The Serpent Power

Picture any chakra chart you have ever seen: lotuses stacked up a spine, each with its petals and its colours. Follow that picture back far enough and you arrive at one book, published in London in 1919 and signed by a man who never existed.

"Arthur Avalon" was a pen name. Behind it stood Sir John Woodroffe, an English lawyer who sat for nearly two decades as a judge of the High Court in Calcutta, and who spent his working life alongside texts almost no European had read.

A judge is not a bad person to have translating something difficult. His whole trade is reading a dense document slowly and saying exactly what it claims, and what it does not.

The pen name hid more than one pair of hands. Woodroffe did not work alone, and later research has shown that "Avalon" was a partnership, above all with his Bengali collaborator Atal Bihari Ghose, who worked on the Sanskrit texts with him.

The book itself is open about leaning on Indian learning. In the preface Avalon singles out one of his earlier volumes as especially valuable because it translates a Bengali pandit who was himself a Shakta, knew no English, and had inherited the old traditions directly.

So the voice on these pages is a joint one. A British judge wrote the English, and behind him stood teachers for whom this material was not an exotic curiosity but their own practice.

Who stood behind the name "Arthur Avalon"?

• An Oxford Sanskrit scholar who worked from manuscripts in England
• A Theosophist lecturer who toured India collecting lore about chakras
• A Bengali yogi publishing in English under a British-sounding name
• Sir John Woodroffe, a Calcutta judge, working with Indian collaborators✓Correct answer

Avalon was the pen name of Sir John Woodroffe, a judge of the Calcutta High Court, and the work behind it was shared with Indian scholars such as Atal Bihari Ghose. It grew out of Bengal, not out of a lecture circuit or a college library.

The heart of the book is a translation of a Sanskrit work called the Shat-chakra-nirupana, which Avalon renders as "Description of and Investigation into the Six Bodily Centres".

Its author was Purnananda, a celebrated Tantric practitioner of Bengal. And here is the detail most readers skip: the Shat-chakra-nirupana is not a book in its own right. It is the sixth chapter of a much larger work of his on Tantric ritual, the Shri-tattva-chintamani, composed in 1577.

That changes how the text should be read. The famous description of the six centres was never a free-floating spiritual map. It sat inside a manual of worship, written by a practitioner for people already performing the rites around it.

Avalon did not invent a legendary sage to hang the text on. He went to Purnananda's family. The sketch of his life in the preface was collected from his living descendants, about ten generations removed, through the Varendra Research Society in Rajshahi.

What they remembered is sparse and concrete. His worldly name was Jagadananda, and a copy of the Vishnu Purana he made in 1526 was still kept by one of his descendants. He took the name Purnananda when he received initiation from Brahmananda, and went to Kamarupa, in Assam.

There, at an ashrama about seven miles from Gauhati, he is believed to have reached siddhi, spiritual perfection. He never returned home. He lived the life of a paramahamsa, a renunciate of the highest order, and wrote his Tantric works.

Avalon's account of Purnananda's life came from Purnananda's own descendants, one of whom still owned a manuscript Purnananda had copied.

True✓Correct answer

True. The preface credits the family, reached through the Varendra Research Society, and describes a Vishnu Purana manuscript copied by Purnananda in 1526 that was still in a descendant's keeping.