The Body & Its Centres

This section gathers the maps traditions draw of the human body as a spiritual and energetic system: the chakras and nadis of tantric physiology, the koshas (sheaths) and gunas of Vedantic and Samkhya analysis, the aura layers of Theosophical writing, the mounts and lines of the palm, and the organs and body parts of medical astrology and traditional medicine.

These are not competing anatomies so much as different purposes laid over the body: centres for meditation, sheaths for a philosophy of the self, channels for the movement of subtle energy, correspondences for diagnosis and timing.

The entries are careful about age and origin. The chakra and nadi systems come from tantric Hindu and Buddhist sources, though the familiar seven-centre, rainbow-coloured scheme owes much to twentieth-century Western synthesis. The koshas are set out in the Upanishads; the aura layers are largely Theosophical; the mounts and lines of the palm belong to chiromancy, attested independently in several traditions.

Where a system is medical, the zang-fu organs, the zodiacal man of medical astrology, the atlas describes it as a historical framework, not as current clinical guidance.