Eileen Caddy

Eileen Caddy MBE (26 August 1917 – 13 December 2006) was a spiritual teacher and new age author, best known as one of the founders of the Findhorn Foundation community at the Findhorn Ecovillage, near the village of Findhorn, Moray Firth, in northeast Scotland. The commune which she started in 1962 with her second husband, Peter Caddy, and Dorothy Maclean was an early New Age intentional community; as of January 2009 it has been home to over 400 residents and thousands of visitors from over 40 countries, and is one of the UK's largest alternative spiritual communities, nicknamed "the Vatican of the New Age".

Early life

She was born Eileen Marion Jessop in Alexandria, Egypt, the second of four children of Albert Jessop, an Irishman, and the director of Barclays Bank DCO, her mother Muriel was English. At six she was sent to school in Ireland, where she lodged with an aunt, and returned to Egypt in the holidays. When she was 16, her father died in Egypt of peritonitis and her family moved back to England, though tragedy struck again, when two years later her mother too died of meningitis. Thereafter she was educated at a domestic college, and later bought and ran a pub at an RAF base in Oxfordshire, with her brother for four years.