The Layers of the Aura

The aura layers are the subtle bodies said to surround a person, usually given as a series running from the etheric body nearest the skin outward through the emotional and mental bodies to the spiritual layers. Each layer is associated with a level of experience (the physical vitality, the emotions, the thoughts, the spiritual life), and, in many modern schemes, with a colour and a chakra.

The layered aura in circulation today is largely Theosophical, assembled in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by writers such as C. W. Leadbeater and Annie Besant, who drew on Indian ideas of the subtle body and gave them a Western, colour-coded form.