Musical Notes
E
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E is the third note of the C major scale and, in the modern chakra-tone correspondence system, the note most commonly assigned to the Solar Plexus chakra, Manipura, at the stomach. The pairing belongs to the same modern Western esoteric tradition as the rest of the chakra-tone system rather than to classical Indian sources, which use Sanskrit seed syllables and do not name the chakras after Western pitches. Note-to-zodiac-sign mappings also exist in the wider esoteric literature but vary from author to author, with no fixed standard.
Facts
Attestation
HistoricityThe pairing of a musical note to a chakra is a twentieth century Western innovation with no basis in any classical Indian source text; later popular sources disagree on which note goes with which chakra, and the pairing recorded here is simply the version most frequently repeated in modern Sound Healing literature, not a claim of ancient origin. 1 Attributions
Associated ChakraSolar Plexus (Manipura) 1 Attested as a fact about the modern chakra-tone correspondence system, not as an ancient teaching: the pairing dates to twentieth century Western esoteric writing rather than to classical Sanskrit chakra texts. Identity
Pitch Frequency Learn More
Manipura and the Modern Correspondence
Manipura, the Solar Plexus chakra, appears in classical Sanskrit tantric texts with its own seed syllable, colour and symbolism, none of which involve Western musical pitch. Its pairing with the note E in the modern chakra-tone system is, like every pairing in the scheme, a product of early twentieth century Theosophical writing and its later New Age elaboration rather than an inheritance from the older Sanskrit material, built by matching the third degree of the diatonic scale to the third chakra in ascending order.
Manipura is frequently described in the modern correspondence literature as the seat of personal power and will, and E's position as the major third of the C major scale, the interval most responsible for a chord's bright, assertive major quality in Western tonal harmony, is sometimes offered by contemporary writers as a poetic reinforcement of that meaning; this kind of interpretive elaboration should be read as commentary added after the correspondence was already fixed rather than as the reasoning that produced it.
Sources The Serpent PowerSir John Woodroffe (Arthur Avalon) with Rainbow Body: A History of the Western Chakra System from Blavatsky to BrennanKurt Leland
E as a Scale Degree
E is the third degree of the C major scale, called Mi in movable-doh solfège, and its distance from the tonic C is what music theory calls a major third, the interval that gives a major triad its characteristic bright quality as opposed to the minor third that would instead produce a minor chord. This single interval, whether the third above a chord's root is major or minor, is the primary acoustic distinction Western tonal harmony uses to separate music generally perceived as bright or sad, a foundational fact of the tuning system rather than an esoteric claim of any kind.
E also names the lowest and highest strings on a standard tuned guitar and is a common open string pitch on the violin family, practical facts of instrument design that have shaped an enormous amount of Western popular and classical music written to sit comfortably in keys related to E, entirely independent of any correspondence system.
Cross-Tradition Connections
Disciplines That Use This
The notes and their correspondences.
Sources
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