Hybrid Serpents and Solar Power: Early Twentieth-century Theosophical Models of Kuṇḍalinī

This paper examines some of the earliest complex engagement with the South Asian phenomenon of Kuṇḍaliṇi by European and North American authors, specifically the hybrid models of three early twentieth-century Theosophists: James Pryce, Charles Leadbeater, and George Arundale. Though such models have been at times critiqued for their appropriation of Sanskrit terminology to represent what may seem like unrelated concepts, they are best approached not as scholarly attempts to faithfully represent South Asian Kuṇḍalinī traditions and practices, but rather as novel spiritual explorations—ones that occur in and rely on a primarily "Western" conceptual framework, but nevertheless seek to build comparative bridges to South Asian traditions.

A contemporary emerging consensus within the anglophone literature depicted Kuṇḍalinī as a "power," articulated in quasi-scientific language as a natural force akin but not exactly identical to electromagnetism. Insofar as it was related to electricity, this force was fiery. Insofar as it moved in a circular or curved path, it was snake-like. This language, which is also found among contemporary Indian popularizers writing for a global audience, both follows and modernizes traditional South Asian imagery. However, looking beyond these broad convergences reveals within the Theosophical accounts deeper and diverging cosmological assumptions that draw primarily on Gnostic and Hermetic rather than Tantric logics. Theosophical authors are not particularly concerned that their portrayals of Kuṇḍalinī are inconsistent with traditional sources, or even among and within themselves. And yet all three describe a violent force—fiery, flashing, electric—that fundamentally transforms the body as it is normally felt and inhabited.

The analyses of Pryce, Leadbeater, and Arundale are framed around their respective written works, specifically: Apocalypse Unsealed (1910); The Chakras (1927); and Kundalini: An Occult Experience (1938).

In Apocalypse Unsealed, which is framed as an esoteric commentary on the Book of Revelation, Pryce sets out to construct something of a latter-day Gnostic treatise. Pryse's book interprets the Apocalypse (from the Greek apokalypsis, literally "revelation" or "unveiling") not as a work of history or prophesy but as a "manual of spiritual development." Its "Gnôsis" (which Pryse translates as "sacred science") comprises a numerologically coded roadmap that charts a journey through the microcosm of the practitioner's mind-body complex, mirrored in a macrocosmic journey through the signs of the Zodiac. To this end, Pryse evokes a "spiritual" or "pneumatic" body, which he describes as a sort of causal ovum that contains within itself the "paraklete" (paraklêtos, the "helper," usually linked in Biblical discourse with the Holy Spirit). Pryse also identifies this paraklete as "the light of the Logos" and "living, conscious electricity," noting that it is "the 'good serpent' of ancient symbology . . . It is called in the Sanskrit writings kundalinî, the annular or ring-form force, and in the Greek speirêma, the serpent-coil" (11-12). In Pryse's view, this is the most perfect body—divine and immortal in its nature, circular in its form, self-luminous like the sun.

Leadbeater's work focuses primarily on his models of the chakras as gates through which cosmic forces flow into the body. Rather than signifying visionary circles of deities or even energetic markers within the body where such divine powers might be located as a vertical roadmap to ascension, Leadbeater treats cakras as individual gateways—not things in and of themselves, but rather openings. Vivifying these centers of force by means of the "sacred serpent-fire" results in suprasensory phenomena such as clairvoyance, and lays out the path for human evolution. This, therefore, is the function of the Kuṇḍalinī force. As it moves through the plexuses of the physical body, it activates the organism's lines of connection to higher aspects of reality. Indeed, Leadbeater also identifies a total of three principal forces that flow through the physical chakras, which he correlates to three aspects of the divine Logos: the vital force, the life force, and the Kuṇḍalinī. The vital and life forces are downward streams that originate from the Second and First aspects of the Logos, respectively. Kuṇḍalinī, meanwhile, becomes for him the returning upward force of First Outpouring (effected by the Third Logos), which had originally manufactured the chemical elements, creating raw material for the creation of the cosmos. It is important to note, however, that—like the other two forces—Leadbeater's Kuṇḍalinī is a physical phenomenon. The cakras can also serve as gateways for more subtle, psychic forces, but the vital, life, and Kuṇḍalinī forces operate on the physical level in particular. While the vital force flows downwards from the sun, Leadbeater's Kuṇḍalinī force "comes from that laboratory of the Holy Ghost deep down in the earth. It belongs to that terrific glowing fire of the underworld" (27).

Arundale, meanwhile, lays out a vision of Kuṇḍalinī that is deeply indebted to that of his mentor, Leadbeater, doubling down and building on the unique aspects of that framework. Even more so than Leadbeater before him, Arundale adopts a kind of world-affirming Hermetic outlook that regards the sun as the living heart of a world suffused with divinity. Like Leadbeater, he imagines a universal Cosmic Kuṇḍalinī, embodied in the sun, but also in "whirling wheels of fiery energy" (11)—something like Leadbeater's chakras—within the earth. In essence, Kuṇḍalinī is the "Fire of Life" and, as such, it is always already awake everywhere life exists. Thus, in Arundale's view, it is rather a matter of intensifying this force, and of directing it toward specific ends. Elsewhere, Arundale positions the sun and the earth as the two opposing poles of Kuṇḍalinī, one positive and the other negative, and thus the awakening of the force is akin to becoming a human embodiment of the occultist's "Rod of Power" between them. In this sense, the individual instantiation of Kuṇḍalinī does not arise from the body per se, but rather is drawn into it from both the sun and the center of the earth, such that it coalesces and comes to rest at the bottom of the spine.