Chakras
Seven centres of subtle energy pictured along the spine, from its base to the crown of the head. The scheme comes from Hindu tantric yoga; the chart most people meet today, with a psychological quality for each centre, is a twentieth-century Western reworking of it.
Meaning
Chakra is Sanskrit for “wheel”. Britannica defines the chakras as “psychic-energy centres of the body, prominent in the occult physiological practices of certain forms of Hinduism and Tantric Buddhism”. Of the supposed 88,000 in the body, six major ones lie roughly along the spinal cord and a seventh just above the crown of the head, and each is linked with a colour, a shape, a sense organ, an element, a deity and a mantra. The lowest, mūlādhāra, at the base of the spine, encircles a divine potency called kuṇḍalinī, which the yogi uses yogic techniques to raise from centre to centre to the highest, sahasrāra, at the top of the head. The chakras belong to Hindu tantric and yogic traditions, and to Tantric Buddhism, which counts four. In their modern Western form they are taught in Western yoga and esoteric books, and used in modern Paganism.
Origin and history
The seven-centre system known in the West is one of many. Christopher Wallis, a scholar of Sanskrit and tantra, writes that tantric yoga taught systems of five, six, seven, nine, ten, twelve, twenty-one and more chakras, depending on the text and lineage. The one that became standard is set out in the Ṣaṭ-cakra-nirūpaṇa, the “Explanation of the Six Chakras”, as Wallis translates the title, by the tantric teacher Pūrṇānanda. It is the sixth chapter of his larger work on ritual, the Śrītattvacintāmaṇi, which the note on his life in the English translation dates to Shaka year 1499, AD 1577. Wallis finds a simpler version of the same system in the thirteenth-century Śāradā-tilaka, and judges that it has been dominant for four or five centuries.
The Western chart was built on that text. Wallis names the sources of most English books on the chakras as the Theosophist C. W. Leadbeater’s The Chakras (1927), John Woodroffe’s translation of Pūrṇānanda (Wallis dates it to 1918; Woodroffe published it as The Serpent Power, under the name Arthur Avalon), and twentieth-century Indian gurus who drew on both. He calls the result a work not of yoga philosophy but of Western occultism.
How the Hindu texts differ from the modern chart
The difference is one of kind as well as detail. Wallis argues that the Sanskrit sources are “prescriptive, not descriptive”: where an English book says that the mūlādhāra “is at the base of the spine and it is red”, the original is instructing the yogi to visualise a red lotus of four petals there as part of a practice. The psychological qualities now given to each centre, survival and safety for the mūlādhāra, willpower for the maṇipūra and so on, are in his words “completely modern and Western”, and began with Carl Jung. He also notes that the glands, foods, metals, planets, tarot suits and archangels that Anodea Judith’s Wheels of Life attaches to each chakra have no basis in the Indian sources. In Pūrṇānanda’s text as Woodroffe translates it, each centre is a lotus: the crimson mūlādhāra lotus has four petals, and across the six centres there are fifty petals carrying fifty letters.
The elements in the chakras
The tantric texts place the elements in the centres. Wallis explains that the seed-mantra LAM, for Earth, is installed in the mūlādhāra and VAM, for Water, in the next centre, with RAM for Fire, YAM for Wind and HAM for Space. He points out that Pūrṇānanda puts the five elements in the first five centres, while in the classical systems Space belongs at the crown of the head. Wicca’s own elements are four (see The four elements).
Other meanings of chakra
The word has other uses in Hindu tradition. Britannica notes that the whirling disc called the Sudarshana Chakra is Vishnu’s weapon, and that the third-eye centre, ājñā, is the one commonly marked with a bindi. The lotus that each centre is drawn as is the padma.
In Wicca and modern Paganism
The chakras have entered Pagan vocabulary too. Ronald Hutton describes modern Paganism as “highly eclectic and adaptable”, taking motifs from other traditions including Buddhism and Hinduism, and the Covenant of the Goddess’s glossary of Craft terms defines centering as “a means of becoming balanced after the grounding process” that “re-aligns Chakras”.
Read next
- Next in Pagan and Wiccan symbolsTriple moon (triple goddess)A full moon between a waxing and a waning crescent: the sign of the Triple Goddess of Wicca and Goddess Spirituality, whom the Covenant of the Goddess calls the goddess “of the waxing, full, and waning moon”.
- Each chakra is pictured as a lotusPadmaThe lotus flower, held by Hindu deities and used as the seat they sit on.
See also
The four elements, Wiccan pentacle, Horned god, Wheel of the Year.
Sources
- chakra, The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica, Encyclopaedia Britannica, entry
- The real story on the Chakras, Christopher Wallis (Hareesh), 5 February 2016, revised, Hareesh.org
- The Serpent Power: being the Shat-chakra-nirupana and Paduka-panchaka, translated by Arthur Avalon (Sir John Woodroffe), 2nd edition, 1924, Ganesh & Co., Madras; Digital Library of India scan on the Internet Archive, Preface; Introduction; “The Centres or Lotuses”
- Definitions, Covenant of the Goddess, Centering
- What Is Modern Paganism?, Professor Ronald Hutton, lecture of 18 September 2024 (text), Gresham College, text
The same shape elsewhere
Browse symbols formed from circles or curves and waves.
Researched, edited and approved by Rory Hansen before publishing. Last reviewed October 10, 2026. How we research
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