Kuthumi (also spelled Koot Hoomi or K.H.) is one of the two Masters most prominently identified in Helena Blavatsky's Mahatma Letters — the correspondence she claimed to have received from Tibetan adepts in the 1880s. Together with El Morya, he is presented as one of the principal teachers of the Theosophical movement. As Chohan of the Second Ray — the Ray of Love-Wisdom — Kuthumi governs the divine energy of intelligent love: not sentiment, but the capacity to understand through the heart, to perceive truth through compassion, and to serve through wisdom rather than merely through feeling.
In Bailey's Seven Ray system, the Second Ray is the primary ray of the solar system — the quality through which the divine expresses most completely in our particular cosmic environment. It combines love (the drawing-together, the recognition of unity) with wisdom (the understanding that enables that love to serve effectively rather than merely feel). Pure love without wisdom becomes sentimentality — it cannot discriminate and therefore cannot truly help. Pure wisdom without love becomes cold and manipulative. Love-Wisdom is their synthesis: compassion that understands, understanding that loves.
Kuthumi embodies this quality in his approach to teaching. Unlike El Morya, whose communications tend toward brevity and demand, Kuthumi's transmissions (as preserved in the Mahatma Letters and subsequent channellings) are expansive, patient, and explanatory — concerned with helping the student understand rather than simply commanding obedience. He is the teacher who takes time.
In the Theosophical and Bailey traditions, Kuthumi held the office of World Teacher alongside the Master Jesus. This joint office is responsible for overseeing the spiritual education of humanity at the planetary level — releasing the teachings appropriate to each age, working through religious founders, philosophers, and educational reformers. Bailey taught that at the initiation of the Christ (Maitreya), Kuthumi released this office to take a higher position, and Djwhal Khul moved up to fill his previous role.
The mechanics of these hierarchical shifts are among the more difficult aspects of the Theosophical/Bailey system to engage with critically. Whether understood literally or as a symbolic map of spiritual evolution, they point to a consistent principle: the spiritual hierarchy is not static but evolving, and individual masters grow and change their functions as they advance.