From Citizendium - Reading time: 3 min
In a book on history of the Bollingen Foundation and its pervasive influence on American intellectual life, William McGuire wrote:
"In 1928 Olga[1] built a lecture hall on her grounds, overlooking the lake, for a purpose not yet revealed to her, and a guest house which she named Casa Shanti in a Hindu ceremony. A year or two later, she went to the United States and sought out Alice A. Bailey, in Stamford, Connecticut, a former Theosophists who led a movement called the Arcane School. Mrs Bailey, whom Nancy Wilson Ross has described as a woman of great dignity, kindness, and integrity, aimed like Olga Froebe at the raising of consciousness and the bridging of the East and West. She lived with a mystic presence, ‘the Tibetan,’ presumably one of the Theosophical Masters, who used her as an instrument to write a number of books devoted to Higher Truth…”
"The most important—though certainly not the only—source of this transformative metaphor, as well as the term "New Age," was Theosophy, particularly ... by the works of Alice Bailey." (Sinclair, Sir John R (1984) The Alice Bailey Inheritance Turnstone Press Limited)
Credited to Alice Bailey's Teacher (works containing the prefatory Extract from a Statement by the Tibetan, and generally taken to indicate the book was telepathically dictated):
Credited to Alice A. Bailey alone (works in which Bailey claims sole authorship of the material):
Combined authorship (Sutras said to be by her teacher, with commentary by Bailey):
Bromley, David G.; Phillip E. Hammond (1987). The Future of New Religious Movements. Mercer University Press, 15. ISBN 0865542384.
Writing from a Christian church perspective, Bromley says:
"After World War II, Eastern thought was filtered through (and more or less distored by) the likes of Manley Palmer Hall, Alice Bailey, Baird T. Spaulding, and Edwin Dingle. Possibly more important than their individual teachings, however, occultists as a group hammered home the central idea, 'The East is the true home of spiritual knowledge and occult wisdom.'
Bailey's books have also been criticized by mainstream Theosophists who say that a great many of her ideas were borrowed from Theosophy while also including perspectives that were not part of the original teachings of Blavatsky.