The second decisive figure after Woodroffe is Charles Webster Leadbeater, a Theosophical writer whose book The Chakras appeared in 1927 and whose colour plates of glowing vortices are the direct ancestor of nearly every modern chakra illustration. Leadbeater described the centres as funnel-shaped whirlpools of force on the surface of the etheric body, said he perceived them clairvoyantly, and assigned them colours; he also linked them to the endocrine glands, an association that has no basis in the Sanskrit texts and that has since been repeated everywhere. His colour assignments were his own and do not match either the tantric texts or the rainbow scheme now in use. The atlas records the tantric material and the theosophical material separately because they are separate; conflating them, which most popular writing does, makes a modern synthesis look ancient.
The specific endocrine pairings that later popular writing attached to Leadbeater's scheme, and that remain the standard list in wellness literature today, run from bottom to top: Muladhara to the adrenal glands, Svadhisthana to the gonads, Manipura to the pancreas, Anahata to the thymus, Vishuddha to the thyroid, Ajna to the pituitary, and Sahasrara to the pineal. Leadbeater's own writing does not spell out this exact list in the form now repeated; it was filled in and standardised by later twentieth-century authors building on his general claim that the chakras correspond to glands, a claim that has no basis in the Sanskrit sources and, unlike the glands themselves, cannot be located or examined.