Arthur Avalon and the Serpent Power

Woodroffe published his tantric scholarship under the pseudonym Arthur Avalon, a name that let him keep his considerable output on a subject then widely dismissed or sensationalized in colonial writing separate from his judicial identity, though his authorship of the Avalon books was an open secret among contemporaries and is well established today. Working closely with Bengali collaborators, most importantly the pandit Atal Bihari Ghosh, he translated and annotated a series of tantric texts and published his own studies, of which The Serpent Power (1919), a translation and detailed commentary on two Sanskrit texts describing kundalini and the subtle body's chakra system, is by far the best known and most durable.

Where most prior European treatment of tantra had been either dismissive or lurid, Woodroffe presented it as a coherent philosophical and yogic system with its own internal logic, doing more than any other single Western writer to establish Shakta tantra as a subject worthy of serious study. The vocabulary his books fixed for the chakras and kundalini in English remains the vocabulary most Western yoga and tantra writing still uses, even where his own broader interpretive framework has since been revised by later scholarship.