Chakras
Crown
sah-hahs-RAH-rah
Also Known As Sahasrar (Sanskrit) The Sanskrit name for this chakra. · Crown Chakra (English) The Sanskrit name for this chakra.Original Term Sahasrara (Sanskrit) The Sanskrit name for this chakra.
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Origin 1920 to 1977
Sahasrara, the crown chakra, whose name means thousand-petaled, the highest center, pictured as a radiant lotus of a thousand petals in violet, white, or gold at or just above the top of the head. It is beyond the elements, belonging to pure consciousness itself, its seed sound is the silent AH or the primal Aum, its traditional planet is the Sun, and its glandular seat is the pineal. Sahasrara is the crown and completion of the system, the place where the awakened Kundalini, rising from the root, reunites with the divine, and it governs spirituality, higher awareness, enlightenment, unity, and the connection to the transcendent, the source, or the whole. Where the lower centers root us in the body and the world, the crown opens beyond the personal self entirely. Balanced, it brings a sense of unity, meaning, presence, and connection to something greater. Deficient, it shows as cynicism, spiritual emptiness, disconnection, and a closed, materialistic outlook; excessive, as dissociation, spiritual bypassing, and being ungrounded and detached from ordinary life.
Facts
Disputed
Origin Period1919 3Tradition: The Western chakra system, from Blavatsky to Brennan Kurt Leland's Rainbow Body (Ibis Press, 2016) dates the London publisher Luzac and Co.'s first printing of Arthur Avalon's (John Woodroffe's) The Serpent Power, the work that fixed the seven-chakra scheme for Western readers, to 1919, based on the publisher's own catalogue record; some other library catalogues, and the Chakra 1 article elsewhere in this collection, instead give 1918. Leland does not adjudicate the one-year gap, which most likely reflects the ordinary difference between a book's printing date and its public release date, a common source of catalogue disagreement for this period. The atlas records 1919 as the publisher-attributed year and flags the alternative rather than asserting either flatly. Attributed Author / CompilerIts date is given as 1526 in some reckonings and 1577 in others 3Tradition: Sat-Cakra-Nirupana (1577) Kurt Leland's Rainbow Body: A History of the Western Chakra System from Blavatsky to Brennan (Ibis Press, 2016) traces the composition date of Purnananda Yati's Sri-tattva-cintamani, the Sanskrit source text behind the seven-chakra system as it reached the West, and finds two dates still in circulation among catalogers and translators, converted from the Hindu Saka calendar: Saka 1448 (1526 CE) and Saka 1499 (1577 CE). Leland compares the manuscript colophons and the catalogue entries recording each date and reports neither has driven out the other in the secondary literature, which is why this atlas's own separate article on the text gives 1577 as a working date while this property records the dispute rather than silently picking one figure. Attributed Author / CompilerPurnananda, a sixteenth-century Bengali tantric author 3Tradition: Sat-Cakra-Nirupana (1577) Kurt Leland's Rainbow Body: A History of the Western Chakra System from Blavatsky to Brennan (Ibis Press, 2016) traces the composition date of Purnananda Yati's Sri-tattva-cintamani, the Sanskrit source text behind the seven-chakra system as it reached the West, and finds two dates still in circulation among catalogers and translators, converted from the Hindu Saka calendar: Saka 1448 (1526 CE) and Saka 1499 (1577 CE). Leland compares the manuscript colophons and the catalogue entries recording each date and reports neither has driven out the other in the secondary literature, which is why this atlas's own separate article on the text gives 1577 as a working date while this property records the dispute rather than silently picking one figure. Attributed Author / CompilerThe Sat-Cakra-Nirupana is the sixth chapter of his Sri-tattva-cintamani 3Tradition: Sat-Cakra-Nirupana (1577) Kurt Leland's Rainbow Body: A History of the Western Chakra System from Blavatsky to Brennan (Ibis Press, 2016) traces the composition date of Purnananda Yati's Sri-tattva-cintamani, the Sanskrit source text behind the seven-chakra system as it reached the West, and finds two dates still in circulation among catalogers and translators, converted from the Hindu Saka calendar: Saka 1448 (1526 CE) and Saka 1499 (1577 CE). Leland compares the manuscript colophons and the catalogue entries recording each date and reports neither has driven out the other in the secondary literature, which is why this atlas's own separate article on the text gives 1577 as a working date while this property records the dispute rather than silently picking one figure. Bija MantraNo seed syllable in the classical description of the six 1Tradition: Hindu Tantra The six centres each carry a bija in the Shat-chakra-nirupana; sahasrara, standing outside the six, is not given one there. Seed syllables assigned to it in modern correspondence tables, including the one this atlas carries, come from later and modern sources rather than from the classical text, and the atlas records the disagreement rather than choosing. Origins
Origin Period1920 to 1977 3Tradition: The Western chakra system, from Blavatsky to Brennan Origin Period1927 to 1928 3Tradition: Theosophical chakra scheme (C. W. Leadbeater, 1927) Origin Period900 to 1300 CE 4Tradition: Tantra Origin PeriodNamed within Tantric literature between the ninth and thirteenth centuries CE, and given its widely known Western sequence through Theosophical writing running from Blavatsky to Leadbeater's 1927 chakra scheme and Barbara Brennan's 1987 book. 4 Place of OriginBritain, India and the United States: the scheme was assembled in English, through the Theosophical Society and its successors, over about a century. 3Tradition: The Western chakra system, from Blavatsky to Brennan Place of OriginThe Sat-Cakra-Nirupana itself is a Bengali work 4Tradition: Tantra Place of OriginThe tantric traditions of the Indian subcontinent 4Tradition: Tantra Attributed Author / CompilerCharles Webster Leadbeater, for the clairvoyant description, the colour plates and the endocrine correspondences that nearly every modern chakra illustration descends from. 3Tradition: Theosophical chakra scheme (C. W. Leadbeater, 1927) Attributed Author / CompilerSir John Woodroffe, writing as Arthur Avalon, for the translation that carried the scheme west. 3Tradition: The Western chakra system, from Blavatsky to Brennan Origin of the NameSahasrara means thousand-petalled, from sahasra, a thousand 2Tradition: Sat-Cakra-Nirupana (1577) Origin of the NameThe English "Crown" renders the placement 2Tradition: Sat-Cakra-Nirupana (1577) LanguageSanskrit 2Tradition: Sat-Cakra-Nirupana (1577) Attributions
Associated NoteAttested as a fact about the modern chakra-tone correspondence system, not as an ancient teaching: the pairing dates to twentieth century Western esoteric writing rather than to classical Sanskrit chakra texts. Meaning
Symbolic MeaningSahasrara is figured as a lotus of a thousand petals in every colour, inscribed with the letters of the Sanskrit alphabet, its centre a full moon within which the Shatchakranirupana describes the risen Kundalini uniting with Shiva. 1 Physical Description
PetalsA thousand petals 1Tradition: Hindu Tantra Sahasra means thousand. The classical description gives the lotus fifty letters repeated twenty times, which is the thousand, so the number is a completion of the alphabet rather than a count. Identity
Also Known As ElementNone. In the classical scheme the gross elements end at Vishuddha; Sahasrara lies beyond the five tattvas entirely and is not assigned one, the same reading this atlas already gives Ajna immediately below it. 1 Practice
Seat in the BodyAbove the crown of the head, outside and above the six centres 1Tradition: Hindu Tantra The Shat-chakra-nirupana is by its title the description of the six chakras, and sahasrara is not one of them. The text treats it as what lies beyond the six, the place where Shakti rising through the central channel meets Shiva, rather than as a seventh station on the same list. Popular seven chakra diagrams flatten that distinction. Use
Ritual UseWoodroffe's Serpent Power describes Sahasrara as the point Tantric sadhana holds kundalini shakti ultimately unites with Shiva, the culmination the whole ascent practice from Muladhara is directed toward rather than a center worked on its own. 1Tradition: Tantra Attestation
Meaning in the Attesting SourceSahasrara, the thousand-petalled: in the text's own reckoning not one of the six centres at all but the place above them, where the ascending power is said to unite with Shiva. Its thousand petals are a figure for completeness rather than a count. 2Tradition: Sat-Cakra-Nirupana (1577) Rival Systems
A Rival System's AttributionThe Western chakra system: violet. The colour this atlas records is a band of the ROYGBIV spectrum, an arrangement assembled in the twentieth century and standard by 1977. The Sanskrit sources give the centres colours, but not a spectrum, and Leadbeater in 1927 gave a third set again. 3Tradition: The Western chakra system, from Blavatsky to Brennan A Rival System's AttributionTheosophical chakra scheme: the pineal. The chakra-to-gland equation was made in Theosophical writing of the 1920s and has no counterpart in the Sanskrit texts, which place the centres in a subtle body explicitly distinguished from the physical one. 3Tradition: Theosophical chakra scheme (C. W. Leadbeater, 1927) Status
Standing as a Comparative CategoryUsed, but its validity as a comparative category is disputed 4 Status TodayLiving tradition, practised today 2 Contested Use
Contested or Appropriated Modern UseChakra diagnosis and chakra healing are marketed as ancient Indian medicine. They are not: the gland equation dates from the 1920s and the colour scale from the 1970s, and no anatomical structure or measurable phenomenon corresponds to a chakra. The Sanskrit sources describe a discipline of attention inside a lineage, not a therapy. No diagnostic claim made here should displace medical care. 3Tradition: The Western chakra system, from Blavatsky to Brennan Learn More
Sahasrara in the Tantric Sources
Sahasrara, the thousand-petalled, is described in the Sat-Cakra-Nirupana as lying above the six centres, at or above the crown, its petals bearing all the letters of the Sanskrit alphabet repeated twenty times. It is not one of the six chakras proper in the text's own reckoning but the place beyond them, the seat of Shiva with whom the ascending Kundalini Shakti unites; the union is the goal of the practice, and the text describes the resulting state in the language of liberation rather than of experience. Because it stands beyond the elemental series it is generally given no seed syllable in the classical description, although later and modern sources supply various ones, and it has no element and no presiding animal. Its thousand petals are a figure for completeness rather than a count.
One of the best documented modern accounts of an experience described in this vocabulary is that of Gopi Krishna, an Indian civil servant who reported a sudden kundalini awakening in December 1937 after some seventeen years of daily meditation, describing a rising sensation of light and heat that he connected explicitly to the ascent described in texts like the Sat-Cakra-Nirupana; he set the account out decades later in Kundalini: The Evolutionary Energy in Man (1967) and in a fuller autobiography, Living with Kundalini. The episode is recorded here as a documented modern testimony within the tradition, not as independent evidence that the physiological process it describes occurs as stated.
Kundalini Practice, and a Real Caution
The chakras exist in the tradition for the sake of a practice: the raising of kundalini through the sushumna from the base to the crown, by means of asana, pranayama, bandha, mudra and concentration, under a teacher and within a lineage. The classical manuals are consistently emphatic that this is done under guidance and not from books, and the Hatha Yoga Pradipika and similar texts contain repeated warnings about attempting the practices unsupervised.
Modern clinical literature has documented a range of adverse effects associated with intensive meditative practice, including derealisation, anxiety, disturbed sleep and in some cases psychotic episodes, and the phrase kundalini syndrome circulates in that literature. The atlas records the practice as the tradition presents it. Anyone drawn to it should know both what the tradition itself says about supervision and what the clinical record shows.
Cross-Tradition Connections
Associated With
Ah, Mantras Named as the seed syllable of the Crown chakra.
The rising of kundalini is completed here, where Shakti is said to meet Shiva.
Attested In
Described in the Shat-chakra-nirupana as what lies above the six, not as one of them.
Belongs to Tradition
The centre belongs to the chakra system, which the atlas catalogues as a discipline in its own right.
Depicted In
Crown chakra, one of the seven the deck's own description confirms it is keyed to.
Held Differently
Head, Human Design Centers Occupies roughly the same position as the crown chakra, but Human Design reframes that position as mental pressure rather than a seat of spiritual attainment.
Disciplines That Use This
The centres stones are most often placed against in this practice.
Originates in Language
Source Roots of YogaJames Mallinson and Mark Singleton (trans. and eds.) Related To
The seven chakras are the centers kundalini is said to rise through and activate. Chakra cosmology is shared across Hindu tantra and hatha-derived Kundalini Yoga.
Source Roots of YogaJames Mallinson and Mark Singleton (trans. and eds.) The description of this centre that reached the West comes from his Shat-chakra-nirupana of 1577, translated by Woodroffe in 1919. He did not originate the scheme, which is older and was never single. The version the modern world uses is his.
The chakra system is a tantric cosmological scheme central to tantric ritual and visualization. Chakra cosmology developed within, and remains central to, Hindu and Buddhist tantric traditions.
Sources
1. The Serpent Power
Sir John Woodroffe (Arthur Avalon), Ganesh & Co, 1919on Sahasrara as the culmination point of the kundalini ascentView the Source 1. The Serpent Power
Sir John Woodroffe (Arthur Avalon), Ganesh & Co, 1919Sat-Cakra-Nirupana, verses on Sahasrara and the union of Shiva and ShaktiView the Source 2. Roots of Yoga
James Mallinson and Mark Singleton (trans. and eds.), Penguin Classics, 2017ch. 5, The Yogic BodyView the Source 3. Rainbow Body: A History of the Western Chakra System from Blavatsky to Brennan
Kurt Leland, Ibis Press, 2016on Leadbeater
4. The Origins of Yoga and Tantra: Indic Religions to the Thirteenth Century
Geoffrey Samuel, Cambridge University Press, 2008kundalini practice within lineage
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