# Kundalini and the Magic of Comparison September 09, 2024 [ Anya Foxen ](/people/anya-foxen) *Edited by* [*Aaron Michael Ullrey*](/people/aaron-michael-ullrey "Aaron Michael Ullrey"). *The following Research Reflection is part of an ongoing series spotlighting CSWR scholars and their research.* In 1982, famous historian of religions Jonathan Z. Smith infamously declared, “In comparison a magic dwells.” For Smith, this was not a good thing. He saw comparative scholarship, like magic, as founded on subjective similarity—not the discovery of a connection but the invention of one. Yet, sometimes, history sets up the comparison for us. In fact, my work has largely been about undoing comparisons. Take Kundalini. An internet search quickly yields a “standard model.” Kundalini is the Serpent Power. It rests coiled at the base of the spine, a reservoir of cosmic energy. Awakened, it rises, a fiery snake racing to the crown of the head. Image searches reveal serpents intertwining to form a caduceus, a double helix climbing a rainbow of seven chakrasup the spine, then bursting—winged—through the skull. A serpentine Kundalini rising through seven(ish) chakras has premodern precedents, but it’s only one among many strands in South Asian tradition. Modern Kundalini, however, is also colored (often in all seven hues of the rainbow) by fusion with Western symbols, concepts, and practices. Both sides have ancient and complex roots, interweaving over millennia, but the Serpent Power rises out of a particularly tenacious tangle created by Colonial-era conversations (implicit comparisons, really) between Indian and Western esotericists. And so comparison is unavoidable when tracking a concept across time. Even in premodern South Asian sources, Kundalini is applied to varied concepts, some outright contradictory, and there are concepts not called “Kundalini” that nevertheless share with it some undeniable similarity. Likewise, when this Sanskrit term first appears in English-language sources, it’s attached to meanings that seem to come out of nowhere. To make sense of how nineteenth-century Western authors would have understood Kundalini, we need to see it through their eyes. We need to ask: what in Western tradition is Kundalini most *like*? Because, of course, this is how human cognition works. We make the strange familiar by comparing. That, incidentally, is where the caduceus comes into play. Images may serve us better than words, yet an image is also never the thing itself. Jeffrey Kripal writes, in a book appropriately titled *The Serpent’s Gift*, “Poetically speaking, gnostic thought recognizes that religious expressions function as symbols and, as such, are simultaneously true and false, that they both reveal and conceal.” The fiery, feminine serpent is such a symbol, revealing the paths history has taken to produce today’s “standard model” of Kundalini. It leads us into a labyrinth of stories, spanning East and West, telling of the intimate link between the human and the divine, body and cosmos. Indeed, promising a map for how the divine becomes human and how the human might become divine. Interestingly, both sets of stories have medieval alchemy as a cornerstone. The inorganic chemistry of minerals reflects both the organic processes of life and the spiritual truths of the cosmos—semen and menstrual blood (which produce life) work like mercury and sulfur (which produce the Latin *lapis philosophorum*, the “Philosopher’s Stone,” or the Sanskrit *rasa-rasayana*, the “Elixir of Elixirs”). Except here’s the catch: the meaning of these components is wholly reversed between East and West. In South Asia, the fiery material of sulfur embodies the creative energy (Shakti) of the Goddess. It’s feminine. Mercury, meanwhile, is the passive essence of unmanifest consciousness associated with the god Shiva. Its organic correspondent is semen, which rests in the bowl of the Moon’s crescent, and so it’s indelibly masculine. But look over to Europe, and the cold and wet Moon is correlated to feminine passivity, whereas the hot Sun represents the dynamic masculine principle. This causes poor Carl Jung no shortage of trouble as he’s forced to insist, in his famous lectures on Kundalini, that the Indians must be wrong about their own cultural symbolism. The Moon *must* be associated with the lower chakras, which *must* symbolize the watery depths of primordial chaos, despite the fact that Indian sources clearly associate this anatomical area with the digestive fire and the consuming force of the Sun as time. Does this make Jung a bad comparativist? Well, perhaps. Or perhaps it’s only that symbols speak to us in ways shaped by our own cultural stories. Symbols are like gender. They are cultural constructs spinning meaning out of and onto lived experience. But the thing is, mercury can be either masculine or feminine, yet it’ll still react with sulfur. Herein lies the real challenge of the comparativist—and the real magic of comparison—finding the hidden correspondences between the primordial chaos of what *is* and what people do with it. The Serpent Power may be a jumble of faulty comparisons, but it also describes something. Underneath the symbols, there lies an experience of *something*. Is it the same something? Well, who can say. Not the historian, but a good comparativist—perhaps. See also:- [ comparative religion ](/topic-tags/comparative-religion) - [ Researcher Reflections ](/topic-tags/researcher-reflection) - [ South Asia ](/topic-tags/south-asia)