Cosmic Respiration and the Four Elements

God Breathing Life into Adam. Franz Xaver Karl Panko, c.1760.

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Molly Hankins March 13, 2025

In Kabblaistic tradition, many of life’s truths are revealed through natural functions and the greatest mystery of all is revealed through our breath. We come in and out of physical form with the rhythmic pattern of our breathing, and by paying attention to this, we learn where we must focus to align with the natural rhythm of life. Alchemy teaches us that transforming each element into one of greater subtlety is how we extract the most energy from matter. So when we learn to breathe consciously we can absorb the subtle energies of the universe more readily, in the same way that we can extract more nutrients from our food by thoroughly chewing.

Presenting at The Science of Consciousness conference last year, professor and spiritual teacher Hide Saegusa presented research showing a correlation between the depth and slowness of breath and an increase in reports of synchronicity and manifestation experiences. His work points to what 20th century Kabbalah teachers such as Omraam Mikhaël Aïvanhov believe -conscious breathing allows us to  absorb more energy, which increases our capacity for magic. Deep, slow, deliberate breathing not only aligns us with the natural ebb and flow of life, but also sets free the subtle energies contained in the air we breathe. 

As Aïvanhov wrote in his book Fruits of the Tree of Life, “The air we breathe is like a mouthful of food, a mouthful of extraordinary forces and energies. If you let it out too quickly, the lungs don’t have time to cook, digest and assimilate it for the benefit of the whole body.” By consciously holding air in our lungs, he contends that our body is able to perform a function equivalent to the ignition and explosions of an internal combustion engine. This energy can only be generated by the compression created when we hold our breath such that it’s forced to circulate through all the tiny alveoli in our lungs.  

The Wim Hof method, by contrast, asks us to hold our breath after exhalation rather than inhalation, but from the perspective of generating subtle energy the result is the same. The element of air is converted into fire by the inherent discomfort of the  process. Subtle energies are then absorbed by our cells, which are predominantly made of water. Our physical, Earthly-matter bodies can then use this energy in a process that unifies the four elements of air, fire, water, and Earth in alignment with a natural process he calls ‘cosmic respiration.’The harmonization and alignment this provides  leads to reality becoming more malleable. Practitioners of these methods then, Aïvanhov asserts, become more adept at influencing reality.

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“By consciously creating more energy to fuel these natural processes, we free up more energy for creativity, magical practice and anything else we care to do.”

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We can apply the same conscious practice to absorbing light from the sun,  By deliberately observing the light as it travels through air, we can “hold onto it” with our awareness and thereby recreate the same process of using the four elements. “We absorb the light through a network of minute channels in our bodies and our whole being vibrates with greater intensity. Of course, light can affect some work in us without our conscious collaboration, but if we are attentive to the work it is doing and eager to take part in it, the results will be greatly enhanced.” The “luminous particles”  released by consciously focusing on absorbing the sun’s rays strengthen our energy and physical bodies by optimizing the process of cellular turnover. Everyday, 1% of our cells, around 330 billion, are replaced with new ones. By consciously creating more energy to fuel these natural processes, we free up more energy for creativity, magical practice and anything else we care to do. 

Saegusa’ suggests that breathing two to three times per minute is the threshold at which there is a statistically significant increase of synchronicity and successful manifestation. While this is impossible to achieve when our autonomic nervous system is in control, consciously practicing slow breathing activates our parasympathetic nervous system, which makes 10 to 15-second inhalations and exhalations attainable. Through practice,  we can train our autonomic nervous system to naturally take longer, deeper breaths. Apply this to the cosmic respiration of sunlight and we can approximate a method of holding our awareness of absorbing sunlight for 10 to 15 seconds at a time for a few minutes a day. Each time we perform this practice, we do so knowing that sunlight causes us to grow and flourish, whether we’re basking in physical sunlight or consciously connecting with the sun metaphysically. 

Most of us have been conditioned to believe we are human beings with a soul, but the premise of cosmic respiration is exactly the opposite. We are souls that have a human body, and by attuning ourselves to this practice, we can supercharge the energy fueling our physical form.

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Molly Hankins is an Initiate + Reality Hacker serving the Ministry of Quantum Existentialism and Builders of the Adytum.

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Paul Saladino

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A Deeper Sense of Home

M. Palacio, 1890.

Tuukka Toivonen March 11, 2025

‘The predicament of private life today is shown by its arena. Dwelling, in the proper sense, is now impossible. […] The functional modern habitations designed from a tabula rasa, are living-cases of manufactured by experts for philistines, or factory sites that have stayed into the consumption sphere, devoid of all relation to the occupant.’   

- Theodor Adorno's Minima Moralia (1951/1994¹)

What does home mean to you? Is it a place you like to return to at the end of a long day? Is it a container of calm solitude? The warm presence and familiar smiles of significant others or the enthusiastic welcome of a furry pet? Passing through the front door, do you see yourself exiting a stressful, chaotic world and entering a domestic realm where the rumblings and unpredictable movements of that world outside give way to security and comfort? My guess is that this sense of relative peace and interiority is integral at least to your idea of the home, if not its entire reality.

If we take a moment to reflect, most of us can probably call to mind the feeling of being ‘at home’ in a place or dwelling. We can also easily imagine its opposite, being ill at home and feeling uncomfortable, unsettled or like one does not really belong to a place. Until a short while ago, I had never thought very seriously about the meaning of home beyond these basic distinctions. Then a brief post on trail hiking prompted me to think again about the nature of being-at-home-ness. 

The post recounted how a good number of the hikers appear to find a sense of home on the trail. These explorers seem to feel most ‘at home’ not when sheltered inside a fixed structure or a familiar daily setting, but when in movement – under the open sky, traversing and surviving challenging terrains in unpredictable conditions – often taking considerable risks along the way. 

This subtle, perhaps simple insight got me wondering whether our assumptions of fixedness and insularity associated with the home, which now seem normal and even ideal to many of us, were but distortions that kept us from seeing a more complex reality. If it really is possible for some of us to experience a sense of home out in the open, in constantly changing conditions, does that not suggest that physical seclusion and stability are in fact not essential for feeling at home in a place and in our present lives? Does it not imply, further, that we might not be quite as fulfilled  and nurtured in our contemporary physical and social home environments as we tend to assume? Perhaps the truth is that many of us have yet to fully explore what could truly make us feel at home in the world.

If we look at architectural history and anthropology of the home, we can help set these ponderings in a wider context. In the classic work Experiencing Architecture, Steen Eiler Rasmussen notes that before the onset of modernity, the very crafting of homes and essential implements was a communal, rather than private or commercial, enterprise that entire villages took part in. The individuals who would come to occupy a building were directly involved in its formation, and the consequence was that ‘houses were built with a natural feeling for place, materials and use and the result was a remarkably suitable comeliness’ (Rasmussen 1959/1992, preface). By the middle of the 20th century, much of this had changed and not for the better, according to Rasmussen: ‘in our highly civilized society, the houses which ordinary people are doomed to live in and gaze upon are on the whole without quality’. What had been lost was not merely the aesthetic harmony of housing or the communal, situated dimension of the home-building process, but also a broader sense of attunement with local ecosystems, landscapes and even seasons. The anthropologist Tim Ingold has written extensively on dwelling, environmental perception and settings that should be viewed as fully alive rather than inert. He observes that industrialized modes of production have disrupted the sense of reciprocity that people feel towards the land they inhabit while also stymieing the local material and relational flows that constitute a living place. 

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“Despite the dramatic erosion of all that used to root our physical dwellings in something greater than their most visible features, what should we do to find a deeper sense of home in contemporary conditions?”

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This understanding can help us appreciate why the alienation and isolation of our present-day homes is at once more profound and tragic than we might initially envisage. It is as if the living roots and rich entanglements that used to make up a home have been surgically removed, leaving behind a mere empty shell, an anonymously designed structure without personality serving as a socially unmoored container. We may have become more mobile and free from the constraints of place-based communities as a result, but at what cost?

Just what is it that makes today’s homes so different, so appealing?, Richard Hamilton. 1956.

As disturbing as this may seem, it can also bring us some relief. If our abodes have themselves become radically untethered from the life-giving relations and processes that used to ground them in place, it should not then come as a surprise that we struggle to feel fully alive in them. How could we feel a deep sense of homeliness and rootedness in buildings or places that have become so abjectly rootless, lifeless, and deprived of the flows that used to both constitute them and nurture the inhabitants’ souls?

Before you pack up your rucksack and set out on a long hike or pilgrimage, consider instead searching for a nearby place that retains some degree of rootedness, history and entanglement. For Jenny Odell, the artist and author of How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy, such qualities could be found in Oakland’s Rose Garden, built into a quiet hillside. Having made the decision to ground herself in this tangible place, Odell quickly came to value the way in which the garden offered her an enriching, contemplative space. Far from furnishing an experience of total isolation, the garden opened her up to notice the diverse forms of life frolicking around her, starting with birdsong. As her moments of ‘doing nothing’ continued, the sound of ravens, robins, song sparrows, chickadees, goldfinches, tomawhees, hawks, nuthatches and others became so familiar to her that she no longer had to strain to recognize them. These unexpected friendships and the coziness she felt within the garden’s labyrinthine layout gave Odell a real sense of home not in a building or even a group of humans but in a fluid bubble that while removed, was a fruitful setting for connection, affective experience and fulfilment. It does not matter  whether or not Odell viewed the Rose Garden as an actual home but that she found something that powerfully grounded her life, her thinking and her artistry, through stillness as well as movement, and through her newfound other-than-human acquaintances. 

Architects and designers, too, are starting to pay attention to how a stronger sense of home, or at least homeliness, might be supported by their creations and the ways in which these interact with their surroundings, even in urban environments. The maverick Japanese architect Yamashita Taiju elevates coziness into a core design principle that informs how he creates everything from offices to commercial complexes. He seeks to also cultivate a sense of flow (nagare) and movement in and around the structures he enacts, believing that without a lively sense of dynamism spaces grow stale and boring. Many other designers are experimenting with how the boundaries between the 'inside’ and ‘outside’ of a structure could be erased or at least minimized when crafting comfortable new dwellings and how they might rejoin local ecological rhythms and regenerative material flows. 

So, despite the dramatic erosion of all that used to root our physical dwellings in something greater than their most visible features, what should we do to find a deeper sense of home in contemporary conditions? I believe that, as a first step, it will help if we set aside binary thinking and embrace how privacy and connection, shelter and openness, stability and movement can combine to generate a fulfilling experience of being ‘at home’. Indeed, it is the presence of these seemingly opposing dynamics that used to bestow our homes with aliveness and meaning. That said, we do not need to (and cannot) revive past realities; instead, what we can do is translate the search for a deeper sense of home into a creative act. We can rediscover the kinds of flows and nurturing qualities that feel both anchoring and enlivening for us in our unique life-worlds. In doing so, we are at liberty to draw inspiration from those who feel truly at home on the trail as well as those who feel more cozy in capsule-like concrete apartments floating above sprawling cities. Perhaps this is how we will ultimately find a more enduring sense of home on Earth as well, as a species that so often appears ill at ease on the very planet that birthed it. 

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Tuukka Toivonen, Ph.D. (Oxon.) is a sociologist interested in ways of being, relating and creating that can help us reconnect with – and regenerate – the living world, in this age of the artificial.

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¹  Adorno, T. W. (1994). Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life (E. F. N. Jephcott, Trans.; 8th ed.). Verso. (Original work published 1951)
²  Rasmussen, S. E. 1992. Experiencing architecture (23rd ed). MIT press. (Original work published in 1959).
³ Odell, J. 2019. How to do nothing: Resisting the attention economy. Brooklyn, NY: Melville House.

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Iggy Pop Playlist

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Iggy Pop is an American singer, songwriter, musician, record producer, and actor. Since forming The Stooges in 1967, Iggy’s career has spanned decades and genres. Having paved the way for ‘70’s punk and ‘90’s grunge, he is often considered “The Godfather of Punk.”

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Marlon Brando

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The Six of Cups (Tarot Triptych)

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Name:  Pleasure, the Six of Cups
Number: 6
Astrology: Sun in Scorpio
Qabalah: Tiphereth of He

Chris Gabriel March 8, 2025

The Six of Cups is just enough: a perfect amount of wine, a good cigarette, the right portion of a meal. This is a card of enjoyment, of the feeling when we find exactly what we want. It is  harmony and balance between ourselves and the world.

In Rider, we find a picturesque scene. A boy in blue with a red cowl hands a potted flower to a little girl in a spotted yellow dress. They are in a little village square. A guard with a pike stands in the distance. Four cups are in the foreground, while one sits on a column behind the boy. It is a picture fit for Norman Rockwell.

In Thoth, we are shown six golden lotuses pouring water into six cups. An ornate, symmetrical network of pipe-like stems hold the flowers aloft. A blue sea lightly churns below, and a clear sky is above. 

In Marseille, a flower divides the card into two halves, each containing three cups to create a perfect mirror image. Qabalistically, this is the Beauty of the Queen, taking pleasure in perfectly balanced things.

It is a great rarity to get exactly what we want, but ‘Pleasure’ shows us it is possible. Together with the Five of Cups, ‘Disappointment’, and the Seven of Cups, ‘Debauch”, we are given the image of too little, too much, and just right.

In this way, the Six of Cups is like Goldilocks - just right. We are prone to desire too much of a good thing, turning it to dangerous excess. Or, there is not enough of it to satiate our needs, and we are left wanting. Pleasure is getting exactly the right amount of what we want, and achieving balance. 

This is a glass that is neither half empty or half full, it is just a good glass.

As Scorpio, this card directly relates to material pleasures, especially drink and sex. Both of these can cause a great deal of problems, as seen in the 5 and 7 of cups, but in the 6 they are just enough. It is the pure release of orgasm. The symmetry shown in Marseilles and Thoth really paint the picture by way of mirror images, and harmony. 

In the words of William Blake “No bird soars too high, if he soars with his own wings.” When we follow our body and nature, we do not restrict all pleasure or over indulge. 

The Psychoanalysts understood well that our neuroses quickly do away with balance, leading us to  either take all that we can, or reject all.

Wilhelm Reich describes it well in “Listen, Little Man!”:

‘You remember the Swedish institution of smorgasbord. Many foods and delicacies are spread out, and it is left to the guest what and how much he will take. To you this institution was new and alien; you could not understand how one can trust human decency. You told me with malicious joy how you did not eat all day in order to gorge yourself on the free food in the evening.’

Let us listen to our bodies and take only what we will.

When pulling this card we can expect things to be quite good: a dream may come true, we may find our feelings mirrored, and our desires met. Let us then keep our hearts balanced and pure, so we don’t take too much of a good thing.

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Chris Gabriel is a twenty four year old wizard and poet who runs the YouTube channel MemeAnalysis.

CHANNEL, SOCIAL, READINGS

Film

Sourcing Gesture Pt. 2

Aby Warburg, Mnemosyne Picture Atlas. 1929.

Find part one of ‘Sourcing Gesture’ here.

Isabelle Bucklow March 6, 2025

Through the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the German polymath Aby Warburg devoted his intellectual life to uncovering a ‘psychology of human expression’. His final and unfinished project, a visual Mnemosyne Atlas (1927-29), showcases certain gestures that persist from Western antiquity to modern advertisements. Warburg forged formal connections across media to trace the migration of a certain pose from a tomb carving, to a Roman statue, to a 1920s fashion campaign. But it would be remiss to assume this was a historical retracing back to an original source, imitated and gradually adapted until it reaches its current form. Instead, this project uncovered not an original but recurrences: ‘Original worlds exist only as survivals, that is to say, impure, masked, contaminated, transformed, antithetically reversed’.¹ Specifically, Warburg was interested in recurring expressions of heightened emotion/motion, leading him to develop the term pathosformel (pathos formula). Pathos, an individual emotive ephemeral event, is transformed into a generic and permanent symbolic expression (enacted corporeally). 

Warburg was concerned with the emotional undercurrents of social memory that informed how past gestures are read in the present. Although gestures might once have claimed stable meanings through time, Warburg noted pathosformel can also be ‘aesthetically reversed’, that is, they both contain and can be flipped into their opposite; joyous laughter becoming sinister mania. The same gesture is capable of communicating different things and Warburg termed this oscillation between opposing forces an ‘energetic inversion’. Thus, for Warburg, gestures are primarily signs of ‘affective intensity and energy’. An affective (and affecting)energy is stored in, released, received and re-enacted through gestures; in short, gestures move (corporeally, temporally) and we are moved by them (but to what psychological ‘affect’ we cannot always be sure for that same gesture, as we have seen, can tip into its opposite meaning).

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“Gesture's fragile, fluctuating energy is displaced; a process akin to pinning a butterfly to a mount, which tells you nothing of what a butterfly actually is.” 

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Returning to Atkins and Zultanski’s Sorcerer, the set was delineated by three cast-iron radiators. The script’s Appendix A states the radiators must be ‘plumbed into the central heating of the theatre […] on and quite warm’.² It is also acknowledged the audience might never notice the radiators are on. There is however a moment in the play when Peter leans in to adjust one of the radiators, ‘his microphone picks up the sound of water moving in it’. For a play propelled by gesture – through ticks and gestural skits (outlined in the stage directions) – and where the use of these gestures conjures a sense of psychological unease, it feels apt to note the explicit circulation of energy in the space as carrying something of a Warburgian charge; Where else does gesture emerge from but the heady concoction of affective intensity and energy. 

If gestures have long been defined by a simultaneous charge between kinetic energy and stored energy, today gestures are also stored in energy intensive data centres. The online database Imagenet contains a wealth of gesticulations categorised under the branch: natural object> body> human body>; and there are datasets based on a collection of European early modern paintings, from which hand gestures are ‘extracted using human pose estimation (HPE) methods’. Some datasets are open source while others are bought and sold or generated in-house to train all sorts of AI tools. The first that comes to mind is the gesture recognition feature in Google Meet video calls. Give a thumbs up and an emoji will appear on screen, raise your hand and the host will be notified you have something to say, of course this function is rife with misrecognition, outbursts of emojis and unintended affects. In such datasets the cataloguing may evoke Warburg’s atlas by bringing together disparate sources that share a formal similitude, but the binary order imposed by these datasets flattens and de-contextualises gestures, fixing them to a preordained affect. Stored here, gesture's fragile, fluctuating energy is displaced; a process akin to pinning a butterfly to a mount, which tells you nothing of what a butterfly actually is. 

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¹  Georges Didi Huberman, The Surviving Image (Penn State University Press, 2016) p. 161
² Ed Atkins, Steven Zultanski, Sorcerer (Prototype, 2023) p. 106

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Isabelle Bucklow is a London-based writer, researcher and editor. She is the co-founding editor of motor dance journal. 

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Francis Ford Coppola

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Sourcing Gesture Pt. 1

Antonin Artaud, 1948. Le Cuziat.

Isabelle Bucklow March 4, 2025

Some months have passed since we last spoke about gesture, and we are no closer to conclusivity. I'll begin with simple observations:: we all gesture everyday, and those gestures are, more often than not, seen and understood by others. Gestures signify and transmit information and so serve a communicative function. This communicative status has led many to neatly package gesture as a language of sorts, that is, decodable, meaningful, shareable and universal. We’ve explored in earlier writings that gestures accompany and provide emphasis to language, as in persuasive speeches of antiquity to present day. But this understanding can  impose hierarchy, establishing language as the source-code that deciphers the gestures. Here, however, I am interested in those gestures that disrupt semantic meaning, that do not rely on a specific word or stable concept, but instead subtly shift according to their affective intensity, revealing the invisible according to their own symbolic logic. 

The French dramatist Antoin Artaud’s impassioned 1938 manifestos for the stage, The Theatre and its Double, speaks of the actor’s need ‘to break through language in order to touch life’, clarifying ‘it must be understood that we are not referring to life as we know it from the surface of fact, but to that fragile, fluctuating center which forms never reach.’¹ Gesture exists  in this precarious point between fragile fluctuating life-force and corporealized form. Writing some years later, British theatre director Peter Brook referenced Artaud, adding the actor’s need to find a ‘form which would be a container and reflector of his impulses [...] We encouraged the actors to see themselves not only as improvisers, lending themselves blindly to their inner impulses, but as artists responsible for searching and selecting amongst form, so that a gesture or a cry becomes like an object that he discovers and even remoulds.’²

If we are to loosen language’s hold on gesture, then we can  more wholly consider the forms or gestures an actor selects, and where they came from. For it seems that when you are really into something or someone and your interest is piqued, you’ll quickly get an itch to know the fabled ‘origin story’ and isolate the determining factor that set it all in motion. In anticipation, we are not going to find it.

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“Just as a child imitates the actions successfully executed by those with authority over them, the gesture is borrowed from without and performed from within.”

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One approach would be to turn to evolution. We have previously considered Andre Leroi-Gourhan’s Gesture and Speech where he traces ‘The essential traits of human technical gesticulation’ back to the action of grasping. Leroi-Gourhan, like us, was interested in the gestures of human hands, even more so in the ‘mesh of techniques’ that humans inhabit and from which a grasping hand emerges. But dwelling on the prehistoric conditions that produced a certain gesture feels a lot like asking someone their personal history only for them to begin at early bipedal apes roaming the Miocene epoch. So, by way of narrative license, let’s jump from Leroi-Gourhan’s paleoanthropology to a contemporary avant-garde theatre-script: Ed Atkins and Steven Zultanski’s Sorcerer, 2023, in which three protagonists, drinking beer in their friend's apartment, are discussing how they go about putting on and taking off a jumper:

‘I put my arms through like this–
(makes motion, puts her hands through the air like a long glove or like putting hands in a cow, one after the other.)
And then I do–
(swooping motion, ducks head in, almost like going under a short doorway) 
[...]
I do an awkward mixture of both. I put my head and one arm though at the same time–
(makes moton, half-lifts one arm and tilts head, like putting head through and checking on the other side of a portal)’³ 

Described are idiosyncratic combinations of gestures that achieve the same thing, as well as stage directions for gestures that employ metaphor to describe one gesture by way of a different gesture. 

One protagonist observes:

‘There’s a way people do it in the movies, which I copied as a kid: you put your arms in first– 
(puts arms in.) 
And you go–
(pulls over head in a movie way)’

In a seminal, anthropological text on gesture from 1934, Techniques of the Body, Marcel Mauss noted how movies influenced gestures. When lying in a hospital in New York he wondered, ‘where previously I had seen girls walking as my nurses walked…At last I realised that it was at the cinema…Returning to France, I noticed how common this gait was […] American walking fashions had begun to arrive over here, thanks to the cinema… ’.⁴

The walking fashions described by Mauss are not motivated by biological necessity but adopted on the basis of aesthetics, taste and an imitative desire to be like stars in the movies. It is through this  opening that we can pursue symbolic gestures that arise from what Mauss terms ‘prestigious imitation’: Just as a child imitates the actions successfully executed by those with authority over them, the gesture is in this sense borrowed from without and performed from within. And so, at the turn of the century you could say many common gestures borrowed their iconography from what was performed in the cinema. But, where then did the cinema source its gestures if not from gestures common to life? 

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¹  Antoin Artuad, The Theatre and Its Double, (Grove Press, 1958 [1938]) Preface, p. 13
² Peter Brook, The Empty Space (Penguin, 1968), p. 58
³ Ed Atkins, Steven Zultanski, Sorcerer (Prototype, 2023) p. 17-18 
⁴ Marcel Mauss, Techniques of the Body ([1934] 1973), Economy and Society, 2(2), p. 72

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Isabelle Bucklow is a London-based writer, researcher and editor. She is the co-founding editor of motor dance journal. 

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