The Seven Chakras: From Tantric Texts to the Modern Rainbow System

The seven chakras, arranged from the base of the spine to the crown of the head and coloured like a rainbow from red to violet, are one of the best-known images in modern yoga and wellness. The idea of chakras is genuinely ancient, but the familiar rainbow system is much younger than most people assume: it took its current form in the West in the twentieth century.

Chakras in Indian tradition

Cakra is Sanskrit for "wheel". In Indian Tantric traditions, chakras are centres in the subtle body used in meditation and ritual. Different texts describe different numbers of them, four, five, six, seven or more, with their own shapes, sounds and deities. There was never one single chakra system.

The Serpent Power

The system most familiar in the West comes largely from a sixteenth-century Sanskrit text, the Ṣaṭ-cakra-nirūpaṇa, "Description of the Six Centres", which with the crown centre gives seven. It reached English readers through John Woodroffe, writing as Arthur Avalon, in The Serpent Power (1919). In the early twentieth century Theosophists, notably C. W. Leadbeater in The Chakras (1927), reinterpreted the system through their own ideas.

Where the rainbow came from

The traditional texts do not give the chakras the colours of the rainbow. As the researcher Kurt Leland has shown in his history of the Western chakra system, colour therapists in the United States and Britain began mapping the spectrum onto the chakras in the mid-twentieth century, and the familiar red-to-violet system came together only around 1977.

Two systems, both real

The rainbow chakras are a genuine modern tradition, widely practised and meaningful to many people. They are simply not the same as the older Tantric systems they grew from, and it is worth knowing which one a design refers to.

Chakras in jewellery

A seven-chakra design refers to the modern rainbow system. Take a look at the AURYN seven-chakra necklace, check our Necklace Length Guide, or read about Reiki's distance symbol. If you wear several necklaces together, our guide to layering necklaces explains how to keep them apart.