C

The chakra system itself is old, described across centuries of Sanskrit tantric and yogic literature using its own vocabulary of seed syllables, colours, petals and presiding deities specific to each centre. Assigning the seven chakras to the seven natural notes of the Western diatonic scale is a much younger overlay, emerging from early twentieth century Theosophical writing on the chakras, most influentially C.W. Leadbeater's work, and elaborated considerably through the later twentieth century New Age chakra literature that followed Theosophy's lead. No classical Sanskrit source pairs Muladhara, the Root chakra, with the pitch C or with any other Western note name, because the concept of fixed Western pitch played no part in the tradition that first described the chakras.

The correspondence as commonly given today, C for Root, rising through the scale to B for Crown, reflects a specific modern choice to map an ascending musical scale onto an ascending sequence of bodily centres, a tidy correspondence that made the system easy to teach and remember but that should be read as a twentieth century synthesis rather than as inherited doctrine. Other correspondence schemes exist in the wider literature and do not always agree with this one, which is itself evidence that no single version carries the weight of settled tradition.

Sources The Serpent PowerSir John Woodroffe (Arthur Avalon) with Rainbow Body: A History of the Western Chakra System from Blavatsky to BrennanKurt Leland

The letter names used here, C through B, belong to a fixed-pitch naming system distinct from the movable-doh solfège syllables, Do, Re, Mi and so on, that most people associate with singing a scale. Solfège descends from the monk and music theorist Guido of Arezzo, working in the early eleventh century, who drew the syllables Ut, Re, Mi, Fa, Sol and La from the first syllables of successive lines of a Latin hymn to John the Baptist, Ut queant laxis, as a mnemonic for teaching singers to find pitches relative to one another rather than as fixed, absolute notes. Ut was later replaced by Do in most traditions, and Ti was eventually added to complete the seven syllable set.

The letter-name system C, D, E, F, G, A, B is older still in its basic logic, descending from the Latin alphabet letters used by Boethius and other late antique and early medieval theorists to mark absolute pitches, and it survives today as the standard naming convention in English, German and several other European musical traditions, run alongside the solfège syllables rather than replacing them; a singer trained in movable-doh solfège reads the same pitch C as Do only when the piece is in the key of C major, since solfège names a scale degree rather than a fixed pitch.