The Sixth Ray: Devotion and Idealism

The Sixth Ray, of Devotion and Idealism, is in Alice Bailey's system the ray of the devotee, the mystic and the crusader, the energy of single-minded aspiration toward an ideal, associated with faith, loyalty, fervour and the intense pursuit of a cause or a vision. It is linked to the planet Mars or Neptune and to a rose or indigo colour, and its quality is passionate devotion, its shadow the fanaticism and narrowness that idealism unchecked can become.

Bailey held the Sixth Ray to have dominated the preceding age, the age of the great devotional religions, and to be now passing out as the Seventh Ray comes in, a transition she connected to the change of astrological ages. It is one of the four rays of attribute. The whole seven-ray doctrine is modern Theosophy, from Blavatsky in 1888 and Bailey from the 1930s, a twentieth-century esoteric framework rather than an inheritance from any classical source.