Shat-chakra-nirupana

The text does one thing, methodically. It ascends the subtle body and describes what is at each station. Muladhara at the base of the spine: four petals, a yellow square, the element earth, the seed syllable Lam. Svadhisthana: six petals, a white crescent, water, Vam. Manipura at the navel: ten petals, a red triangle, fire, Ram. Anahata at the heart: twelve petals, a smoke-coloured hexagram, air, Yam. Vishuddha at the throat: sixteen petals, a white circle, ether, Ham. Ajna between the brows: two petals, and the seed Om. Above them all, outside the series of six, the thousand-petalled sahasrara. Each centre also carries a presiding deity, a shakti, an animal vehicle and a set of Sanskrit letters on its petals.

The scheme is not a diagram of anatomy and the text does not present it as one. It is a map for a practice: the raising of kundalini, the coiled power at the base, up the central channel through each centre in turn to union in the sahasrara. The letters, the deities and the syllables are what the practitioner visualises and sounds at each stage, which is why the five bija mantras in this atlas point here as their source. Purnananda wrote it in Bengal in 1577, as the sixth chapter of a longer work, the Sri-tattva-cintamani; it is a late text summarising a much older tantric literature rather than an origin.

In 1918 a British High Court judge in Calcutta, Sir John Woodroffe, publishing under the name Arthur Avalon, brought out a translation of this text with a long introduction and called the book The Serpent Power. It was the first substantial and sympathetic English presentation of tantric subtle-body doctrine, and its effect was enormous and largely unintended. Nearly every modern account of "the seven chakras" (in yoga studios, in New Age literature, in popular psychology), descends from Woodroffe's book, and therefore from this one chapter by one Bengali author in 1577.

That descent has consequences worth stating. The Indian tantric traditions do not agree on a single scheme: systems of four, five, nine, twelve and more centres are attested, the placements differ, and the number six plus one is Purnananda's convention rather than a universal Indian teaching. The rainbow colour sequence attached to the chakras almost everywhere today is not in this text at all; it is a twentieth-century Western addition, spread through Theosophical writing and later through the human-potential movement. So is the association of each centre with an endocrine gland, and so is the psychological reading of the centres as stages of emotional development.

None of that makes the modern system worthless; it makes it modern. The distinction the atlas keeps is between what the 1577 text says, which is set out above, and what has been built on top of it since 1918, which is a separate and traceable history.