Chakras are Fluffy
Have you ever thought about chakras like, “Nope, not for me. Too fluffy.”?
Well, that’s because they objectively are fluffy, at least in the way they’re understood in the West.
Today’s post is about how it’s not Indian teachers but Madam Blavatsky, the founder of the Theosophical Society, who is behind the New Age chakra system. But first, I want to set the stage with a little Harry Potter atmosphere. J.K. Rowling’s tales include Victorian-era costumes, spells, and settings which provide a window into the popularity of occultism in Europe and the U.S. at around the same time that Blavatsky encountered the chakra system in India. In Rowling’s wizarding world, magic, mysticism, and talking to spirits are commonplace – her fantastical tales (especially as depicted no film) echo back to the Victorian fascination with spiritism, mediumship, trances, and séances.
I grew up in the 1970s and 80s and my siblings and I had a very popular Ouija board game. We’d go down into the basement, turn off the lights, light candles, and pretend that none of us were putting any pressure on the plastic pointer as it moved across the board - it just spontaneously revealed cryptic messages to us from the beyond. Then we’d play “séance” where one person would lay down on the floor and the others would try to lift them up using just two fingers of each hand while chanting “light as a feather, stiff as a board.”
Like the Western chakra system today, little did we know that our games originated in Victorian era parlors, concocted by people who were fascinated by the occult - a fascination which continues to permeate Western culture through this day, particularly in the yoga world.
Blavatsky was born in 1831 to an aristocratic Russian family. She spent a lot of her youth traveling. In America, she realized her true potential was to become a medium who channeled messages that she claimed came from ascended masters. They told her that they had great spiritual wisdom and supernatural powers, and that through her, they would revive ancient knowledge in order to share it with the world. She was their chosen one. In 1875 in New York, she and her friend, Colonel Henry Steel Olcott formed the Theosophical Society with the intention of researching mysticism and spreading their teachings throughout the world.
In 1879, Blavatsky and the Colonel traveled to India, via England, France, and Egypt. Blavatsky believed that India held unbroken lineages that could be traced back to the masters she channeled, and it was in India where she would discover the deepest occult teachings and purest forms of mysticism.
In many places she and the Colonel went in India, they were greeted by groups of admirers. Of course racism was alive and thriving in the nineteenth century. In fact, it formed the entire basis and justification for Western imperialism. So here are these white people - Blavatsky and the Colonel – arriving in occupied India saying that they want to learn something from traditional Indian culture - it was not common at the time, some Indians responded very positively. While Blavatsky and the Colonel were introduced to celebrated scholars like Swami Dayananda Saraswati and Tallapragada Subba Row – many orthodox scholars and renunciates regarded them with suspicion, seeing Western occultism as spiritually immature.
Two Indian writers, Baradakanta Majumdar and Baman Das Basu, helped explain the tantric chakra systems to Madame Blavatsky and the Colonel. Blavatsky took the information she learned from them and then expanded upon it and claimed that she had “improved” the chakra system by adding features like being able to see others’ chakras through clairvoyance, correlating them with the western musical scale (diatonic scale), as well as correlating them to glands, nerve plexuses, and colors. Blavatsky elaborated on the chakras, added many of her own ideas, and then taught and wrote about her chakra concoction extensively.
She passed it on to her students including Annie Bessant and Charles Leadbeater. Leadbeater’s book, The Chakras, which was originally published in 1927 remains, to this day, the most popular publication from the Theosophical Society and has sold millions of copies. It’s Leadbeater’s book that forms the foundation for subsequent New Age chakra books like Anodea Judiths’ Wheels of Life. Since the late 1970s, literally thousands of chakra books have been published in English which are almost entirely divorced from the tantric origins of the chakras.
In the yoga world, we suffer from source amnesia. We have forgotten where the Western chakra system comes from and have attributed it to ancient Indian knowledge when, in fact, the system that is most often taught began with Madame Blavatsky’s interpretation and “improvements.”
For more about the development of the chakras system in the West, read Kurt Leland’s book, The Rainbow Body.
I’ll be teaching the The Neuroscience and Psychology of the Chakras March 14-15 at the Yoga Center of Columbia. You can watch the class online. Details here: https://momence.com/Yoga-Center-of-Columbia/The-Neuroscience-and-Psychology-of-the-Chakras/123304846