The Masters / the Mahatmas

A hidden hierarchy of advanced beings — Morya, Koot Hoomi and others — held to guide human evolution and to have chosen the Society as their instrument. Their instructions arrived as letters, sometimes precipitated out of the air, sometimes found in a cabinet.

The load-bearing claim, and the one that decides everything else. It puts the movement's authority somewhere that cannot be examined and cannot be appealed — which is the exact structural problem the Golden Dawn also hit, with its Secret Chiefs, and which broke both organisations within a generation.