A TOUCHSTONE REVIEW:
The Chakras * by Charles Webster Leadbeater Quest Books; 2nd edition (2013)
* For this review, I have mined information on the history and influence of this book from Kurt Leland’s Rainbow Body: A History of the Western Chakra System from Blavatsky to Brennan (2016).
The Author (1854-1934)
Charles Leadbeater in 1914 (age 60)
The young Charles Webster Leadbeater, interested in spiritualism and trained as an Anglican clergyman, joined the Theosophical Society in 1883 and became a high-ranking officer of the Society. He remained one of its leading members until his death in 1934, writing over 60 books and pamphlets and maintaining regular speaking engagements. At the time Leadbeater wrote The Chakras, he was a bishop of the Liberal Catholic Church (a reinvention of Catholicism along Theosophical lines).
Leadbeater’s first substantial reference to the chakras occurred in 1898 in answer to a question concerning the existence of organs in the astral body. Leadbeater’s clairvoyant investigations of the chakras seem to have occurred at about the same time.
According to his memoir, Leadbeater developed clairvoyant abilities in 1885 at Adyar, India, then the location of the headquarters of the Theosophical Society. Leadbeater reported that this instruction required “a year of the hardest work I have ever known.” He claimed to have been visited by one of the Theosophical Masters, who suggested he practice a certain type of meditation connected with developing the kundalini power. This training the Master said he would oversee himself, and made Leadbeater pledge never to divulge it to anyone else except with his authorization. Leadbeater was further instructed by a physically embodied Hindu yogi, Subba Row, whom Blavatsky claimed had the same Master (Morya) as she did.
In Leadbeater’s perception, the five lower chakras grow out from the spinal ganglia on stems toward the front of the body in flower-like funnels that open into circular vortexes. Details of Leadbeater’s clairvoyant investigations appear in the chapters “Force-Centers” and “Serpent Fire.”
Leadbeater’s Chakras—Side View (reprinted from C. W. Leadbeater’s The Chakras, 1927) Note the “stems” attaching the chakras to the spine and the vortices or “flowers” showing at the front of the body.
During his investigations, Leadbeater reported seeing saucer-like depressions on the surface of the etheric body, vortices either sluggish or in rapid rotation, glowing and pulsating with living light, with petals like spokes resulting from wavelike undulations that were formed as forces rushed around in the vortex, producing a shimmering, iridescent effect like mother-of-pearl, yet with each chakra having its own predominant color (two inches across and dull in color when undeveloped and four to six inches across and flashing like miniature suns when developed), bringing Divine Life into the physical body. He also saw a protective web between each chakra of the ethereal body and its astral counterpart. The nacreous silvery aspect of these undulations or petals, he says, is likened in Sanskrit works to “the gleam of moonlight on water.”
“If we imagine ourselves to be looking straight down into the bell of a flower of the convolvus type,” he says, “we shall get some idea of the general appearance of a chakra.”
The Morning Glory, a member of the plant family Convolaceae.
The Book
First published in 1927, this pioneering book by clairvoyant C. W. Leadbeater was among the first to introduce to the West the concept of chakras and the seven chakra system as centers of spiritual contact in the human body and bridges to higher consciousness and well-being. He didn’t ask, Are chakras real? And he didn’t seek scientific evidence. He based his findings on his own mystical experience of the chakras described in the ancient texts of Hinduism. At that time, he was a pioneer in the field of subtle energies, and the first to publish a clairvoyant view of the chakras and their energy flow.
The Serpent Power by Arthur Avalon (John Woodroffe) brought discussion of the chakras and yogic tantra to the Western public first. But because the lengthy Sanskrit translations in the book required the deepest concentration to read, Charles Leadbeater’s The Chakras became the classic. The book has been in print continuously for nearly one hundred years. Even so, it too is not an easy read.
The preface and first chapter will be clear to the common reader. However, Leadbeater’s descriptions of energy flow and blockage and his explanations of the workings of life force and mind and body in later chapters use obscure Theosophical terms on the assumption that all readers would be Theosophists familiar with them.
Throughout the book are quotes from the teachings of Annie Besant, Madame Blavatsky, and Leadbeater’s own earlier writings on energy healing, Vedic traditions, and the energy body. Based on his own clairvoyant observations, Leadbeater interpreted these subjects and attempted to reconcile the disparate teachings of Blavatsky, Steiner, and tantric scriptures. The result is an eastward-leaning Western chakra system.
A foreword to the book by Anodea Judith and an afterword and notes by Kurt Leland explain terms and place the book in context within the evolution of the New Age version of the seven chakra system. This is significant because the two are experts in their fields.
Anodea Judith published the first formal codification of the current Western chakra system in an attempt to resolve the great chakra controversies. Kurt Leland is the researcher who wrote the only esoteric history of the Western chakra system from its roots in Indian Tantra from the 1880s to the 1990s.
Leland’s afterword provides additional information on Eastern and Western chakra systems. His notes explain all the terms Leadbeater uses and so make this new edition of The Chakras an authoritative stand-alone text. Readers do not have to go elsewhere to discover what they need to understand the text. In his notes, Leland also identifies the material in The Chakras that Leadbeater cut and pasted, rearranged, modified, and omitted from his earlier works.
The five chapters of his book explain in coherent, step-by-step fashion how the chakras are awakened and nourished by the light of the sun from above and the rising serpent power from the earth. The principal points of the process are presented below in sequence.
The Force Centers
Leadbeater begins by identifying the chakras as force centers and describing their appearance according to his own experience.
The centers are in operation in everyone, although in the undeveloped person they are usually in comparatively sluggish motion, just forming the necessary vortex for the force, and no more. In a more evolved man, they may be glowing and pulsating with living light, so that an enormously greater amount of energy passes through them, with the result that there are additional faculties and possibilities open to the man.
The Forces
Before going on to describe how the force centers are awakened, Leadbeater discourses on the origin and nature of “the mysterious power called kundalini or the serpent fire,” the three nadis or channels through which the three streams of energy flow in and around the spinal cord, the movement of forces through the nerve systems, and the “vital energy” or “prana” carried in sunlight.
The force of kundalini in our bodies comes from that laboratory of the Holy Ghost deep down in the earth. It belongs to that terrific glowing fire of the underworld. That fire is in striking contrast to the fire of vitality which comes from the sun …. We thus draw God’s mighty power from the earth beneath as well as from heaven above; we are children of the earth as well as of the sun. These two meet in us and work together for our evolution. We cannot have one without the other, but if one is greatly in excess there are serious dangers. Hence the risk of any development of the deeper layers of the serpent fire before the life in the man is pure and refined.
The Absorption of Vitality
Leadbeater devotes an entire chapter to explain in greater detail how vital energy or prana, in the form of “vitality globules,” is absorbed as food by the etheric double. “Etheric” being the name Leadbeater gives to a type of matter that is “still physical though invisible.”
… conspicuous above all others which may be seen floating in the atmosphere, on account of their brilliance and extreme activity…. While the force that vivifies these globules is quite different from light, it nevertheless seems to depend upon light for its power of manifestation…. When this globule is flashing about in the atmosphere, brilliant as it is, it is almost colorless and shines with a white or slightly golden light.
The Development of the Chakras
Without giving away precise details of the practice, which is only handed down orally from teacher to student, Leadbeater discusses the way to properly awaken the energy centers, and how and why to avoid premature awakening.
Besides keeping alive the physical vehicle, the force centers have another function, which come into play only when they are awakened into full activity…. The function of each of the etheric centers when fully aroused is to bring down into physical consciousness whatever may be the quality inherent in the astral center which corresponds to it.
The Laya Yoga
The final chapter of the book, written twenty years later than the material preceding it, discusses the English translations of Sanskrit literature which existed at the time that dealt with laya yoga, a practice in which Supreme Consciousness is achieved and the self is united with the Divine by working energy down from the crown chakra through the lower chakras to awaken kundalini.
Leadbeater’s Chakra System
In the Eastern chakra system, the energy that awakens the chakras either arises from the lowest chakra at the base of the spine or descends from the highest at the top of the head or circulates in both directions, but always along the spine.
In Leadbeater’s system, these vortices form along the outer edge of the astral and etheric bodies. They absorb forces from their respective planes and channel them into the core of the body along whirling funnels (a lesser known meaning of chakra is “whirlpool”) that converge on astral or etheric centers that correlate to organs or nerve plexuses of the physical body.
Leadbeater’s model arranges the subtle bodies in layers around the physical body like nested dolls increasing in size. In the same way, each organ and nerve center is surrounded by its own etheric field, a more expansive astral field, and an even more expansive mental field.
According to Leadbeater, astral energy entering the vortex of each astral chakra carries information, which the astral center registers in accord with that center’s function. Astral energy and information may then pass through the etheric equivalent of the astral center and thence to the associated physical organ or nerve plexus.
In his model, undeveloped chakras have no stems or funnels and no flower-like openings to the outer edge of a subtle body. Developed chakras have these structures, which Leadbeater calls the “sense organs” of the etheric, astral, and mental bodies. The chakras of the etheric body “bring down into physical consciousness” the characteristics of their associated astral centers, thus making them “gates of connection between the physical and astral bodies” when fully awakened.
Leadbeater assigned psychic powers to each of the chakras in the typical Western way, related to human potentials. His list of powers represents his attempt to rationalize the catalog of abilities in Eastern teachings that appear in the Sanskrit text Siva Samhita.
Leadbeater’s system combines the sacral chakra with the root chakra, moves the navel chakra into its usual place, and adds a spleen chakra. (In the later Western system, red is assigned to the first chakra and orange to the second. Leadbeater represents the first chakra as red-orange.) In his system, the crown chakra is not connected with any of the sympathetic plexuses of the physical body. It is associated with the pineal gland and the pituitary body. And in the root chakra, heart chakra, and brow chakra there are special “knots” through which kundalini has to break in the course of her journey.
In Buddhist tantra the number of main chakras is five. The sixth and seventh are fused into one located in the head, and the first and second are fused and located beneath the navel. In this, Leadbeater may have followed the lead of Buddhism when he combined the root and sacral chakra, rolling their functions into one.
Leadbeater didn’t take the obvious step of building his chakra system in the order of the rainbow by linking yellow to the third chakra and green to the fourth. Maybe he was just reporting what he saw. Or maybe he hoped to validate correspondences among the colors discussed in Blavatsky’s Esoteric Instructions, the colors used in traditional tantric systems and his own.
Leadbeater notes that the chakras mentioned in the Sanskrit books “always substitute their Svadhisthana center for that at the spleen.”
The function of the spleen chakra, as Leadbeater explains it, is to draw in vitality from sunlight and to break it down into the colored energies or rays that each of the chakras specializes in and then to distribute these energies to the chakras, which absorb the rays and vivify the physical nerves and organs of the associated with them.
Figure 12 in Leland’s book The Rainbow Body depicts the absorption of these vitality globules from the sun and their differentiation into colored prana with various functions which are then distributed to the chakras.
Leadbeater’s Chakra Functions (reprinted from A. E. Powell, The Etheric Double, 1925)
Any chakra system that mentions the spleen or the splenic chakra bears his influence. The origin of Leadbeater’s concept of the spleen chakra can be traced to Blavatsky’s implication of the location of the “spleen and liver” chakra in the master table of correspondences she created for her Inner Group Teachings (Esoteric Instruction No. 4).
Leadbeater’s identification of the spleen as the source of the vitality of the physical body may also be traced back to Blavatsky’s Esoteric Instructions, where she says “the spleen acts as the center of prana in the body, from which the life is pumped out and circulated.”
It may be that Leadbeater also followed up on Rudolph Steiner’s hints about the workings of this “wonderful organ” and combined them with his own clairvoyant investigations to produce a detailed schema of how this organ supplies rays of different colors to the organs of the physical body and the main chakras of the etheric body.
Leadbeater’s visions of the chakras as colorful, whirling wheels reigned supreme in much of the Western world for more than half a century. His multi-colored illustrations of the chakras reflect what he “saw” on the basis of his research into the ways in which vital energy circulates among the chakras of the etheric body. But perhaps the most notable contributions of his book to the Western chakra system are the names by which the major chakras are known today: root chakra, navel chakra, heart chakra, throat chakra, brow chakra, and crown chakra. A subtler contribution to the evolution of the Western chakra system is Leadbeater’s novel resolution of the question of the number of chakras, their locations, and their activities.
Controversy
Shortly after the publication of The Chakras in 1927, a Hindu spiritual teacher active in California, Rishi Singh Gherwal, published a passionate complaint against Leadbeater’s work, calling him “the greatest enemy of yoga philosophy.”
Gherwal claimed Leadbeater had “given a bad name to yoga” and refuted Leadbeater’s claim to have awakened the kundalini, quoting at length from the Sanskrit scholar John Woodroffe’s critique of Leadbeater’s teachings in The Serpent Power. Whether or not Gherwal’s critique is valid, Leadbeater nonetheless opened up to the Western public the concept of chakras as the force centers of a higher energy body that generated and feeds the physical body.
Going Further
The force fields of a higher body, also referred to as color bodies, appear to dictate to large degree the life and development of the physical organism. Each force center correlates to nerve plexuses in each one of those force centers. And there is always a colony of glands and organs around each one of these force centers related to them. Each is like a universe – its own little world.
Metabolism, for example, is regulated by the endocrine glands, which control the chemical processes that govern the generation of new cells and the destruction of old ones. Medical science overlooks the fact that these glands may be governed by forces outside the physical human organism.
The force fields or color bodies are representative of a more refined “cosmic” body which requires nourishment directly from the source of all life – the sun. Lack of this nourishment results in atrophy of the refined cosmic body and premature breakdown of the physical organism. The fact that an individual is able to affect endocrine regulation through the practice of solar techniques is something new and unsuspected by medical science.
Absorption of solar energy causes vital life forces to begin to pulse in the fields, the nervous system, and the force centers, causing our vibratory rate to increase. The endocrines are affected by the pituitary and pineal glands, which influence in turn the physical organism. Our psychic potential begins to develop, and we begin to exist on a higher level. Thus we are transformed from purely physical and mental existence to include psychic and spiritual existence.
The sun thus serves as the catalyst between the physical and non-physical (spiritual) universes on the macrocosmic level of the solar system.
The atoms of the body link the physical and non-physical on the microcosmic level. The human physical organism is a mass of pulsating energy. And when the human organism contacts an unlimited energy source, such as the sun, the potential for intelligence also becomes heightened.
There is every reason to believe that these force fields are the source of life and may have the potential of surviving death of the physical organism. The question of immortality is bound up with these fields, for they are interrelated with a still higher ultradimensional Light body.
When ill health and old age threaten to overwhelm the organism, and death appears a certainty, the energized force centers that constitute the Light body and the developed Consciousness go on to inherit a new life. But before this can be realized, ultradimensional life has to be experienced in the here and now. This is the object of Cosolargy.