Interview with Mary Bailey, President of Lucis Trust

Community station KOPN FM in Columbia, Missouri, once aired a half hour interview with Mary Bailey, who led the Arcane School and served as president of Lucis Trust for years after the death of her husband Foster Bailey in 1977. The recording survives today in the American Archive of Public Broadcasting, a joint project of the Library of Congress and GBH, streamable under a Creative Commons license.

Bailey uses the interview to walk through Alice Bailey's own account of how the School began: a first contact in November 1919 with a teacher Alice called simply the Tibetan, whose dictated material became twenty four volumes over the following decades, and the correspondence course Alice and Foster founded in 1923 to teach it. Bailey recites the Great Invocation, the mantra the School treats as central to its work, and the recording includes a sung version performed by the New Troubadours from the Findhorn community in Scotland.

What the interview foregrounds is not ritual or secrecy but the School's own account of itself as a practical program: meditation instruction delivered by post, organized around ideas its members apply to stated concerns like world hunger and the redistribution of wealth, work Bailey connects to Lucis Trust's standing as a non governmental organization affiliated with the United Nations. Mary Bailey went on to lead the School for thirty three years before her death in 2007, and this recording is one of the few surviving public accounts of that leadership in her own words.