Twin Flames
playing with fire will result in burns
We’re doing something that we’ve never done!! A guest post!! Exclamation points don’t even begin to express my enthusiasm for what you’re about to read.
The topic of twin flames briefly arose during our discussion of souls and reincarnation. If you missed that, you can find it my Highlights. From this sprang a message offering a rundown of the origins of this concept. I anticipated a few hearty paragraphs. What follows is more than I could ever have imagined, in the best possible way! Even photos were included!!
While I offered to publicly credit the author and hire the plane for skywriting her name, she wishes to maintain her anonymity. Understood. These are delicate topics. A hearty thank you for trusting me with your words and this topic. A second thank you for the time and effort and research that went into compiling these thoughts. I feel like I was on the receiving end of what many of you describe when reading my deep dives. I simply did not want it to end!
Since this format is a bit different, here’s what to expect. I’m presenting it with few edits. There are tweaks here and there for spacing and such. The big thing to note is that these are not my words. Rather than interject my thoughts into the flow of this articulate piece, I’ll save them till the end. As always, feel free to ask questions along the way. The author and I will collaborate to answer them.
That’s it! My part is done for a bit. Enjoy this guest piece on the backstory of twin flames.
The Origin of Twin Flames
Here is the origin story that I’ve pieced together for twin flames. Many twin flame proponents make claims about its ancient origins in Greek, Egyptian, or Judeo-Christian mythology. That’s complete BS attempting to give twin flames a veneer of respectability. More honest accounts point to Elizabeth Clare Prophet, a cult leader who began teaching about twin flames in the 1970s. That’s getting closer to the truth — but she didn’t come up with the concept. She was copying from earlier channelers in the 1930s to 1950s, who were themselves building on core ideas from Helena Blavatsky in the 1880s. What I’m sharing here is my tracing of this lineage of development.
I look forward to seeing how you build on this with an energetic read. Your readers should also practice their own intuitive read – all it takes is one look at the creepy cult leaders who created twin flames to know that there is a very dark, very manipulated energy here!
Blavatsky: reincarnation, soul as divine spark, and guidance from masters
Our story starts with Helena Blavatsky, the infamous mystic and occultist of the Victorian era. In the 1870s to 1880s, Blavatsky was hugely influential in introducing eastern spiritual ideas to the west. She wove together hermeticism, Vedic philosophy, Buddhism, and telepathic messages from mysterious masters into an esoteric belief system called theosophy.
Theosophy has an elaborate cosmogony explaining the origins of the universe and the evolutionary journey of mankind. In terms of our own spiritual path within this process, she posits that each human has an individual soul (‘monad’) that is a spark from a larger oversoul, and it must purify its karma over many lifetimes to be liberated from reincarnation. She claimed that we can move faster with guidance from ‘masters’ who are associated with the ‘seven rays’ emanating from the primordial source energy. She particularly followed a master called Morya, but there was a whole council of these masters called the Great White Brotherhood.
Blavatsky laid the groundwork with beliefs about the universal source energy, divine rays, astral bodies, the complex structure of souls, past lives, and reincarnation cycles. She also set a precedent for claiming spiritual authority based on channeled messages from ancient masters.
Ballard: ascension and twin rays
In the decades after Blavatsky’s death, numerous people claimed to be her successor as the messenger of the masters. One of these was Guy Ballard, a mining engineer with interests in theosophy and occultism. After several failed business ventures, including swindles about gold deposits, he finally struck it rich with spirituality. While hiking on Mount Shasta in 1930, he claimed that Saint Germain visited him and appointed him as the messenger of the Great White Brotherhood. Within a few years, Ballard published several books based on messages from Saint Germain, Jesus, Morya, and other masters. He and his wife also established a spiritual group, the “I AM” activity, that attracted thousands of followers.
Ballard was an avid student of theosophy, and his teachings drew on many of its core concepts, including a universal source energy that emanates in rays, higher energy bodies, the goal of transcending reincarnation, and clairvoyant messages from the masters. He pumped it up with positive thinking and affirmations from the New Thought movement, which undoubtedly appealed during the Depression. He also layered in Christian language to sanitize and popularize the occult elements.
In addition to focusing on Jesus as a prominent master, he referred to the escape from reincarnation as ‘ascension,’ renamed the brotherhood of masters the ‘Ascended Masters,’ exhorted his followers to activate their Christ Consciousness, and referred to the God spark within as the ‘I AM Presence’ (in the Old Testament, the phrase “I AM” is what God called himself when speaking to Moses).
Put it all together, and the essence of Ballard’s teaching was that the Ascended Masters had given him the keys to achieving ascension within this lifetime, even before death. It required repeating affirmative decrees, clearing karma with Saint Germain’s violet flame, positive thinking, and living a pure life of vegetarianism and sexual abstention. (Followers were also told to send him money, leading to a fraud lawsuit that went all the way up to the Supreme Court — but that’s another story.)
Ballard’s books, written under the pseudonym Godfre Ray King, were fantastical stories about his adventures with the ascended masters. It is here that we encounter his description of ‘twin rays.’ I will explain it with his terminology so that you see his imagery of flames and rays — and also so that you can see how bonkers it is!
Ballard called the universal source of consciousness the Great Central Sun. When an individualized I AM Presence wishes to be created, the Great Central Sun projects a Flame, also sometimes called the White Fire Body since the substance is similar to a white fire. Next, the Flame projects Twin Rays, one predominantly masculine and one feminine, into the Great Sea of Pure Electronic Light. There the rays form Electronic Bodies, which are projected down into the substance of the physical world. They come into physical embodiment many times, taking turns in feminine and masculine bodies.
When each Ray achieves self-mastery and spiritual perfection, it will make its individual Ascension. When both Twin Rays achieve Ascension, they will reunite with the original Flame forming a Three Fold Flame of Life. As he explained, “Thus, that which came out of the Great Central Sun as One Flame becomes Three complete Flames… This is the way the Godhead is ever expanding the Perfection of Itself throughout Infinity and keeping order throughout interstellar space.”
These convoluted ramblings of a 1930s cult leader are the origin of twin flames. In his view, the twin rays are the masculine and feminine aspects of a single I AM presence. They have an exalted love that is predominantly spiritual, not physical.
Ballard died in 1939, disappointing many followers who expected him to ascend before death. Nevertheless, his ideas lived on through a series of spin-off groups competing to be the new messengers of the Ascended Masters.
Geraldine Innocente: Twin Flames
In 1944, a young woman named Geraldine Innocente, whose mother had run an I AM center, began spontaneously receiving messages from Morya. In 1951 Geraldine’s mother and several other former I AM followers formed a new organization called the Bridge to Freedom to spread these messages. Geraldine’s channeling from this time used ‘twin flame’ instead of ‘twin ray.’ That’s where we get this name change.
She did not expand on the theory, however, as she mostly just referred to various pairs of twin flames as a way of organizing the pantheon of masters. She herself claimed to be the twin flame of Master Morya.
So, I would say that Geraldine Innocente was influential with changing the name, but she did not play a larger role in the conceptual development. She died in 1961 of a suspected suicide and has drifted into obscurity.
Mark and Elizabeth Clare Prophet: Twin Flame vs Soulmate vs Karmic
Shortly after Bridge to Freedom was established, other spin-off groups emerged that also claimed to be the messengers of the Ascended Masters. In 1952 a man named Mark Prophet began to independently publish his own channeled messages from Morya. He connected with one of the co-founders of Bridge to Freedom, Frances Ekey, and began writing messages for her newsletter the Lighthouse to Freedom in 1954.
Ekey and Prophet splintered from the Bridge to Freedom to form their own group, the Summit Lighthouse, in 1958. When Mark married Elizabeth Clare Prophet in 1963, he appointed her another messenger of the Ascended Masters and gave her the title Mother of the Flame.
Mark and Elizabeth Clare Prophet largely continued what had been taught about twin flames by I AM and Bridge to Freedom. They claimed that they were twin flames, although Elizabeth didn’t seem particularly grief-stricken when Mark died in 1973. She was already cheating on him and remarried within a few months. A couple of years later she renamed the group the Church Universal and Triumphant.
I encourage you to look up her taped lectures, particularly a 1982 lecture called "Twin Flames in Love,” to see her teachings and read her energy. She explicitly says there that she learned about twin flames from Ballard’s books.
You can see that influence in her description:
At the center of the I AM presence is a white fiery core…. And out of the white fire core [come] two individuals holding the masculine and feminine polarity of God, who hold the identical electrical blueprint in life.
She also continued teaching that the relationship between twin flames is first-and-foremost a spiritual relationship. The two must achieve their own individual ascension — defined as “when the individual unites with the Holy Christ Self and I AM Presence” — and only then can they be united.
Yet while Prophet’s core philosophy was a continuation of Ballard’s, she added a few more practical components to help people navigate these relationships. For example, her 1999 book “Soul Mates and Twin Flames” laid out the differences between twin flames, false twin flames, soulmates, and karmic relationships. This book was marketed as a popular paperback.
Still, her teachings are a far cry from the romanticized version of twin flames that we have today, and Prophet herself was a controversial cult leader that would hardly have been appealing to the mainstream. Her followers had to obey strict rules about vegetarianism, tithing, sexual moderation (no more than twice a week for married couples!), and other rules.
In the late 1980s and 1990s she also went into doomsday predictions, leading the church to relocate to Montana and build bomb shelters. How did twin flames make the leap from her wacky cult to the mainstream?
Doreen Virtue: the missing link with the mainstream new age?
I suspect that the linkage was Doreen Virtue, a New Age author who published books and oracle cards about angels for Hay House. She was not a follower of I AM or Summit Lighthouse. However, in one interview I found, she recalled listening to taped lectures of Elizabeth Clare Prophet, and the influence is likely seen in her 2003 book, Archangels and Ascended Masters. So there is a plausible connection between their teachings in the early 2000s.
Subsequently, Virtue included a Twin Flame card in her 2008 deck, Angel Therapy. It’s just one card, but I’m guessing that it’s how twin flames percolated from Prophet’s lectures into the New Age mainstream.
Not long after the publication of this oracle deck, twin flames began to appear in the romance genre. Romance novels and poetry about twin flames started to appear around 2010-2011, then after a few slow years grew more rapidly after 2017.
Non-fiction self-help/spiritual books came a little later, with one obscure book in 2012 and more popular books published only since 2018. Of course, this is just looking at published books, so it’s not capturing that most of the teaching and discussion about twin flames happens on websites and social media. But I still think that it gives us some dates and markers indicating potential lines of influence from Elizabeth Clare Prophet to Doreen Virtue’s oracle deck to romance novels to self-help/spiritual books. That would also help explain how the concept itself became more romanticized.
Since then, twin flames have taken on a life of their own with hundreds of coaches, psychics, and tarot card readers peddling their expertise. It’s become a Twin Flame Industrial Complex that feeds off desperate women who are trapped in tortuous entanglements.
I’m hoping that this tracing of its development can help shed light on the dark entities and agendas that are behind all of this. Looking forward to continuing this conversation with your energetic read!
An Ongoing Unfolding
Me again! Libby that is. A hearty thank you to our anonymous guest author for connecting these threads. When I initially read this backstory, so many pieces clicked. Seemingly disparate concepts actually have a through-line — New Age, Occultism, and Fake Jesus; Heaven’s Gate and the Trans Movement; St. Germain and the Myth of Ascended Masters.
We’ll delve into each of these in time. What we’re unpacking is dense and extensive. Initial discussions will transpire on Instagram with recaps here on Substack. Join in accordingly. That you for your willingness to explore these complex topics and acknowledgement that there is great nuance to all of them.