Where do the colours of the chakras really come from?
Red at the base, orange at the sacrum, yellow at the solar plexus, green at the heart, blue at the throat, indigo at the third eye, violet at the crown of the head. This rainbow palette is known by heart by almost everyone who practises yoga today.
It does not come from the ancient texts.
A recent origin
The seven-colour system takes shape at the turn of the twentieth century, in Theosophical circles — a movement founded in 1875 in New York by Helena Blavatsky, which sought to synthesise Western spirituality, science and Eastern traditions, often reinterpreted through that lens. Charles Webster Leadbeater, one of the movement's figures, published The Chakras in 1927, in which he describes the energy centres as wheels of coloured light. It is this text, more than the Sanskrit treatises themselves, that fixed the image most people hold today.
The New Age would take up and spread this version in the following decades, associating it with crystals, stones and aura colours. The popular success of this aesthetic ended up covering almost entirely what the original texts described.
What the traditional texts say
An important text on this subject is the Sat-Cakra-Nirupana, translated and commented on by Indologist Tara Michaël in Corps subtil et corps causal (Le Courrier du Livre, 1979; second edition, 1998). Its palette differs from a rainbow gradient. Tara Michaël's bibliography presents the book and the Sanskrit text it studies.
The first centre, at the base of the body, is associated with scarlet red. The second, at the sacrum, with vermilion — close to red, but not the same red, and above all not the orange it is given today. The third, at the navel, is leaden grey, almost black. The fourth, at the heart, returns to a darker vermilion red. The fifth, at the throat, is described as smoke grey, sometimes even transparent. The sixth, between the eyebrows, is white, iridescent in places. The last, at the crown of the head, is the only one to gather several hues at once — but not as a gradient: the text speaks of a thousand petals gathering all the colours simultaneously, a profusion rather than an ordered spectrum.
No trace of the red-orange-yellow-green-blue-indigo-violet progression. Instead: grey, black, white, several shades of red, and a final explosion rather than a logical gradation.
These colours are not decorative. Each is associated with an element (earth, water, fire, air, ether), with a specific deity, with Sanskrit letters, with a geometric diagram — an entire system of correspondences built for meditation and visualisation, not to look pretty on a poster.
The difference is not cosmetic. The traditional system describes a subtle physiology designed for practice — breathing, concentration, meditation — not a decorative palette.
Why it matters
This is not a question of which colour is more or less right. It is a question of what we pass on when we teach. An extremely simplified system, originally designed to make a complex tradition digestible for a Western audience at the start of the twentieth century, ended up replacing the tradition itself in the collective imagination.
Going back to the texts is not rejecting a hundred years of yoga history in the West. It is simply putting the fruit back in place of the jam.
Marjorie Mathieu — IFSU studio
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