The Second Ray: Love and Wisdom

The Second Ray, of Love and Wisdom, is in Alice Bailey's Theosophical system the ray of the teacher, the healer and the unifier, the energy of attraction and coherence that draws things into relation and understanding. It is regarded in that system as the dominant ray of the present age and of the planet itself, and it is associated with the sun (or Jupiter in some schemes) and with the colour blue, its quality being inclusive love, patience, intuition and the wisdom that comes of understanding rather than analysis. Its distortion is a love that becomes attachment or a wisdom that becomes coldness.

Like the whole seven-ray doctrine it belongs to modern Theosophy, first outlined by Blavatsky in 1888 and elaborated by Bailey from the 1930s; it is presented here as a modern esoteric framework, and its associations with planets and colours are part of that twentieth-century synthesis rather than any older astrological or religious source.