An Authority That Cannot Be Checked

The device is older than the order that made it famous. The Rosicrucian manifestos of the early seventeenth century announced an invisible college of adepts who could not be found by anyone who went looking, and the pattern recurs whenever a group needs to explain where a body of knowledge came from without producing a teacher who can be interviewed. Theosophy Mahatmas are the same shape, and so are the several later claims of contact made by leaders of magical orders in the twentieth century.

What it does institutionally is specific. Authority located in an unverifiable source cannot be adjudicated, so a dispute between two people who both claim it has no evidentiary resolution: it can only be settled by which claim the membership finds persuasive, or by separation. That is why the schisms in this tradition have the character they do, with each fragment claiming the true succession and none able to demonstrate it.

The device also protects a teaching from ordinary criticism, since an objection can always be met by saying that the objector does not have access. Scholars of Western esotericism generally treat that as its main function and read the Secret Chiefs as an authority-conferring literary convention rather than as a claim to be tested. Practitioners have read it otherwise, and some have interpreted the Chiefs as inner or psychological realities rather than as men living somewhere, which changes the claim considerably without abandoning the term.