belonging to a ray says nothing about a person's moral or mental qualities. The earliest assignment of people to rays we have found.
About 1885 (his account) C. W. Leadbeater Says a Master gave him a table of the rays at Adyar; he printed it in 1925 and called it partial and misleading.
1888 H. P. Blavatsky, The Secret Doctrine Seven groups of cosmic beings, "the primeval seven Rays", emanate from and return to the source; she reads a Vedic verse on seven "rays of wisdom" as seven paths. A cosmology, not yet a psychology.
1919 to 1920 Alice Bailey at Krotona, California By her account a voice she called the Tibetan asks her to write books in November 1919. She and her husband leave the Theosophical Society around 1920, after its leaders question her claims.
1922 Alice and Foster Bailey, New York Initiation, Human and Solar and Letters on Occult Meditation: the three major and four minor rays, a Master named on most of them, and colours for the rays that she says are mostly blinds. The Lucis Trust grows out of their publishing company.
1925 Ernest Wood; Leadbeater; Bailey Wood's The Seven Rays, the first book of the rays as seven human types; Leadbeater's chapter on the rays and their heads; Bailey's Treatise on Cosmic Fire tabulates the planets' rays.
1936 Bailey, Esoteric Psychology I The rays named and described; the rays that condition a person; three lists per ray, which she calls "necessarily imperfect".
1942 Bailey, Esoteric Psychology II The rule for the three bodies, with exceptions.
1944 and 1955 Bailey, Discipleship in the New Age Named students are given five rays in a fixed order: the form every school uses now.
1951 and 1960 Posthumous volumes Esoteric Astrology: the rays of the signs and planets and the three sets of rulers. The Rays and the Initiations: a word of power for each ray.
1952 to 1988 Hodson, Cedercrans, Creme, Robbins An Adyar typology (1952); parallel lesson series; Creme's lists of the rays of historical figures; the Seven Ray Institute (1985) and its questionnaire.
2026 EsoTerrier The system rebuilt from Bailey's tables and a questionnaire of our own, after our earlier method was found to have no source.
Title page reading: The Secret Doctrine: the synthesis of science, religion, and philosophy, by H. P. Blavatsky, Vol. II, Anthropogenesis, London, The Theosophical Publishing Company, 1888, with a motto in Sanskrit and English: There is no religion higher than truth.
Figure 2. The Secret Doctrine by H. P. Blavatsky, volume II, London, 1888: the book that made "the seven rays" a Theosophical doctrine, half a century before Bailey's treatise. 1888. Wellcome Collection, Public Domain Mark 1.0.

Bailey's own story is that the books came from "the Tibetan", Djwhal Khul, whom she said she heard and took down; that is her account, and scholars treat it as a religious claim. What is not in doubt is the order in which the ideas appeared: the Theosophists had the rays first, as cosmic powers and then as one ray per person, and Bailey turned them into a five-part psychology with an astrology attached.

An engraved plate of line diagrams: a beam of sunlight passes through a hole in a window shutter and a triangular prism and spreads into a long band on a screen; a second figure shows the band divided into lettered parts.
Figure 3. Isaac Newton's prism experiments, Opticks, London, 1704, Book I, plate III: sunlight entering through a hole and spread by a prism. Shown for the old image of light divided into rays; the Theosophical rays are a different idea, not Newton's. 1704. Wellcome Collection, Public Domain Mark 1.0.

The seven rays

Each ray has its own page: Bailey's name for it, the signs and planets she gives it, her three lists in our paraphrase, how older Theosophy saw it and the claims made about it.

Variants and what we leave out

Several methods and lists circulate under the name of the rays. We describe them so you can recognise them, and say why we do not use them.

  • Numerology (our own, retired). Until 11 October 2026 our engine took the rays from the birth date and the letters of the name. No Bailey book and no ray school does this; the mapping put most body rays outside her rule. It was removed.
  • Clock and weekday tables. Anonymous tables read six rays from the weekday and hour of birth converted to New York time. They have no author and no source, and they disagree with every other method.
  • Ray percentages. Some astrology software scores a chart's rays as percentages. Its own documentation says a true ray chart cannot be found objectively; we show counts of planets at most, never a "dominant" ray.
  • The Seven Ray Institute's questionnaire is the serious one: long, and recording the person's own confidence. It is the institute's own instrument, and we neither read nor copied its items; our seventy statements are our own.
  • Theosophical single-ray types. Subba Row, Wood and Hodson gave each person one ray. Bailey's five personal rays replace them here; Wood's type for each ray appears on its page, credited to him.
  • The Ascended Master teachings (the I AM Activity and the Summit Lighthouse) give the rays different colours, different heads, chakras and days. A separate, later stream: we name it only to tell it apart.
  • Colours. Besant's, Bailey's, the Seven Ray Institute's and the Ascended Master lists all differ, and Bailey withheld two of her own. We use colour only as a cue beside the numeral.
  • The monad, sub-rays, veiled planets and Vulcan. The monad's ray and sub-rays are not offered. Where Bailey says the Sun or Moon veils another planet, we show a note and substitute nothing; Vulcan, a hypothetical planet, is named as a ruler without a position.
  • Rays of nations and cycles. Bailey also gives rays to nations, kingdoms of nature and periods of time. Out of scope here.

Myths and disputed claims

What is said about the rays, who says it, and what the record shows. The label is ours.

  • The birth chart decides a person's rays: the rising sign gives the soul ray and the Sun sign the personality ray.

    false

    Who says it: Some ray calculators and loose readings of Esoteric Astrology.

    What the record shows: Bailey links the Sun sign to the personality and the rising sign to the soul's purpose as energies acting on a person, and says the astrologer must already know the two major rays before reading a chart (EA pp. 512 to 513).

  • Bailey's books were dictated to her telepathically by a Tibetan master, Djwhal Khul.

    unverified

    Who says it: Bailey herself and the Lucis Trust.

    What the record shows: Her own account, and a religious claim that scholars treat as such. Annie Besant doubted it in Bailey's lifetime. The books are registered with Bailey as their author.

  • The Vedic hymns' seven rays of the sun are the earliest record of the Seven Rays teaching.

    unverified

    Who says it: Theosophists from Blavatsky on.

    What the record shows: The Vedic phrases are real (Rigveda 1.50.8 to 9, 1.105.9, 8.61.16). Reading them as Bailey's doctrine is a Theosophical interpretation of older texts.

  • The five personal rays (soul, personality, mind, emotions, body) are an ancient teaching.

    false

    Who says it: Popular ray sites and apps.

    What the record shows: The five-ray formula is Bailey's, published between 1936 and 1955. The Theosophists before her gave one ray per person.

  • Bailey was the first to develop the idea of the seven rays.

    disputed

    Who says it: A 1980 history of Theosophy, the Seven Ray Institute and Lucis Trust literature.

    What the record shows: Subba Row assigned people to rays in the 1880s, Leadbeater kept a table said to date from about 1885, and Wood's book of seven ray types appeared in 1925. Bailey's treatise is the fullest development.

  • Bailey was expelled from the Theosophical Society in 1920.

    disputed

    Who says it: Popular biographies and some histories.

    What the record shows: The accounts agree that the Baileys lost their positions at Krotona and left the Society around 1920 after its leaders questioned her claims. Whether that was an expulsion differs between tellers.

  • Any ray can govern an ordinary person's mind, emotions or body.

    false

    Who says it: Clock-and-weekday ray tables, quizzes, and our own engine before October 2026.

    What the record shows: Bailey's rule (EP II p. 288) gives the mind rays 1, 4 or 5, the emotions 2 or 6 and the body 3 or 7, with exceptions she says appear sometimes among disciples.

  • Bailey's rule for the three bodies has no exceptions.

    disputed

    Who says it: Simplified ray courses and apps.

    What the record shows: She states exceptions herself, and her own example chart (EP II p. 295) has a second-ray body against her rule.

  • Belonging to a ray fixes a person's virtues and vices.

    disputed

    Who says it: Readings of Bailey's table of virtues and vices.

    What the record shows: Subba Row wrote in the 1880s that a ray implies no particular moral or mental quality, and Bailey called her own table "necessarily imperfect" (EP I p. 201).

  • Each ray has one agreed colour, handed down by the tradition.

    disputed

    Who says it: Most ray websites and charts, and our own chart before October 2026.

    What the record shows: Bailey said most of her colour names were meant to blind and withheld two of them; the published colour lists disagree with one another. Any palette is a convention.

  • A quiz can tell you your ray.

    unverified

    Who says it: Single-result ray quizzes.

    What the record shows: Bailey gives five rays per person and says they emerge with development; the Seven Ray Institute's founder wrote that there is probably no way yet to confirm a ray opinion.

  • A person's rays can be computed from numerology.

    false

    Who says it: EsoTerrier's own engine and pages before 11 October 2026.

    What the record shows: Our own invention, with no source in Bailey or any ray school. It put most body rays outside her rule and was removed.

Stories and lore

These are told as the tradition tells them.

The stranger in the turban. Bailey wrote that in 1895, when she was fifteen, a stranger in European clothes and a turban walked into the room where she was sitting, told her she had work to do for the world, and left; years later she identified him as the Master Koot Hoomi. In November 1919, walking in the hills near Krotona, she said she heard a voice asking her to write books, which she at first refused.

A Master's table. Wood tells that Leadbeater one day handed him a table of the rays, given to Leadbeater some forty years earlier, he said, by a very advanced occultist; Leadbeater printed it too and warned that it was partial and misleading. In Leadbeater's telling the giver was the Master Djwal Kul, the same name, spelt Djwhal Khul, that Bailey gave her Tibetan.

The two hidden classes. Subba Row wrote that two of the seven classes of adepts are so rare that one or two of them appear only every few thousand years, and that the other five are always represented on earth.

The Lord of the World from Venus. Theosophy and Bailey teach that a being named Sanat Kumara came to Earth from Venus with helpers, long ago, bringing the energies that woke the human mind. Bailey glosses Venus as a "chain" of her cosmology. A teaching, not a history.

The masters of the rays. In Bailey's 1922 book the three major rays have heads, and named Masters stand on most of the rays; Leadbeater's list differs on the third. The Ascended Master teachings rearrange both. Each ray page gives Bailey's line, as her teaching.

Evidence and criticism

No test of the rays exists. We know of no study that checks whether assessed rays or chart indications predict anything, and the tradition itself says rays cannot be confirmed: Michael Robbins, who founded the Seven Ray Institute, wrote that many of Bailey's own students mistook their rays and that there is probably no way yet to confirm a ray opinion. The institute's questionnaire records how sure the person is.

The methods do not agree. For the same test person our old numerology and the clock tables agreed on no level; a site that runs a chart method beside the clock tables reported that none of its five layers matched. Only the shared tables, the rays of the signs and planets, can be checked, and those match Bailey everywhere.

Bailey is not always consistent. Her table of rulers differs from her own text in one chapter, her example chart breaks her rule for the bodies, her names for the rays vary between books, and she calls her table of virtues imperfect and most of her colour names blinds.

The tradition argued about types. Subba Row denied that a ray implies any moral quality; Wood and Hodson built types on exactly that; Bailey's lists do too, with her caveat. Wood also warned against wishing one's ray to be this or that.

How scholars place her. The historian of religion Olav Hammer calls Theosophy's reading of older religions as its forerunners a "construction of tradition"; Wouter Hanegraaff treats the channelled Masters as religious claims and places Bailey among the sources of New Age thought; others call her a post-Theosophical writer and credit her with developing an idea that existed before her in germ.

Racism and antisemitism. Scholars have criticised racist and antisemitic passages in Bailey's writings, among them a section of Esoteric Psychology I on what she called the Jewish problem; her defenders answer that her aim was the unity of humanity. EsoTerrier uses nothing from those parts of her work.

Copyright. The Lucis Trust states that it holds the copyright of all of Bailey's books. The 1922 and 1925 books, and Esoteric Psychology I, whose copyright was not renewed, are in the public domain in the United States; her later books are still protected there, and all of them are in the public domain in the United Kingdom. So we give her tables as facts with book and page, quote only short items from public-domain books, and write everything else in our own words.

Terms

Ray
In Bailey's teaching, one of seven qualities of energy that condition everything that lives. Numbered 1 to 7 and named, never identified by a colour.
Rays of aspect and of attribute
Bailey's two groups: rays 1 to 3 are the rays of aspect, rays 4 to 7 the rays of attribute.
Lines of force
Bailey pairs the odd rays (1, 3, 5, 7) and the even rays (2, 4, 6) as two lines of energy.
Soul ray
The ray of the soul, which Bailey also calls the egoic ray. It may be any of the seven.
Personality ray
The ray of the personality, which in her teaching integrates the mind, the emotions and the body; it is not a sixth body. It may be any of the seven.
The usual rays of the bodies
Our name for Bailey's rule that the mind is normally on ray 1, 4 or 5, the emotions on 2 or 6 and the physical body on 3 or 7. Another ray is shown as a labelled exception.
Ray formula
A person's five rays written in Bailey's order, for example 2-7-5-6-3. The list form is hers; the name is the Seven Ray Institute's.
Indications
Our word for what a birth chart shows by Bailey's tables: the rays acting through the Sun sign, the rising sign and the planets. Never a person's own rays.
Orthodox, esoteric and hierarchical rulers
Bailey's three sets of ruling planets for each sign (Esoteric Astrology, Tabulations IV to VI). She calls some planets sacred and others non-sacred.
Word of power
Bailey's phrase for seven short sentences in The Rays and the Initiations (pp. 515 to 518), one per ray, meant for a stage of inner work. Not a motto or keynote; we cite them by page and do not quote them.
Keynote
Bailey's one-word keynotes of the rays (Esoteric Astrology, p. 602), such as Initiation for the first ray and Unification for the second.
Glamour
Bailey's word for a ray's illusions of feeling, a separate list in her book Glamour; not the same as the vices in her table.

Sample reading

Sample reading, AI-written for a fictional person.

Read the sample (1,309 words)

AI output can be wrong.

Jason, your chart places your Sun at Capricorn 29°55′ and your rising sign at Leo 21°03′; in Bailey's scheme, which is her teaching and not something the record can confirm, Capricorn is assigned Ray 1, Will or Power, Ray 3, Active Intelligence, and Ray 7, Ceremonial Order or Magic, while Leo is assigned Ray 1 and Ray 5, Concrete Knowledge or Science. These are indications of energies acting on you, not your rays. You have not yet assessed those for yourself, and the tradition holds that the astrologer must know a person's rays before the chart can be read with any authority. What follows is a reading of the pressures the chart describes, and of how they might feel from the inside.

A Will That Arrives Twice

One energy appears at both ends of your chart. Ray 1 comes through the Sun sign and again through the rising sign. Bailey writes of the first ray as the energy that decides, begins and ends things, and that holds to a direction once it is chosen. When the same current comes through both the deepest and the most visible part of a chart, the tradition would read it as a theme you meet on every floor of the house.

Notice where the four sign rays sit. Rays 1, 3, 5 and 7 all belong to what Bailey calls the 1-3-5-7 line of force. Nothing from the softer, even-numbered rays comes through your signs. The chart leans entirely toward purpose, plan, fact and form.

In ordinary life this often looks like a particular impatience with vagueness. Picture a meeting where people circle a problem for twenty minutes. You have already seen the decision, the sequence of steps, and the two facts everyone is ignoring. You wait. You wait a little longer. Then you say it, more crisply than you meant to, and the room goes briefly quiet. Some people feel relief. Some feel overruled. You may not have noticed which.

Your Sun stands at the very last degree of Capricorn, five arcminutes from the next sign. The chart is computed from the true Sun, and it reads Capricorn. That position at the threshold has a quality of its own: the end of a long climb, still carrying its full weight.

The Engine Room in Capricorn

Capricorn is crowded in your chart. The Sun, Venus, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune all sit there. By Bailey's assignments, three of these planets carry exactly the rays the sign itself transmits or rules through. Saturn carries Ray 3 and is both the orthodox and the esoteric ruler of Capricorn, sitting in its own sign. Uranus carries Ray 7. Venus carries Ray 5 and is Capricorn's hierarchical ruler. The chart indicates a closed circuit: the sign transmits active intelligence and ceremonial order, and the planets that embody those energies are standing in it.

Bailey lists the special virtues of the third ray as wide views on abstract questions, sincerity, a clear intellect, concentration, patience and caution. For the seventh she gives strength, perseverance, courage, courtesy, extreme care in details and self-reliance (after A. A. Bailey, Esoteric Psychology I, pp. 201-210). Taken as tendencies to reflect on, the combination suggests a mind that sees the whole system and then cannot rest until the system is built properly. The plan matters. So does the execution, down to how things are labelled and in what order they happen.

You may recognise the evening spent rebuilding something that technically already worked: a filing structure, a spreadsheet, a process at work, the way a cupboard is arranged. It was not broken. It was simply not right, and that difference is real to you in a way it may not be to anyone else in the room.

Where Exactness Turns Hard

Here the tension sharpens. Ray 1 through both signs gives force. Ray 5 through the rising sign gives exactness. Ray 3 and Ray 7 through the Sun give the plan and the procedure. Each of these, as Bailey describes it, carries its own characteristic misuse, and on this line they reinforce one another rather than cancel out.

Bailey names pride, hardness and the wish to control others among the first ray's vices. Among the fifth ray's she lists harsh criticism, narrowness, arrogance, an unforgiving temper and prejudice. Among the seventh's she lists formalism, bigotry, pride, narrowness, superficial judgements and self-opinion. Among the third's she lists intellectual pride, coldness, isolation, inaccuracy in detail and too much criticism of others. Read the four lists side by side and the same few words keep returning: pride, narrowness, criticism. When a chart stacks rays from one line, the tradition would expect their shared trap to be the loudest.

The Leo rising matters here. It is what people meet first. Ray 5 at the front door can make your accuracy feel like a verdict to others. You correct a date, a figure, a misremembered quote, and you mean it as a service to the truth. The other person hears judgement. Bailey's phrase for one of the fifth ray's virtues, justice without mercy, names both the gift and the cost in the same breath.

Bailey also lists scheming and manipulation among the third ray's glamours, which she treats as illusions rather than vices. A strong third-ray indication can quietly persuade you that arranging people toward the right outcome is the same as serving them. It is worth watching for that moment when the plan begins to include other people as pieces.

The Warmer Ruler at the Door

One thread in your chart runs against all of this. By Bailey's tables, the Sun rules your Leo rising at every level (orthodox, esoteric and hierarchical), and the Sun carries Ray 2. The rules for reading the rising sign follow its esoteric ruler, so this is not a footnote. Every sign ray in your chart sits on the 1-3-5-7 line, yet the planet that governs how your rising sign expresses itself carries the second ray, the one ray of aspect your signs do not transmit. Bailey gives the second ray's special virtues as calm, strength, patience and endurance (after A. A. Bailey, Esoteric Psychology I, pp. 201-210).

Look at what Bailey says each of your indicated rays must acquire. For the first: tenderness, humility, sympathy, tolerance, patience. For the fifth: reverence, devotion, sympathy, love, wide-mindedness. For the seventh: the realisation of unity, wide-mindedness, tolerance, humility, gentleness. For the third: sympathy, tolerance, devotion, accuracy, energy, common sense. Sympathy and tolerance appear again and again. The chart seems to place the very corrective in the governing position of your rising sign. The tradition would read your outward life as the place where force is meant to learn patience, where it meets people rather than problems.

Your Moon, Ray 4, sits in Cancer, and Mercury, Ray 4, sits in Aquarius. Neither of these comes through your signs. They suggest a second register beneath the hard line, one that may feel at odds with the efficient surface and that the surface may tend to override.

One Thing to Try

All of this remains indication. The chart describes the weather your energies move through. It does not tell you which rays are yours. The next real step is the self-assessment, taken slowly and honestly, so that your soul and personality rays rest on your own judgement rather than on the sign tables. The schools say rays emerge over years, and you can retake it.

Before you do, try a small observation for two weeks. Each time you correct someone, finish their sentence, or quietly redo their work, write down a single line about what happened next in the room. Do not change the behaviour yet. Just record it. A chart this weighted toward will and exactness rarely lacks for clarity about problems. What it may lack is a clear record of its effect on people, and that record is worth having when you sit down to decide, in your own terms, where your rays actually lie.

Sources

Primary texts (17)
  1. Alice A. Bailey, Esoteric Psychology I (A Treatise on the Seven Rays, vol. I). New York: Lucis Publishing, 1936. archive.org/details/dli.ernet.234062
  2. Alice A. Bailey, Esoteric Psychology II (vol. II). New York: Lucis Publishing, 1942.
  3. Alice A. Bailey, Esoteric Astrology (vol. III). New York: Lucis Publishing, 1951.
  4. Alice A. Bailey, The Rays and the Initiations (vol. V). New York: Lucis Publishing, 1960. Cited by page only.
  5. Alice A. Bailey, Discipleship in the New Age, vol. I. New York: Lucis Publishing, 1944.
  6. Alice A. Bailey, Letters on Occult Meditation. New York: Lucifer Publishing, 1922.
  7. Alice A. Bailey, Glamour: A World Problem. New York: Lucis Publishing, 1950.
  8. Alice A. Bailey, Discipleship in the New Age, vol. II. New York: Lucis Publishing, 1955.
  9. Alice A. Bailey, Initiation, Human and Solar. New York: Lucifer Publishing, 1922. sacred-texts.com/book/initiation-human-and-solar
  10. Alice A. Bailey, A Treatise on Cosmic Fire. New York: Lucis Publishing, 1925.
  11. Alice A. Bailey, The Unfinished Autobiography. New York: Lucis Publishing, 1951.
  12. H. P. Blavatsky, The Secret Doctrine, 2 vols. London: Theosophical Publishing Company, 1888. theosociety.org/pasadena/sd/sd-hp.htm
  13. Transactions of the Blavatsky Lodge, meeting of 14 March 1889. theosociety.org/pasadena/sdcommnt/sdc-10.htm
  14. T. Subba Row, "The Occultism of Southern India", in A Collection of Esoteric Writings of T. Subba Row (1910).
  15. C. W. Leadbeater, The Masters and the Path. Adyar: Theosophical Publishing House, 1925. archive.org/details/masterspath00lead
  16. Ernest Wood, The Seven Rays: A Theosophical Handbook. Chicago: Theosophical Press, 1925. Facts only.
  17. The Hymns of the Rigveda, translated by Ralph T. H. Griffith (1889 to 1892). en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Hymns_of_the_Rigveda/Book_1/Hymn_105
Studies and other sources (22)
  1. Geoffrey Hodson, The Seven Human Temperaments. Adyar, 1952 (known from catalogue records).
  2. Michael D. Robbins, "Finding the Rays in an Individual" (2001). esotericastrologer.org/articles/finding-the-rays
  3. Michael D. Robbins, Tapestry of the Gods, vol. I. Seven Ray Institute, 1988.
  4. Seven Ray Institute and Morya Federation, the Personal Identity Profile (PIP III), described from its public pages; its items were not read.
  5. Seven Ray Institute and University of the Seven Rays, "Education" (the Personal Identity Profile). sevenray.org/education
  6. Walter D. Pullen, "Esoteric Astrology", Astrolog documentation. astrolog.org/astrolog/asteso.htm
  7. Benjamin Creme, Maitreya's Mission, vols. 1 to 3 (1986 to 1997). Not reproduced.
  8. "Seven rays", Ascended Master teachings encyclopedia. ascendedmasterencyclopedia.org/w/Seven_rays
  9. Olav Hammer, Claiming Knowledge: Strategies of Epistemology from Theosophy to the New Age. Leiden: Brill, 2001.
  10. Wouter J. Hanegraaff, New Age Religion and Western Culture. Leiden: Brill, 1996.
  11. Steven J. Sutcliffe, Children of the New Age: A History of Spiritual Practices. London: Routledge, 2003.
  12. Bruce F. Campbell, Ancient Wisdom Revived: A History of the Theosophical Movement. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980.
  13. Michael York, Historical Dictionary of New Age Movements. Lanham: Scarecrow, 2004.
  14. Victor A. Shnirelman, "Russian Neo-pagan Myths and Antisemitism". Jerusalem: SICSA, Hebrew University, 1998. web.archive.org/web/20070810224751/http://sicsa.huji.ac.il/13shnir.html
  15. Hannah Newman, "Invocation, The Great", in Antisemitism: A Historical Encyclopedia of Prejudice and Persecution (2005).
  16. Isaac Lubelsky, "Mythological and Real Race Issues in Theosophy", in Handbook of the Theosophical Current. Leiden: Brill, 2013.
  17. "Seven rays", Wikipedia (orientation only). en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_rays
  18. "Alice Bailey", Wikipedia (orientation only). en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alice_Bailey
  19. The Lucis Trust, the copyright statement on its books page (read 2026-10-11).
  20. "Esoteric Ray Tables", anonymous, mermaid-uk.net (cited only as the source of the claim).
  21. astrologyreadings.online, "Esoteric and Soul Report" calculator (cited only as the source of the claim).
  22. United States Copyright Office records and the Catalog of Copyright Entries (renewals checked 2026-10-13).
Our own research (2)
  1. EsoTerrier, Seven Rays research and validation, 11 to 13 October 2026.
  2. EsoTerrier calculation engine, the Seven Rays service and its documentation.

By EsoTerrier. Written with AI assistance from our research and checked against its sources; last revised 15 October 2026. How we write these pages.

First published ; last revised . Corrections: support@esoterrier.com.

EsoTerrier is independent of the Lucis Trust, which publishes Alice A. Bailey's books, and of the Seven Ray Institute; neither has reviewed or endorsed these pages.