Divinity Atlas

Sacred Correspondences
Sign In
Text size
100%
Theme

Switch Atlas

The Inner World

The Civil World

The Natural World

Aura Layers

Emotional Body

Citation Formats

General Reference

APA Style

BibTeX

Origin 1880 to 1930

The Emotional Body is the second of the seven layers of the aura described in the modern subtle body model most fully set out by the healer Barbara Brennan in her 1987 book Hands of Light, itself building on earlier Theosophical writing about layered auras from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In this model each of the seven layers is paired with one of the seven chakras in ascending order, and the Emotional Body is paired with the second chakra, the Sacral, reflecting its claimed role as the seat of feeling and emotional response. It sits directly outside the first layer, the Etheric Body, and is described as fluid and colour filled compared to that layer's more structured, close fitting form. As with the rest of this subtle body system, its structure and claimed functions are the model's own account, not a finding of anatomy or physiology.

Facts
Origins
Origin Period
1880 to 1930 1Tradition: Theosophical subtle-body doctrine
Origin Period
Named within late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century Theosophical writing on layered auras, and set as the second of seven layers in Barbara Brennan's 1987 Hands of Light. 1
Place of Origin
The Theosophical Society and its successors, in India, Britain and the United States; the seven-layer synthesis itself is American. 2Tradition: Theosophical subtle-body doctrine
Attributed Author / Compiler
Barbara Ann Brennan, for the seven named layers and their pairing with the seven chakras. 3Tradition: Seven-layer aura (Barbara Brennan, Hands of Light)
Attributed Author / Compiler
Charles Webster Leadbeater and the Theosophical writers, for the graded subtle bodies and for the claim that they are clairvoyantly perceived. 1Tradition: Theosophical subtle-body doctrine
Origin of the Name
"Emotional body" is a plain English coinage of the later literature 3Tradition: Seven-layer aura (Barbara Brennan, Hands of Light)
Origin of the Name
Theosophy's own body of feeling and desire was the astral body, which the seven-layer scheme splits in two 3Tradition: Seven-layer aura (Barbara Brennan, Hands of Light)
Language
English 3Tradition: Seven-layer aura (Barbara Brennan, Hands of Light)
Disputed
Origin Period
1987 3Tradition: Seven-layer aura (Barbara Brennan, Hands of Light)
Kurt Leland's Rainbow Body: A History of the Western Chakra System from Blavatsky to Brennan (Ibis Press, 2016), which traces the aura and chakra literature through to Brennan, dates Barbara Ann Brennan's Hands of Light, the same book credited elsewhere on this page with fixing the seven named aura layers and their pairing with the seven chakras, to 1987 by its publisher's catalogue record, while some other library catalogues list the same first edition as 1988. Leland notes the one-year discrepancy without resolving it; it most likely reflects the ordinary gap between a book's stated copyright year and its public release the following year, a common source of one-year catalogue disagreements. The atlas's own articles on the aura layers follow 1987, and this property records that year while flagging the alternative rather than asserting either flatly.
Status
Standing as a Comparative Category
Used, but its validity as a comparative category is disputed 4
Status Today
Living tradition, practised today 4
Contested Use
Contested or Appropriated Modern Use
Aura reading and aura photography are sold as diagnostic. No aura has been demonstrated, no diagnostic or therapeutic claim made for these layers is supported, and the model belongs to a modern esoteric movement rather than to anatomy. The atlas records the scheme as a belief and attaches no medical claim to it. 4Tradition: Seven-layer aura (Barbara Brennan, Hands of Light)
Learn More
The Emotional Body, the Second Layer

The emotional body is, in the seven-layer aura model of modern esotericism, the second layer, lying just beyond the etheric and associated with the feelings and emotions, often described as more fluid and coloured than the etheric, its shifting hues held to reflect the emotional state of the person. In the scheme popularised by Barbara Brennan and rooted in Theosophical subtle-body doctrine, each successive layer is subtler and extends further from the body than the one before, and the emotional layer is paired conceptually with the feeling life much as the mental layer beyond it is paired with thought.

The idea descends from the Theosophical "astral body" of emotion and desire, itself an adaptation of older Indian subtle-body teaching. As with the whole aura model, this is a concept within a modern belief system rather than a demonstrated structure; auras have no scientific basis, and the layer is described here as part of an esoteric tradition, with no medical or diagnostic claim attached to it.

Sources Hands of Light: A Guide to Healing Through the Human Energy FieldBarbara Ann Brennan with Rainbow Body: A History of the Western Chakra System from Blavatsky to BrennanKurt Leland

Where the Emotional Body Came From

The seven layer model has a traceable history and a recent one. A layered subtle anatomy entered English language occultism through Theosophy in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, in works such as Leadbeater's Man Visible and Invisible of 1902. The particular seven layer sequence in circulation today, with these names in this order, is later still: it was set out by Barbara Brennan in Hands of Light in 1987, and most contemporary aura charts descend from that book rather than from the Theosophical material behind it.

Emotional Body. This is where the two vocabularies collide. In the Theosophical scheme the astral body IS the emotional body: they are one thing under two names. The modern seven layer chart lists them as separate layers, which is a change of substance and not just of wording, and it is the clearest single sign that the current scheme is a reworking rather than a transmission.

On testing, the record is short and it is worth stating plainly. No instrument has detected a layered field of this kind. Kirlian photography, often produced as evidence, images corona discharge from a high voltage field and responds to moisture and pressure rather than to anything vital. Kilner's 1911 dicyanin screen work was not replicated. The most direct test was published in JAMA in 1998, in which practitioners who said they could feel a human energy field were asked to say which of their hands one was near and were correct about as often as chance would predict. The atlas records this layer as a documented feature of a real modern tradition, and attributes the claim to that tradition rather than making it.

Sources Rainbow Body: A History of the Western Chakra System from Blavatsky to BrennanKurt Leland with A Close Look at Therapeutic TouchLinda Rosa, Emily Rosa, Larry Sarner and Stephen Barrett, The Skeptic's Dictionary: A Collection of Strange Beliefs, Amusing Deceptions, and Dangerous DelusionsRobert Todd Carroll

Cross-Tradition Connections

Originates in Language

Modern English, Languages
Source Rainbow Body: A History of the Western Chakra System from Blavatsky to BrennanKurt Leland
Sources
1. Claiming Knowledge: Strategies of Epistemology from Theosophy to the New Age
Olav Hammer, Brill, 2001Theosophy's construction of subtle-body doctrine and its passage into the New AgeView the Source
2. The Theosophical Enlightenment
Joscelyn Godwin, State University of New York Press, 1994on the Theosophical Society and its milieuView the Source
3. Rainbow Body: A History of the Western Chakra System from Blavatsky to Brennan
Kurt Leland, Ibis Press, 2016on Brennan
4. New Age Religion and Western Culture: Esotericism in the Mirror of Secular Thought
Wouter J. Hanegraaff, Brill, 1996The aura and seven-layer subtle-body model in New Age culture, incl. Brennan's Hands of LightView the Source
Religion and the Subtle Body in Asia and the West: Between Mind and Body
Geoffrey Samuel and Jay Johnston (eds.), Routledge, 2013Theosophy's adaptation of the Indian koshas and subtle-body teaching
Comments (0)
No comments yet. Be the first to share a thought.
Reader Challenges (0 open reader challenges)
No disputes yet. Spotted an error or a better source? Open the first one.

View At A Past Year

Choose a year to see this entry's facts and connections as the atlas records them at that moment: what it held then, what it held instead, and what it had not yet adopted. Choose Present for the current record.