A Rainbow Up the Spine

Begin with the poster. A seated figure, usually in silhouette, with seven coloured circles up the midline: red at the base of the spine, orange below the navel, yellow at the solar plexus, green at the heart, blue at the throat, indigo between the brows, violet or white at the crown. Each circle has a Sanskrit name, an element, a gland, a note of the scale, and a list of qualities: survival, sexuality, power, love, communication, intuition, spirit. The sequence is Newton's spectrum, the one every schoolchild learns from a prism, laid along the human spine, and the chart is nearly always presented as a piece of ancient Indian wisdom.

The ancient Indian text exists, and it can be read. In 1919 Sir John Woodroffe, a judge of the Calcutta High Court writing as "Arthur Avalon," published The Serpent Power, a translation with a very long introduction of two Sanskrit works, the Ṣaṭ-cakra-nirūpaṇa, "Description of the Six Centres," composed by Pūrṇānanda in the sixteenth century, and the shorter Pādukā-pañcaka. Woodroffe's book was, in the historian Kurt Leland's words, "the first scholarly publication in English of one version of the Western chakra system," and nearly everything the West knows about the seven centres descends from it. So the question is simple. Open Woodroffe's translation at the verses that describe the lotuses, and look at the colours.

What the Text Says the Colours Are

The Ṣaṭ-cakra-nirūpaṇa is fifty-five verses long, and it describes six lotuses along the central channel of the subtle body, with a seventh, the thousand-petalled lotus at the crown, that the tradition does not count as a cakra at all. Each lotus has a fixed number of petals, "4, 6, 10, 12, 16 and 2 respectively, commencing from the Mūlādhāra and ending with Ājñā," as Woodroffe summarizes it elsewhere, and on each petal a letter of the Sanskrit alphabet; inside each is a geometrical region belonging to one of the elements, with its seed-syllable, its animal, and its god and goddess. It is, in other words, a map for meditation, dense with things to visualize, and colour is part of the map. Here is what it gives.

The root lotus, Mūlādhāra, at the base of the spine: "It has four petals of crimson hue" (verse 4), and within it the square of the earth element, "shining yellow" (verse 5). The second, Svādhiṣṭhāna, at the genitals, is a lotus "of a beautiful vermilion colour" (verse 14). The third, Maṇipūra, at the navel, is "the shining Lotus of ten petals, of the colour of heavy-laden rain-clouds" (verse 19), with the triangle of fire inside it "like the young sun" (verse 20). The heart lotus, Anāhata, is "of the shining colour of the Bandhūka flower," a red flower, its twelve letters "of the colour of vermilion" (verse 22), and the region of air within it "grey as a mass of smoke" (verse 23). The throat lotus, Viśuddha, is "pure and of a smoky purple hue," its sixteen vowels on sixteen petals "of a crimson hue" (verse 28), and the circle of ether within it "white like the full Moon" (verse 29). The brow lotus, Ājñā, "is like the moon (beautifully white)," with two petals (verse 32). And the serpent power herself, Kuṇḍalinī, coiled in the root lotus, "shines in the cavity of the root Lotus like a chain of brilliant lights" (verses 10 to 11).

Set that against the poster. The text's root is crimson and the chart's is red, and that is the only match. The text's second lotus is vermilion, not orange; its third is the colour of a storm cloud, not yellow, though the fire inside it is sunrise-red; its heart is red, not green; its throat is smoke-purple, not blue; its brow is moon-white, not indigo. There is colour everywhere in the text, and it is the colour of flowers, clouds, lightning, and moonlight, chosen for what each thing is, not for its place in a sequence. "The chakras have colors," Leland writes of the Indian sources, "but there is no rainbow."

Where the Rainbow Came From

The spectrum was laid over the lotuses in the West, and it was laid gradually. Leland, who has traced the process in a book, Rainbow Body (2016), and in a summary article in the Theosophical Society's Quest magazine, dates the first stage to the Theosophists, who between Blavatsky's arrival in India in 1879 and the 1920s fixed "the seven-chakra base, the locations in association with nerve plexuses, and the non-Sanskrit names." C. W. Leadbeater's The Chakras (1927), which describes the centres as he claimed to see them clairvoyantly, with colours of its own that are not the text's, became what Leland calls "a classic in the field of New Age chakra studies," and the Wikipedia summary of the scholarship credits Leadbeater with the rainbow outright. Leland's account is more cautious and more interesting. In his telling the rainbow arrived through colour therapists of the 1920s to 1950s, obscure figures such as Ivah Bergh Whitten and the pseudonymous Cajzoran Ali, who "was the first to bring the chakra system and the endocrine glands together in a book published in 1928," so that by the 1930s one finds "single colors attributed to each chakra in order of the spectrum, either seven colors, including indigo, or six colors plus white." Meanwhile a separate line ran from Woodroffe through Carl Jung's seminar on Kundalini in 1932, Heinrich Zimmer, and Joseph Campbell into the human potential movement, which supplied the list of psychological qualities.

The two lines met in 1977. Ken Dychtwald, Leland writes, "became the father of the Western chakra system when he inadvertently brought together the color healers' list of rainbow colors and endocrine glands and the human potential movement's list of chakra qualities in a book and article published in the summer of 1977." The article was in Yoga Journal, and its list of qualities, Leland notes, was "very similar to the one I saw in the Aura Cacia brochure four decades later." Anodea Judith's Wheels of Life (1987), the most widely used handbook of the system, then carried the combined chart to the yoga studios. Leland's conclusion is that the Western system is "an unintentional collaboration" among esotericists and clairvoyants, Indologists, a mythologist, psychologists, Indian yogis, and energy healers, and that its fortieth birthday fell in 2017, which makes it, as he says drily, a system "reverently referred to in yoga classes and New Age books as 'ancient.'"

What the Old Map Was For

None of this makes the Sanskrit text a quaint ancestor of the poster. It is a different kind of object. The Ṣaṭ-cakra-nirūpaṇa is a manual of visualization for an initiate who already has a teacher and a mantra: the letters on the petals are to be recited, the deities in each region are to be worshipped, the elements are to be dissolved one into the next as Kuṇḍalinī rises, and the goal, in the tradition's own terms, is liberation. The colours are furniture for that work. Crimson petals and a yellow square are things to see with the eyes shut; a storm-cloud lotus with a sunrise inside it is a picture of fire held in water. Nothing in the text assigns the lotuses to glands or to emotional themes, and Woodroffe, in his own prose, is careful to say what they are in the tradition's terms: "The Cakras are centers of Shakti as vital force," he writes in Shakti and Shākta, "in other words they are centers of Prāṇaśakti manifested by Prāṇavāyu in the living body." The seven-step ascent is in the text; the diagnosis of a "blocked throat chakra" is not.

Nor was the seven-fold system the only one. The scholarship Leland and others draw on points out that medieval Buddhist texts describe four or five centres, the tenth-century Kubjikāmata-tantra five, another tantra eight, and that the number "typically ranged between four and seven" before Pūrṇānanda's text, and then Woodroffe's translation of it, made seven canonical for the West. The poster's seven is an inheritance; its uniformity is a modern simplification of a tradition that was never uniform.

What the Chart Keeps, and What It Changes

Here the readings can be tiered honestly. The practitioner's reading takes the chart as a working tool, and nothing in the history above says it does not work for the purposes its users put it to; Leland himself, a Theosophist, ends by calling the Western system "the embodiment of a deeply meaningful archetype of enlightenment, common to East and West." The historian's reading, which is the one this feature has followed, says that the rainbow and the list of qualities "first appeared together only in 1977," and that the claim of antiquity attached to them is false in the plain sense that no Indian text contains them. Between the two lies the question the Diotimos reader will care about, which is what the figure of a rainbow does to the thing it was laid over.

It keeps the ascent. The old text and the new chart agree that there is a sequence, that it runs from the base of the spine to the crown, and that moving up it is a movement toward something higher; the spectrum, running from red to violet, is a natural picture of a graded ascent, and that is why it stuck. It keeps the number, and the names, and the elements in roughly the old order. What it changes is the logic of the colours. In the text each colour belongs to its lotus for a reason internal to that lotus, the red of a particular flower, the grey of smoke, the white of the moon. In the chart each colour belongs to its position, and the positions belong to a physical law about light. The rainbow turns a set of images into a scale, and a scale invites measurement, so that a system built for recitation and worship became, by 1977, a system for assessing which of one's centres is "open." That is a real change in what the chakras are, and it happened in English, not in Sanskrit.

The Poster Again

Look at the chart once more, and read it now as a palimpsest. The seven discs and their stacking are Pūrṇānanda's, filtered through Woodroffe. The glands are a colour therapist's of 1928. The rainbow is a mid-century overlay, and the qualities are the human potential movement's, and the two were stapled together in a magazine in 1977. Under the orange disc at the navel there is, in the text, a vermilion lotus; under the yellow one, a storm cloud with the sunrise in it; under the green heart, a red flower; under the blue throat, purple smoke around a white moon. The old colours are better, as images, than the new ones, and they can still be seen, if one is willing to look through the rainbow rather than at it.