Toward Ecosophy

A little while ago I reread Peter Kelder's classic early 20th century occult exercise book, The Eye of Revelation.  It's partly a classic because of its framing -- it retails the standard cod story about a seeker finding a strange lamasery in Tibet where he learned mysterious exercises that he brought back to the Western world, and does so in high style -- but it's also a classic because the exercises it teaches, the Five Rites, are good solid physical culture exercises with reliable effects on the material and subtle bodies, and they have a substantial following all over the world these days. (You can read a good description of them here.) 

There are a few odd things about the Rites, however, and one of them -- to my mind, the most important of them -- is the set of energy centers described briefly in Kelder's text.  Here's what he has to say about them: 
"There are SEVEN Psychic Vortexes in the physical body. They are located as follows:

• Vortex “A” is located deep within the forehead
• Vortex “B” is in the posterior part of the brain
• Vortex “C” located in throat at the base of the neck
• Vortex “D” located in the right side of the body (waist line)
• Vortex “E” is in the reproductive anatomy or organs
• Vortexes “F” and “G” located one in either knee."

There has been a lot of discussion in recent years about the source of the Five Rites, most of it based on the assumption that Kelder's claim of a Tibetan origin should be taken literally. Those seven energy centers, however, point in a different direction. You can find them discussed at length in the pages of Max Heindel's Rosicrucian Cosmo-Conception, from which I took the diagram at the top of this post. The same centers described in Kelder's book are shown in that diagram as points around which the desire body (astral body or aura) forms vortices. Here's one bit of Heindel on the subject: 

"There are no organs in the desire body, as in the dense and vital bodies, but there are centers of perception, which, when active, appear as vortices, always remaining in the same relative position to the dense body, most of them about the head. In the majority of people they are mere eddies and are of no use as centers of perception. They may be awakened in all, however, but different methods produce different results." 

Heindel got most of his ideas originally from Rudolf Steiner, whose student he was back before he came to the United States. I don't know Steiner's voluminous works well enough to know whether these same centers appear in them; I do know that they were picked up and used by some other Rosicrucian groups in the United States during the twentieth century.  There was a great deal of interest in energy centers other than the standard chakras at that time, not least because a rush of incautious students in the 1920s tried to practice it using Sir John Woodroffe's book The Serpent Power as their manual, with disastrous results. (According to Manly P. Hall, the body count was considerable.) Since the Five Rites work quite well -- I've practiced them with good results -- and Heindel's Rosicrucian Fellowship has earned a solid reputation as one of the saner occult groups out there (I'd probably be a member myself if I was a Christian and could handle a vegetarian diet), tracing the lore of these centers and seeing if there are other practices that make use of them is one of my current research projects.