Chakra Colours: The Full Chart, and Why the Rainbow Is From 1977

The rainbow chakra chart — red at the base, violet at the crown — was put together in the 1970s. It is not ancient, it is not Indian, and the Sanskrit text that gave the West its seven chakras describes almost none of those colours. In that text the solar plexus is the colour of a rain cloud, the heart is golden-red, the throat is smoky purple, and the brow is white as the moon.

That is not a reason to throw the rainbow out. It is a very good colour system and it does a job the old one never tried to do. But almost every page that hands you the chart calls it five thousand years old, and once you know where it actually came from, the chart gets more interesting rather than less.

Below: the full modern chart, clickable; the same seven chakras as three different traditions drew them; and an honest answer to how many chakras there actually are.

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The chakra colour chart

Tap a colour for the full entry — Sanskrit name, location, element, seed sound, number of petals, what the tradition reads as balanced and unbalanced, and what the 1577 text called it.

Three charts, four centuries

The same seven centres have been drawn three very different ways, and each version is still in circulation. Switch between them.

Old colours and new, side by side

Two out of seven. And the two that survive are the two at the bottom, where red and orange are the obvious readings of heat and blood anyway.

Does it matter that the rainbow is modern?

Less than you might think, and the reason is worth spelling out.

A symbolic system does not get its usefulness from its age. It gets it from whether it gives you a vocabulary for something you could not otherwise name. "My throat feels shut when I have to say the real thing" is a sentence people recognise instantly, and the chart is what makes that sentence available. Whether the colour attached to the throat was chosen in 1577 or 1977 changes nothing about whether the sentence is true of you.

What the age does change is the size of the claim you are entitled to make. "This is a 5,000-year-old system that Western science is only now catching up with" is a claim about history, and it is false. "This is a map people have found useful for a long time, in several quite different versions" is true, and it is the more interesting thing to say.

The other thing knowing the history buys you is immunity. The moment somebody tells you your yellow is dim and that clearing it costs four hundred pounds, it helps enormously to know that the yellow was assigned in the 1970s by a man working from a prism.

How many chakras are there, really?

Seven is one tradition's count, presented as the count. The actual answer is that it depends entirely on which text you open.

• Four — the Hevajra Tantra, a Buddhist text.
• Five — some versions of the Kubjikamata Tantra.
• Six — the Goraksha Shataka, and the 1577 text whose title literally says six.
• Seven — the six plus the crown, which is how the West counted it after 1919.
• Twelve, twenty-one, and more — later and modern systems, including the "higher" chakras above the head that appear in twentieth-century writing.

The concept appears in tantric texts between roughly the eighth and twelfth centuries CE, and the number varies from the start. It was never a fixed anatomy that someone later miscounted. Different lineages were mapping different practices, and the map matched the practice.

So when a page tells you there are seven chakras, the accurate footnote is: seven is the count in the lineage that happened to get translated into English first.

Are chakras real?

Nothing corresponding to a chakra has been found in the body. There is no organ, no structure, no measurable vortex at any of the seven sites, and no instrument detects one. Anyone who tells you otherwise is either selling something or repeating someone who was.

What is real is the thing the map is drawn over. The seven sites are not random: they sit on the pelvic floor, the gut, the diaphragm, the chest, the throat, the brow and the crown — which is close to a complete list of the places where emotion is actually felt in the body. Fear does land in the belly. Grief does sit in the chest. Held-back speech does tighten the throat. Those are ordinary, well-documented facts about how the nervous system and the viscera interact, and the chakra map is a four-hundred-year-old index of them.

That is a smaller claim than "spinning energy vortices", and a more durable one. It also explains why the system keeps working for people regardless of which century's colours they use.

Using the colours, without overclaiming

The colours earn their keep as attention anchors. Holding "red at the base of the spine" in mind is a concrete, unambiguous instruction, and concrete instructions are what make a body scan work at all. That is a real effect and it does not require the colour to be correct in any cosmic sense.

1. Pick one centre, not seven. Whichever one the description above made you wince at. A sweep through all seven in ten minutes gives each of them eighty seconds, which is not enough to notice anything.
2. Put attention there before colour. Thirty seconds simply feeling the throat, or the belly, or the chest. Most of the benefit is here.
3. Then add the colour. Let it be the colour the chart gives, or the one the 1577 text gives, or whichever one arrives on its own. It is a handle, not a prescription.
4. Add the seed sound if you want to. LAM, VAM, RAM, YAM, HAM, OM — spoken aloud, low and slow. The vibration in the chest and face is the point, and it is genuinely calming for the ordinary reason that a long, controlled exhale is calming.
5. Stop before it becomes homework. Five minutes done most days beats forty minutes done resentfully once.

If you want tones rather than colours, the frequency charts are their own tangle — the numbers on them do not agree between sources, and the chakra frequencies page sets out who says what and why they disagree.

Common questions

What are the 7 chakra colours in order?

From the base upward: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet — the spectrum, bottom to top. Some charts give the crown white or gold instead of violet, and many give the heart pink as an alternative to green.

Are chakra colours the same as aura colours?

No, and confusing them causes a lot of muddle. Chakra colours are fixed: the heart is always green on a modern chart, whoever you are. Aura colours are variable and are read as a description of a particular person at a particular moment. Fixed map versus changing reading.

Why is the heart chakra green and not pink or red?

Because green is the fourth colour of the spectrum and the heart is the fourth chakra. That is the entire reason. Pink shows up as a common alternative precisely because the spectrum answer satisfies nobody emotionally — and in the 1577 text the heart is a deep golden-red.

What colour is the eighth chakra?

There is no settled answer, because the eighth chakra is a modern addition rather than a traditional one. It is usually placed above the head and given white, gold or a shimmering multicolour depending on the author.

Which chakra is which colour crystal?

Crystal correspondences follow the modern colour chart directly — red stones for the root, orange for the sacral, and so on down the spectrum. Which means they inherit the 1977 scheme, including at the heart and throat where it departs from the older sources.

Do I have to believe in it for it to work?

For the attention part, no. Directing steady attention to the chest for five minutes does what it does whether or not you think there is a wheel there. For anything beyond that, the honest answer is that there is nothing measurable to work.

How do I know which chakra is blocked?

The tradition reads it off the symptom rather than off any test: what you cannot say points at the throat, what you cannot want points at the sacral, what you cannot decide points at the solar plexus. The blocked-chakras guide works through all seven.

Each chakra in full: root · sacral · solar plexus · heart · throat · third eye · crown