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Aura Layers

Celestial Body

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Origin 1880 to 1930

The Celestial Body is the sixth of the seven layers of the aura described in the modern subtle body model most fully set out by the healer Barbara Brennan in her 1987 book Hands of Light, building on earlier Theosophical writing about layered auras. It is paired with the sixth chakra, the Third Eye, in the model's ascending pairing of the seven layers with the seven chakras, and it is described as the layer of spiritual feeling and ecstatic experience, sitting between the structural Etheric Template below it and the outermost Ketheric layer above it. Where the lower layers are described as increasingly structured, the Celestial Body is described as loose and radiant, more like a body of light than a defined shape. As with the rest of this subtle body system, its structure and claimed functions are the model's own account, not a finding of anatomy or physiology.

Facts
Origins
Origin Period
1880 to 1930 1Tradition: Theosophical subtle-body doctrine
Origin Period
Named within late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century Theosophical writing on layered auras, and set as the sixth of seven layers in Barbara Brennan's 1987 Hands of Light. 1
Place of Origin
The Theosophical Society and its successors, in India, Britain and the United States; the seven-layer synthesis itself is American. 2Tradition: Theosophical subtle-body doctrine
Attributed Author / Compiler
Barbara Ann Brennan, for the seven named layers and their pairing with the seven chakras. 3Tradition: Seven-layer aura (Barbara Brennan, Hands of Light)
Attributed Author / Compiler
Charles Webster Leadbeater and the Theosophical writers, for the graded subtle bodies and for the claim that they are clairvoyantly perceived. 1Tradition: Theosophical subtle-body doctrine
Origin of the Name
"Celestial body" is a coinage of the modern aura literature, naming the upper counterpart of the emotional layer. 3Tradition: Seven-layer aura (Barbara Brennan, Hands of Light)
Language
English 3Tradition: Seven-layer aura (Barbara Brennan, Hands of Light)
Disputed
Origin Period
1987 3Tradition: Seven-layer aura (Barbara Brennan, Hands of Light)
Kurt Leland's Rainbow Body: A History of the Western Chakra System from Blavatsky to Brennan (Ibis Press, 2016), which traces the aura and chakra literature through to Brennan, dates Barbara Ann Brennan's Hands of Light, the same book credited elsewhere on this page with fixing the seven named aura layers and their pairing with the seven chakras, to 1987 by its publisher's catalogue record, while some other library catalogues list the same first edition as 1988. Leland notes the one-year discrepancy without resolving it; it most likely reflects the ordinary gap between a book's stated copyright year and its public release the following year, a common source of one-year catalogue disagreements. The atlas's own articles on the aura layers follow 1987, and this property records that year while flagging the alternative rather than asserting either flatly.
Status
Standing as a Comparative Category
Used, but its validity as a comparative category is disputed 4
Status Today
Living tradition, practised today 4
Contested Use
Contested or Appropriated Modern Use
Aura reading and aura photography are sold as diagnostic. No aura has been demonstrated, no diagnostic or therapeutic claim made for these layers is supported, and the model belongs to a modern esoteric movement rather than to anatomy. The atlas records the scheme as a belief and attaches no medical claim to it. 4Tradition: Seven-layer aura (Barbara Brennan, Hands of Light)
Learn More
The Celestial Body, the Sixth Layer

The celestial body is, in the seven-layer aura model, the sixth layer, one of the highest spiritual layers, and it is associated with spiritual love, ecstasy and the connection to the divine, described in the modern aura literature as the level of unconditional love and of mystical or devotional experience, often pictured as shimmering pastel light.

In the scheme popularised by Barbara Brennan and rooted in Theosophical subtle-body teaching, the sixth layer stands near the summit of the ascending series, beyond the etheric template and below the outermost ketheric layer, marking the emotional aspect of the spiritual planes as the emotional body marked the feelings of the physical planes. The seven-layer aura is a modern esoteric model, drawn together in the twentieth century from Theosophy and older Indian and Western subtle-body ideas; it is described here as part of a belief tradition and not as a demonstrated structure. Auras have no scientific basis, and no medical, diagnostic or therapeutic claim is intended by this description.

Sources Hands of Light: A Guide to Healing Through the Human Energy FieldBarbara Ann Brennan with Rainbow Body: A History of the Western Chakra System from Blavatsky to BrennanKurt Leland

Where the Celestial Body Came From

The seven layer model has a traceable history and a recent one. A layered subtle anatomy entered English language occultism through Theosophy in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, in works such as Leadbeater's Man Visible and Invisible of 1902. The particular seven layer sequence in circulation today, with these names in this order, is later still: it was set out by Barbara Brennan in Hands of Light in 1987, and most contemporary aura charts descend from that book rather than from the Theosophical material behind it.

Celestial Body. Like the etheric template, this layer belongs to the later reworking rather than to the Theosophical original, and the name is not a translation of an older term. The upper three layers of the modern chart are the part of it with the shallowest history.

On testing, the record is short and it is worth stating plainly. No instrument has detected a layered field of this kind. Kirlian photography, often produced as evidence, images corona discharge from a high voltage field and responds to moisture and pressure rather than to anything vital. Kilner's 1911 dicyanin screen work was not replicated. The most direct test was published in JAMA in 1998, in which practitioners who said they could feel a human energy field were asked to say which of their hands one was near and were correct about as often as chance would predict. The atlas records this layer as a documented feature of a real modern tradition, and attributes the claim to that tradition rather than making it.

Sources Rainbow Body: A History of the Western Chakra System from Blavatsky to BrennanKurt Leland with A Close Look at Therapeutic TouchLinda Rosa, Emily Rosa, Larry Sarner and Stephen Barrett, The Skeptic's Dictionary: A Collection of Strange Beliefs, Amusing Deceptions, and Dangerous DelusionsRobert Todd Carroll

Cross-Tradition Connections

Originates in Language

Modern English, Languages
Source Rainbow Body: A History of the Western Chakra System from Blavatsky to BrennanKurt Leland
Sources
1. Claiming Knowledge: Strategies of Epistemology from Theosophy to the New Age
Olav Hammer, Brill, 2001Theosophy's construction of subtle-body doctrine and its passage into the New AgeView the Source
2. The Theosophical Enlightenment
Joscelyn Godwin, State University of New York Press, 1994on the Theosophical Society and its milieuView the Source
3. Rainbow Body: A History of the Western Chakra System from Blavatsky to Brennan
Kurt Leland, Ibis Press, 2016on Brennan
4. New Age Religion and Western Culture: Esotericism in the Mirror of Secular Thought
Wouter J. Hanegraaff, Brill, 1996The aura and seven-layer subtle-body model in New Age culture, incl. Brennan's Hands of LightView the Source
Religion and the Subtle Body in Asia and the West: Between Mind and Body
Geoffrey Samuel and Jay Johnston (eds.), Routledge, 2013Theosophy's adaptation of the Indian koshas and subtle-body teaching
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