John Woodroffe ("Arthur Avalon")

A High Court judge in Calcutta who, under a pen name, translated and defended Tantra at a time when both British and Indian respectability treated it as an embarrassment. The Serpent Power (1919) put Pūrṇānanda's six wheels into English — and thereby into every subsequent book on the subject in any Western language.

The first weld. He is a serious scholar and a sympathetic one, and this pack is not debunking him — it is dating him. Everything the West means by "chakra" comes through 1919, from a sixteenth-century Bengali text, in a judge's English.