The Lord of the Chakras: A Yogic Perspective on Middle-earth
This is either an essay about chakras as illustrated by The Lord of the Rings or an essay about The Lord of the Rings interpreted through the chakra system.
Tolkien did not know much about chakras. (Probably.) He was not a yogi, though he was deeply spiritual. Still, Lord of the Rings is such a complex and archetypical work of fiction that it proves a surprisingly apt background on which to understand the world of the chakras.
Concerning chakras
The chakras (and here I’m going to use the most well-known system of 6 chakras plus sahasrara, though there are many others) are an evolutionary map of the human being as manifesting across several different planes of existence. Each chakra is not only a center or resonating point of a specific energy but a level of consciousness, a whole world of traits and tendencies and a particular way of viewing the world.
Each chakra is also connected to an element: muladhara to earth, svadhisthana to water, etc.
Sahasrara is not really a chakra but an expression of pure Consciousness, the integration of all energies and that which transcends all energies.
Muladhara
Muladhara chakra is our base. It’s the root, our source of vitality and stability, our point of contact with the Earth.
Both hobbits and dwarves are solid muladhara representatives, but dwarves also have some element of manipura and I’m more into hobbits so let’s look at them.
Things hobbits like:
· Food
· Farming
· Nature
· Reading books that only contain things they already know
· Living underground or close to ground level
Things hobbits do not like:
· Boats
· Heights
· Having adventures or doing anything out of the ordinary
Love for the simple life, a life of habit and routine surrounded by familiar things and the joy of basic creature comforts, is muladhara in its essence.
People on muladhara chakra radiate contentment, the strength and simple goodness of the Earth. This is very clear in hobbits, who are notoriously resilient and very difficult to corrupt, much less than other people.
Just look at Sam, earthiest of the earthy: all the Ring could think to offer him was a giant garden, and he still says, “no thanks!”
Even Gollum, after hundreds of years carrying the Ring, still had a trace of goodness.
Most hobbits lack wisdom in the conventional sense — they seem pretty silly on their own, they know very little about the outside world and in mixed company a hobbit is rarely the smartest or best-informed person in the room — and yet they tend usually to be stupidly right somehow. (Again, Sam is probably the best example of this.)
However, hobbits aren’t perfect, and they demonstrate very well some of the negative traits associated with an imbalance or impurities in muladhara: pettiness, materialism, getting stuck on details and a certain inertia. They’re generally stubborn to a fault and once set on a course they’ll follow through to the end, but it can be difficult to get them moving to begin with.
Like when Gandalf tells Frodo that he has the One Ring and the forces of Mordor are bent on finding him, it takes Frodo s i x m o n t h s to finally leave the Shire. Six months! First he has to say goodbye to all his favorite places, say goodbye to his beloved house… come on, bro.
Svadhisthana
Home sweet home, svadhisthana!
Svadhisthana is the domain of sexuality, sensuality and emotionality. It’s the world of social dynamics and sense pleasures, the resting place of the subconscious mind.
Although svadhisthana is the dominant frequency in humans, this energy is notably absent in Middle-earth.
There is little sensuality or sexuality in Tolkien’s world. Dwarves and Ents are almost mono-gendered, and if there are female Orcs they’re never seen or mentioned. Despite Aragorn and Arwen’s grand tragic romance (taking place mostly in Appendix A); despite Éowyn and Faramir finding love in a hopeless place; despite Frodo and Sam spending roughly half of the last book holding hands and gently stroking each other’s faces; there is effectively no eroticism in the entire story.
The one and only mention of raw lust is a passing comment about Wormtongue creeping on Éowyn.
(And yet the epic is still primarily a love story, just focused on love of different kinds: mostly agape rather than eros. More under that when we get to anahata chakra.)
However, some svadhisthana tendencies can be spotted among hobbits: their love of parties, socializing and gossip, and their strong sense of identification with family and social groups. There’s little that hobbits enjoy more than a good round of gossip, and rumors spread like wildfire around the Shire.
Social conformity is a huge aspect of life on svadhisthana. Think about teenagers: it’s all about fitting in, being part of one group or another, being on the right side of trends…
Most hobbits have this quite strong. (Our four heroes, of course, not so much.) Shire life is all about families, who is related to whom and how, and outsiders are deeply distrusted. Even hobbits from the neighboring village of Bree are considered odd and possibly suspect by most Shire hobbits. Even hobbits from the semi-independent Buckland, where Frodo grew up, are regarded with suspicion.
Poor Mr. Frodo, with his mild eccentricity, his dreaminess and love of the wider world, was always just a little bit too weird for Shire society. In life on svadhisthana, social structure is everything, so anything that operates outside that system is deeply unsettling.
Manipura
Power! Courage! Valor and glory! The will to control! This is the energy of manipura chakra, and Men in Middle-earth are all about it.
At its best, this is the image of the great warrior or the valiant knight, fighting for justice, living or dying by a code of honor.
This level of consciousness is glorified in most fantasy stories, but in Lord of the Rings it’s not the mark of a true hero and getting stuck here is dangerous. The more powerful you are, and the more you love power, the easier you are corrupted and the worse it becomes for everyone else.
Compare Boromir with Aragorn.
Boromir is full-on manipura. He has a good heart, but his consciousness is primarily residing in manipura, and from this perspective he can’t understand why they can’t use the Ring. It just does not compute. For him, the only path is through gaining as much power as possible. And so, although he has tremendous courage and willpower, he’s led astray. (Just as the nine human kings who became the Nazgûl were corrupted by their lust for power.)
Aragorn is the other way around. He has huge manipura but at the end of the day he’s coming from anahata — which is what makes him worthy of being King.
The Men of Númenor (Aragorn’s ancestors) apparently had more of an anahata vibe, with their refinement and love of philosophy and the arts. Over time in Middle-earth they mostly lost it and merged with the local manipura culture, except for those in whom “the blood of Númenor runs true” — like Aragorn, Faramir and the Rangers in general.
Here’s how Faramir describes it:
“Yet now, if the Rohirrim are grown in some ways more like to us, enhanced in arts and gentleness, we too have become more like to them, and can scare claim any longer the title High. We are become Middle Men, of the Twilight, but with memory of other things. For as the Rohirrim too, we now love war and valour as things good in themselves, both a sport and an end; and though we still hold that a warrior should have more skills and knowledge than only the craft of weapons and slaying, we esteem a warrior, nonetheless, above men of other crafts.”
The values of a consciousness on manipura — valor, honor and glory — contrast clearly with the more refined values of a consciousness on anahata. From anahata, one can understand manipura and make use of its strengths, but not the other way around.
Anahata
Anahata: the heart chakra. The center of love, compassion, humility and devotion. The point of integration, halfway between raw physicality in muladhara and pure transcendence in sahasrara. Just like the marriage of Aragorn and Arwen, it’s the union of earth and sky, human and divine, immanent and transcendent.
The Lord of the Rings is an anahata epic, beyond anything else. Victory for our heroes only comes by holding to values at this level, and the main evolution for most characters in the story (as for most human beings in our world) is from the lower levels of consciousness into anahata.
We meet Éowyn as a fierce shieldmaiden who dreams only of glory in battle. But once she has a real taste of the horror of war, and the hollowness of valor for its own sake, she decides instead to become a healer.
Aragorn is a great warrior, but what marks him as a true king is his humility and care for others: “the hands of the king are the hands of a healer.” The return of the King is really the return of the heart, or rather a return to the Heart.
And of course our beloved hobbit friends.
Frodo has a touch of anahata from the beginning, with his airiness and wanderlust that set him a bit apart from normal hobbit society. We can debate all day whether or not Frodo is the hero of the story, but he certainly is a hero of the heart. He’s not the strongest or bravest in battle, really not a conventional hero at all, but his strength lies in vulnerability, humility and his willingness to walk in the dark. Arguably his most heroic act is sparing Gollum’s life and trying to help him, an act of mercy that finally led to the destruction of the Ring.
His evolution is from a sort of shallow anahata, kind but ungrounded, to the deep anahata of self-sacrifice, the pure heart that can carry within it all the suffering of the world.
“Samwise the Stouthearted” (“Samwise the Brave” in the movies, ok it’s fine too) of course shows the incredible power of the heart. He’s just a goofy little gardener but he loves Frodo so much, he’s willing to fight with a giant spider or go charging into a tower full of orcs just to protect him. His courage isn’t just manipura bravado but 100% love in action, and without his enormous heart, the quest would never have made it off the ground.
Again and again, the force behind the whole narrative lies in unbreakable bonds of friendship. As Gandalf recommends to Elrond:
“Trust rather to friendship than to great wisdom. Even if you chose for us an Elf-lord […] he could not storm the Dark Tower, nor open the road to the Fire by the power that is in him.”
And indeed, those small, inexperienced hobbits accomplish more out of friendship and love than anyone could by strength of arms.
Their journey points towards what the old Greeks called agape, an unconditional love that can exist between friends and comrades but ultimately transcends personal relationships.
Our four hobbits start their journey motivated purely by love for each other, as friends and family. Yet this personal love matures into a love for the world, for life itself, for peace and goodness, and for serving others.
Vishuddha
The Elves are the perfect example of beings that live on vishuddha chakra, surrounded by an aura of purity, mystery and otherworldly beauty. They love subtle things, preferring moonlight to sunlight, silver to gold, and most of all the light of the stars. Music, poetry and high art come from vishuddha, all of which the Elves adore. Bilbo even notes that they seem to live on songs and poetry more than food.
They seem almost too refined for this harsh, messy material world — and indeed they are. Their time is ending and as Middle-earth shifts into the frequency of Men, it can no longer maintain the more elevated energy of the Elves.
Vishuddha is related to space and time, as the matrix underlying material reality.
As immortal beings, Elves have a very different relationship to time than us mortals. They exist in a kind of timelessness, in tune with the endlessly repeating cycles of nature, and yet they are acutely aware of the passage of time as it carries all things away, whole ages of the world passing away in the blink of an eye as compared to their lifespan.
Legolas explains the Elvish perception of time to Frodo and Sam, when Sam wonders if time doesn’t pass in Lothlórien:
“‘Nay, time does not tarry ever, but change and growth is not in all things and places alike. For the Elves the world moves, and it moves both very swift and very slow. Swift, because they themselves change little, and all else fleets by: it is a grief to them. Slow, because they need not count the running years, not for themselves. The passing seasons are but ripples ever repeated in the long long stream.’”
The three Elven Rings seem to have the particular power of preserving certain things and places in a state almost outside the normal flow of time, as is the case in Rivendell and Lothlórien.
Walking into the heart of Galadriel’s realm,
“Frodo felt that he was in a timeless land that did not fade or change or fall into forgetfulness. […] [He] stood still, hearing far off great seas upon beaches that had long ago been washed away, and sea-birds crying whose race had perished from the earth.”
Everything that has ever happened or could happen still exists in archetypical form within akasha, the womb of space and time, which resonates in us at the level of vishuddha chakra.
Ajna
Ajna chakra, the “third eye,” is the center of the power of the mind: not the chattering discursive stream of thoughts, but the higher mind, the expression of the cosmic intelligence. It is the eye of wisdom, that can perceive reality, that can comprehend and influence the entire manifestation from its root — because it is the root of the manifestation, the mind as the forerunner of all things.
The wizards operate from the level of ajna chakra. Gandalf is the consummate chess player, directing the action mostly by spreading information and motivating others to act, but not participating so much himself. He is the voice of wisdom, the guide, the one who can see the bigger picture.
Saruman is also an ajna creature (his irresistible hypnotism is a classic power from ajna), but obviously at a very different angle.
Gandalf is on ajna but with an opening to sahasrara, the Oneness rising above all dualities of the mind. He sees himself always as a servant of the greater good, no matter how great his own power.
Saruman illustrates a danger warned about in the yogic tradition: getting stuck in ajna without sahasrara (or the Heart), without going beyond the ego. Without this awareness, the mind in its full power can seem like the highest reality, and like its highest purpose is to control the world. From this perspective, Saruman chooses to be Saruman of Many Colors instead of Saruman the White: he prefers the multiplicity to oneness, turning away from the source (to which one can only surrender) towards only the world of forms (which he can control).
Gandalf can truly be the White because he is transparent to the light. His power of ajna, of the mind, is always in service to the Heart.
Sahasrara
And we arrive at the Thousand-Petaled Lotus, the window to transcendence.
Devout Catholic Tolkien perhaps couldn’t resist sprinkling his narrative with moments of grace and miracle, from the understated (Sam finding water in the wastelands of Mordor, or catching sight of a star through the dark clouds) to straight-up deus ex machina as the Eagles breeze in to save the day (again).
About those Eagles.
I’m not going to drag all of us through the Silmarillion, but suffice to say that the giant Eagles belong to the leader of the Ainur (divine beings or angels who are meant to watch over Middle-earth), a kind of sky deity who himself represents the breath of God.
So their appearance is not Tolkien being a lazy writer but expressing his belief in divine grace as the primary cause, the underlying impulse beyond all strategies of the ego. Consciousness is omnipresent and absolutely free, so it can choose to reveal itself even in the most dire situations.
Acts of courage and heroism carry the narrative (or your spiritual evolution) up to a certain point, but past this there can only be a surrender and openness that allows for the flow of grace. (In the case of our story, Frodo and Sam’s effort carried the Ring to the Cracks of Doom, but it went into the fire only because Gollum slipped and fell — and he was only there thanks to Frodo and Bilbo’s mercy.)
I mentioned earlier that The Return of the King is really the return to the Heart, and here I mean not only the specific quality of anahata chakra, but to the essence of what we are. It’s a return to center, to self-remembering and finding a place for everything within the wider scope.
There is clearly a messianic Christ-narrative underlying Aragorn’s rise to kingship, as well as Gandalf’s resurrection and Frodo “Agnus Dei” Baggins’ martyrdom. Tolkien clearly wasn’t so interested in power and glory for their own sake, but the sacred dimension of kingship shows instead how when the Heart is restored to its place at the center, the Heart as the ruler and the mind its servant, the entire world somehow is brought into harmony.
The Kingdom of God is in your heart. Just like the great stories, the ones that really matter (thanks, Sam) touch us so deeply because they take place within ourselves.
