The Ascended Masters

The idea arrives in its modern form with the Theosophical Society. Helena Blavatsky described a brotherhood of adepts, living men of extraordinary attainment resident in Tibet and elsewhere, and named two of them, Koot Hoomi and Morya, as her own teachers. Between 1880 and 1884 letters attributed to these adepts reached the Theosophist A. P. Sinnett, sometimes appearing in a cabinet or falling from the ceiling, and they contain a good deal of the doctrine that later Theosophy rests on.

The Society for Psychical Research sent Richard Hodgson to India to investigate, and his report of 1885 concluded that the phenomena were produced by Blavatsky and confederates and that the letters were her own work. The report was widely accepted and remains the standard sceptical account.

It has also been contested from within the same society. In the 1980s and 1990s Vernon Harrison, a document examiner and a member of the Society for Psychical Research, published a detailed criticism arguing that Hodgson had worked selectively, that his handwriting analysis did not meet the standards of the discipline, and that the letters are not simply Blavatsky writing in disguise. The Society printed both. The atlas records the dispute as a live one rather than treating either report as final, and notes that neither report establishes that the adepts existed.

The teaching was rebuilt in the 1930s in the United States. Guy Ballard reported meeting the Count of Saint Germain on the slopes of Mount Shasta in California, and with his wife Edna founded the I AM Activity, which grew rapidly through public lectures, decrees spoken aloud, and a distinctive use of colour and light. Where Theosophy had described living adepts, the I AM teaching described masters who had ascended, leaving the body entirely, and it made Saint Germain rather than the Tibetan adepts the central figure.

The movement produced a Supreme Court case. After Guy Ballard death, family members were prosecuted for mail fraud on the theory that they knew their religious claims to be false. The Court held in 1944 that a jury may not be asked to decide whether a religious belief is true, only whether the person holding it was sincere, and the decision has been foundational in American law on religion ever since. A group that most Americans have never heard of therefore set the terms on which every later claim of religious fraud has been argued.

The line continued through the Bridge to Freedom in the 1950s and then through the Church Universal and Triumphant, founded by Mark Prophet and led after his death by Elizabeth Clare Prophet, which added a large body of dictations. A great deal of later New Age teaching about guides, channelled masters and the ascended hierarchy descends from this sequence, usually without the institutional history attached.