Petal (chakra)

Traditionally the names used to identify chakras come from Sanskrit but there is a New Age consensus in the use of English names for the chakras. In this article the English nomenclature will be mainly used.

In current literature on the human aura and chakras, the expression subtle energy centres is often used in conjunction with or instead of the Sanskrit term chakras.

Based on ancient Sanskrit writings from India, it is generally considered that there are seven major chakras within the subtle human energy body or - to say it differently - seven subtle energy centres within the human energy field.
The earliest Sanskrit sources (Upanishads) though list either only four or five chakras. The Yogatattva Upanishad (sloka 83-101) lists five and describes these chakras as being interrelated with the five elements: earth, water, fire, air, space. Over time, less ancient sources have added two or three major chakras to the original list while contemporary New Age writings have added a plethora of minor ones.
Recent chakra literature has also expanded the original list of five elements with many different and sometimes rather arbitrary elemental notions such as time or light for the brow chakra, and consciousness or pure energy for the crown chakra.

This article will specifically focus on the number of petals for each of the seven major chakras. However, in order to help with the understanding of the mathematics behind the various and sometimes varying chakra petal counts, one additional but lesser known chakra will be brought in.
In addition to the more abstract characteristics that are traditionally discussed in relation to the chakras e.g. Chakra Sanskrit Characters, Chakra Sounds and the elements or Skandhas there are also more concrete characteristics (albeit still rather non-human) e.g. Chakra Animals, Chakra Geometric Shapes and, as discussed here, the number of chakra petals that are traditionally used in the description of the chakras.

This article aims to explain that the relationship between the number of chakra petals and the human body is much more fundamental and concrete than it is generally assumed to be. Often only symbolic value is given to the petal counts, especially when discussed in relation to the Sanskrit characters that are assigned to chakras and petals.
It will become evident that the petal count for each chakra is related to certain specific groupings of vertebrae and subsequently certain specific groupings of nerve pairs in the central nervous system (CNS) that emanate from the spinal column through the vertebrae. This may be an indication of the fact that the early yogic investigators of the chakras (who either depicted or enumerated the chakra petals) were not only intuitive or clairvoyant but also used anatomical practices to find a correlation between what they saw intuitively and found through physical anatomical research. Terms like sushumna, ida and pingala that often appear in texts dealing with yoga, chakras or kundalini are not only dealing with esoteric subtle energy notions but also point concretely at physical structures found in the human body - structures that may produce energetic field characteristics that are not accepted or easily understood in current scientific investigations of the human being as a whole, physically as well as, say, spiritually.

The main purpose of this article then is to show how the number of chakra petals is not just 'some number' but rather specifically related to and depending on a series of physical internal components within the human body such as its skeletal and central nervous system parts as well as some specific physical structures within the brain.

Thus the following considerations affect the number of petals for each chakra:

• groupings of spinal vertebrae,
• groupings of nerve pairs (ganglia) in the central nervous system,
• the pituitary and pineal glands situated within the brain,
• the five paired lateral ventricles present within the brain that contain cerebral spinal fluid (CFS).

The Chakras by C.W. Leadbeater (1927) is considered to be a classic book on this topic. In it the chakras are depicted as segmented or striated color wheels, the segments of which according to tradition are called petals. Leadbeater proposes another additional term for these petals: undulations.

Appellations such as colored undulations and terms like striated rotating energy disks or circular concentric interference wave patterns describe the way these segmented chakras are seen by clairvoyants much more accurately than the word petals.

Except for the crown chakra, literature in general agrees on the number of petals or segments for each chakra.

In addition to explaining the reason for the specific number of petals that each chakra can be observed to contain, this article will also explain the reason for the discrepancy between the number of petals for the crown chakra as reported in various differing older and newer writings e.g. 960, 972 or 1000.
As mentioned above, in order to understand this discrepancy it will prove to be worthwhile to recognize an additional but not very well known chakra that is situated underneath the root chakra, just below the base of the coccyx: the perineum chakra. This chakra (just like the crown chakra) is situated outside the physical body but still within the subtle human energy field.

When this additional chakra is taken into account, the reason for the difference between the crown chakra petal counts of 960 vs 1000 will become more understandable.

° a minor chakra
Note: Unfortunately, in contemporary literature on the chakras the pineal and pituitary glands are sometimes exchanged in their relationship to the crown and brow chakras. This mix-up originates from a confused understanding of a difficult paragraph in Sir John Woodroffe's (Sir John Woodroffe/temp) (pseudonym Arthur Avalon) book Serpent Power.

In his book The Chakras Leadbeater shows an illustration in which the five lower chakras are related to various nervous plexi that are part of the central nervous system. Keeping that in mind, we can - for the five lower chakras - come to an understanding of the relationship between:

• the number of petals, segments or undulations of those chakras,
• the number of vertebrae that each particular chakra appears to be linked to,
• the number of nerves (nerve pairs or ganglia) emanating from the particular groupings of vertebrae.

When the number of petals of the five commonly accepted lower chakras (not including the extra perineum chakra) are added up, one comes to a total of 48 petals (4+6+10+12+16=48). It is interesting that this number corresponds to the 48 nerves as they are identified in older anatomy sources. When the perineum chakra (consisting of two petals) is included, one counts 50 petals. This quantity corresponds to the current count of 50 nerves - the 25 nerve pairs that emanate from the spinal vertebrae.

The lower chakras thus appear to be directly related to the nerve pairs that emanate from the spinal column; their petal count corresponds - although not exactly - to the current convention of anatomical identification and numbering of the vertebrae and nerve pairs:

The arrangement for the chakras (including the additional perineum chakra) that are directly related to the spinal column and CNS nerve pairs emanating from it, is as follows:

When we look at an anatomy chart (often to be found in a doctor's or chiropractor's office) depicting the vertebrae and their nerve pairs, it can be demonstrated that the division as described in the list above makes as much sense (or more?) as the current convention of vertebrae number designation.

Whereas the lower chakras are directly related to the spine, it should be noted that the brow and crown chakras do not have a direct spinal column connection. Instead, according to most literature, they are directly linked to two glands embedded in the human brain: the pituitary gland (hypophysis) and the pineal gland (epiphysis).

The brow chakra is linked to the pituitary gland which consists of two parts, the anterior and the posterior lobes. This two lobed feature of the pituitary gland - or alternatively - the two hemispheres of the brain (which this chakra is also sometimes reported to be influenced by) may account for the fact that in many illustrations the brow chakra shows two large lobes.
According to Borsboom's brochure it is this two-fold nature of the pituitary gland or the brain that accounts for the doubling of the total number of petals of the traditional five lower chakras (48x2=96) as their accumulated energy reaches the brow chakra, thus producing the 96 petals of the brow chakra. Borsboom, favoring the two brain hemisphere view, suggests the following, "The 48 nerves (older anatomical count) are intricately connected to the brain's two hemispheres. This might be what results in the doubling of the total of 48 petals for the five lower chakras thus resulting in - as depicted in Leadbeater's book The Chakras - the two vertical semi-circles containing 48 striations or undulations each, adding up to 96 petals altogether."

In most chakra literature, chakras are described as subtle energy centres processing and transmitting subtle vibrational energies. The chakra pictures found in Leadbeater's The Chakras show this vibrational energy as concentric undulations or interwoven energy waves. Keeping that in the mind's eye, one can envisage that the energetic wave packets, as they acquire and build up more energy while moving up from the lower chakras up the spinal chord to the highest chakra, that they affect the total energy of the crown chakra around or, according to most writings, above the head - but still within the subtle energy field that surrounds the human body.

According to The Chakras, a clearer view, to understand the differing counts in petals e.g. 960, 972 (960+12) or 1000 for the crown chakra, it may be helpful to know that the brain contains within it ten liquid containing cavities, the five paired lateral ventricles of the ventricular system, that are filled with cerebro-spinal fluid (CSF). This is the same fluid that circulates through:

• the central spinal canal,
• an outer layer of the spinal chord,
• the meninges that surround the brain,
• and - according to current histology texts - leaks out from the ventricles and the spinal chord either to be absorbed by the blood or to 'bathe' the nerves by a process that is currently not well understood.

The crown chakra can be observed (and is often depicted that way) with an additional twelve lobed flower-like formation in its centre. This may account for the additional 12 petals that, when added to the 960, make up the 972 petals that the crown chakra is reported to contain according to some writings.
In turn this 12 lobed centre contains another striated circular formation. It may be possible to interpret these lobed and striated formations as representing the 12 major cranial nerve pairs that are found to exist within the brain.

Additional notes:

Literature dealing with chakra petals often associates each petal with one of the characters of the Sanskrit Devanagari alphabet.

Each chakra as a whole is usually also associated with a single Sanskrit Devanagari character, an element, a color, a geometric shape, an animal, a sense, one organ or a pair of organs, a gland and a mantric sound.

For more information regarding this, a classic source is Chakras, Energy Centers of Transformation by Harish Johari (1987).

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