Divinity Atlas

Sacred Correspondences
Sign In
Text size
100%
Theme

Switch Atlas

The Inner World

The Civil World

The Natural World

Aura Layers

Mental Body

Citation Formats

General Reference

APA Style

BibTeX

Origin 1880 to 1930

The Mental Body is the third 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 from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It is paired with the third chakra, the Solar Plexus, in the model's ascending pairing of the seven layers with the seven chakras, reflecting its claimed role as the seat of thought, belief and mental structure. It sits outside the Emotional Body, the second layer, and is described in the model as a finer, more structured layer built from thought forms rather than feeling. 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 third 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
"Mental body" is a plain English coinage, and the layer is habitually equated with the manomaya kosha of Vedanta, an equation made by the Theosophists, not by the Indian sources. 1Tradition: Theosophical subtle-body doctrine
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 Mental Body, the Third Layer

The mental body is, in the seven-layer aura model, the third layer, lying beyond the emotional body and associated with thought, ideas and the intellect, said to be structured and often described as yellow or bright where mental activity is strong. In the scheme popularised by Barbara Brennan's Hands of Light and derived from Theosophical subtle-body doctrine, the layers ascend from the dense etheric nearest the body through the emotional and mental to the more rarefied spiritual layers beyond, the mental body marking the level of the reasoning and conceptual mind. It corresponds broadly to the mental sheath, the manomaya kosha, of the Indian tradition from which the Theosophists drew.

The seven-layer model is a construction of modern esotericism, assembled in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries; it is presented here as a description of a belief tradition, not as an anatomical or scientific account, since there is no evidence for the existence of an aura, and no medical or diagnostic claim is intended.

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 Mental 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.

Mental Body. The Theosophical sources also carry a mental body, and here the modern layer is roughly continuous with the older one. The differences are of description rather than of existence, which makes this layer a useful control against the ones that were genuinely rearranged.

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
Comments (0)
No comments yet. Be the first to share a thought.
Reader Challenges (0 open reader challenges)
No disputes yet. Spotted an error or a better source? Open the first one.

View At A Past Year

Choose a year to see this entry's facts and connections as the atlas records them at that moment: what it held then, what it held instead, and what it had not yet adopted. Choose Present for the current record.