The Coiled Power

Before the series begins

This is a treatise on the chakras: the centres of the subtle body, the channels that thread them, and the coiled power said to climb from the base of the spine to the crown of the head. It is written for a reader who has seen the rainbow chart and wants to know what stands behind it.

The honest answer is that two different things stand behind it, and most popular accounts blur them into one. There is the tradition: a body of tantric and yogic Sanskrit texts, the oldest developed versions roughly a thousand years old, the most influential of them composed in Bengal in the sixteenth century. And there is the overlay: a modern synthesis, largely built in the West across the twentieth century, that gave the chakras their rainbow colours, their gland associations, and their tidy psychological themes. The overlay is not worthless and it is not the subject of this treatise. The tradition is. Where the two diverge, this work says so, on the page, every time.

A word on method. The chakras are not anatomy. No surgeon has ever found one. They belong to the sukshma sharira, the subtle body, a map drawn from meditative experience rather than dissection, and the texts treat them as things to be visualised, pierced, and dissolved, not located on a chart. This treatise keeps the texts’ own account and the historian’s account distinct, and gives both their due. Where the sources agree, it speaks plainly. Where they diverge, it names the divergence. Where the record runs out, it says so. The tradition does not need the map. The map is offered anyway, in humility, for the reader who wants to walk back to the source.