I will now place myself under the auspices of he who sometimes dons the philosopher’s garb, who—ambiguous—is more often to be sought in the comedian’s banter, but who is always encountered in the politician’s secretive action: the good logician, odious to the world.1

Lacan the logician will take us into the movement of time as a suspended motion, modulated in “the instant of the glance”, “the time for comprehending”, and “the moment of concluding”. With this, Lacan places the egoic subject within a temporal tension that signals anxiety:

The “I,” subject of the conclusive assertion, is isolated from the other—that is, from the relation of reciprocity—by a logical beat. The movement of the logical genesis of the “I” through a decanting of its own logical time largely parallels its psychological birth. Just as, let us recall, the psychological “I” emerges from an indeterminate specular transitivism, assisted by an awakened jealous tendency, the “I” in question here defines itself through a subjectification of competition with the other, in the function of logical time. As such, it seems to me to provide the essential logical form (rather than the so-called existential form) of the psychological “I”.2

Lacan is thus elaborating the temporal logic of the mirror stage—where the infant, standing before its own speculation, experiences an anticipatory movement of its body that remains suspended in the very instant of the glance.

Join us as we unfold Lacan’s riddling logic with our special guest, Nick Castellucci, co-host of the Vanishing Mediators channel.

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00:00 - 07:53 Lacan the Logician
07:54 - 24:01 Logic and Language in Western Philosophy
24:02 - 39:04 Kantian Ethics and Self-Authorization
39:05 - 50:55 Lacan's Sophism: Explaining the Prisoner's Dilemma
50:56 - 01:02:06 Signifying Motion and Phenomenological Time
01:02:07 - 1:20:00 Influencer Culture and the Anxiety of Verification
01:20:01 - 1:45:19 Logical Time in Analysis

I first encountered Lorie’s work in her book, Five Spirits: Alchemical Acupuncture for Psychological and Spiritual Healing. This text became the source of a synchronicity: only two days before my meeting with Lorie, a friend came over and mentioned that she was reading Five Spirits.

The spirit of this synchronicity is a dynamics of resonance—as Lorie and I already share roots in Worsley five-element acupuncture, depth psychology, and alchemy. If the unconscious is the Other’s discourse, then in this conversation I heard my own pathways coming back to me in new points of connection.

In this conversation, Lorie shares her experience and inspiration with listeners, as we move across fields in an exciting exchange of ideas. From five-element acupuncture to the spirit of human potential. From field dynamics to rapport, transference, and the alchemical third. From Jung to Lacan, archetypes to signifiers, and the structures of the unconscious.

We conclude by re-framing human potential and individuation into rhizomatic networks of becoming, where desire realizes destiny.

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Chapter Annotations

0:00 — Synchronous Currents

Opening with a synchronicity

03:28 — Five-Element Acupuncture

Studying with J.R. Worsley

06:48 — Acupuncture and Human Potential

Esalen; the mystery of acupuncture intervention

10:18 — Source Points

Teaching five-element treatment; less is more

13:27 — Field Dynamics

Subtle energetics; the joy of treatment; rapport and transference

20:35 — Knowledge and Collaboration

Breaking the epistemological divide; treatment as collaboration

24:32 — From Jung to Lacan

Tracing the move from Jung to Lacan; depth psychology and psychoanalysis

34:00 — Structures of the Unconscious

Preverbal experience and the a priori unconscious

40:23 — Spirit of the Points

Points as archetypes and signifiers

50:35 — Co-Individuation and Rhizomatic Becoming

Beyond the heroism of human potential and individuation

53:49 — Desire, Destiny, and the Real

Desire as the force of destiny; the Real to be continued

About Lorie Dechar

I’m an acupuncturist, psychotherapist, teacher, and author whose passionate focus is on the intersection of traditional Chinese medicine, depth psychology, spirituality, and Taoist and European alchemy. I touch the bodies, souls, and spirits of human beings with needles, moxa, plant medicines, poetry, stories, images, tears, laughter, and dreams.

I have studied with human teachers in this dimension – European Five Element Acupuncturist Professor J.R. Worsley, Zen Peacemaker Priest Claude AnShin Thomas, Focusing Founder Eugene Gendlin, Jungian Analyst Nathan Schwartz-Salant, and trans-public intellectual and post-activist Bayo Akomolafe. I have studied with more than human teachers – the quarry ponds, ocean tides, songbirds, fir trees, lady slippers, puffball mushrooms, sphagnum mosses, burdock weeds, and ice age stones – of the cove in Downeast Maine where I live. These, as well as teachers from other dimensions – the sages of ancient China, the revolutionary European mystics of Kabbalah and consciousness, wise wimmin whose names have disappeared like white feathers in the clouds – have guided me in the development of the work I call Alchemical Healing.

www.anewpossibility.com

In this conversation, I sit down with my friend and colleague, Paul Arellano, to explore the Year of the Fire Horse. We examine the Horse as a symbol of desire and drive, and Fire as an element of sovereignty and spirit. Paul unfolds the ecological and astrological dimensions, which I infuse with psychoanalytic and medical reflections. Together, we traverse a symbolic terrain of correspondences to better grasp the cautions and catalysts stirring this year.

00:00 - 09:23 The Ecology of the Fire Horse

Energetics of the Fire Horse, Chinese astrology, and cycles of change.

09:24 - 13:39 Heart, Fire, and Consciousness

The Heart as the seat of shen; fire element as warmth and relationality; centers of cognition in Eastern and Western medicine.

13:40 - 18:09 Horse Power

Horse as symbol of speed and power; horse power as amplification of energy.

18:10 - 27:20 Desire, the Unconscious, and the Libidinal Horse

Ethics of desire; the unconscious repression of desire; the horse as libidinal symbol.

27:21 - 30:57 Equestrian Therapy and Heart Fields

The heart field of horses; equestrian therapy and autism; horse as symbol of relational attunement.

30:58 - 38:42 The Sacrificial Horse

Vedic and Upanishadic conceptions of the horse.

38:43 - 42:17 The Heart as Sovereign

Horse as sovereign; Heart as Emperor.

42:18 - 49:08 Sublimated Sexuality

Reining in Fire Horse energy; Daoist deity Wen Zhe as general of negotiation.

49:10 - 54:38 Relational Conflict and Pericardium Gate

Potential for conflict; forgiveness and community; Pericardium as Heart Protector.

54:39 - 1:00:10 Tones of Excess Water

Fear; Water controlling Fire; freezing desire.

1:00:11 - 1:03:40 The Alchemy of Liberated Desire

Fire and Water as alchemical pair; nirvana as extinguished desire; moksha as liberated desire.

1:03:41 - 1:09:51 Historical Shifts

Fire Horse as solar fire; avoiding burnout; retrospectives on the previous Fire Horse year (1966).

1:09:52 - 1:13:18 Heart as Yin Fire

The wisdom of allowing; embodied speech.

1:13:19 - 1:20:24 Crystallizing Destiny

Forging fire; deepening connections.

About Paul Arellano

Paul Arellano is an acupuncturist and herbalist working in Portland, OR. He studies the interplay of climate and human health through the Wuyun Liuqi system of ecological health science. In addition to studying and writing about seasonal dynamics in nature and health, Paul offers BaZi natal chart readings, which uses the 5-Element system to create a “landscape map” of personal constitution and character. In these readings, Paul explores how each individual can harmonize with their own inner nature and enter into resonant, healthy relationship with the living forces of our world.

https://www.willamettevalleyacupuncture.com

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00:00 - 06:54 What is Ordinary Psychosis?

06:55 - 10:04 Latent Psychosis and Hidden Illness

10:05 - 13:54 Institutional Psychiatry

13:55 - 20:04 The Place of Psychosis

20:05 - 28:59 Psychosis and Neurosis

29:00 - 34:19 Symbolic Modes of Treatment

34:20 - 40:09 Psychedelics and Psychosis

40:10 - 45:04 Psychosis and Capitalism

45:05 - 50:59 Institutional Psychoanalysis

51:00 - 57:39 Psychoanalysis and Style

57:40 - 1:02:14 The Humanity of Analysis

1:02:15 - 1:08:09 The Lacanian School

1:08:10 - 1:14:39 Clinical Study Days and Misunderstanding Sexuality

1:14:40 - 1:21:14 Resisting Standardization

1:21:15 - 1:28:09 Virtual Analysis and the Presence of the Analyst

1:28:10 - 1:35:19 On-Demand Analysis and the Desire of the Analyst

1:35:20 - 1:41:59 Psychoanalysis as a Way of Life

1:42:00 - 1:47:36 Upcoming Events and Closing Reflections

About Michael McAndrew

Michael McAndrew is a poet and Lacanian psychoanalyst based in Denver, CO. He is a member of the Lacanian Compass.

Meridian Mappings: Symbolic Anatomy and Global Medicine

I was honored to sit down with Z’ev Rosenberg for a wide-ranging conversation on the nature of anatomy, tradition, culture and more.

Our dialogue oscillates around Lan Li’s publication, Body Maps, an anthropological study of the “graphic genre” of meridian drawings in Chinese medical history. In the preface of the text, Li writes:

It was from the visually absolute inscription of a line and a dot that physiologists grew to question whether knowing where meridians lay defined what constituted them. Place somehow presumed essence. Meridian tu manifested the uneasy relationship between aesthetic practice and ontological judgment. Conflating what meridians were to where they appeared on paper gave anatomical images power. Reading meridian tu as body maps pinned meridians to a place on the page. It confused the sign with the signified. (Li, xiii).

Z’ev and I open the field by discussing this quotation. As we move through its meanings, we touch upon the symbolic and the empirical, medicine as a map of relatedness, the path of the scholar-physician, the ecological dimension of medical knowledge, and the evolution of medicine in a changing world.

In the afterglow of speaking with Z’ev, I found myself reflecting on the resonance of shared networks, classical thinking, and intergenerational dialogue. How we are still discoursing meridians, centuries after they were first written.

This conversation also follows my recent essay, Méridiens du Parlêtre, where I explored meridian lines as symbolic structures of the unconscious.

Chapter Annotations

00:00 – Meridians as Body Maps
Lan Li’s Body Maps, the problem of mapping meridians onto nerves, and how anatomical images confuse the sign and the signified.

07:30 – Symbolic Anatomy as Empirical
Symbolic structures as palpable and knowable; meridians as multi-dimensional structures; meridian drawings as structured like a rebus.

17:30 – Chinese, Tibetan, and Ayurvedic Anatomies
Comparing meridians with Indo-Tibetan nāḍīs and humors; why Tibetan medicine never developed a true meridian system; five-element paradigms; plural medical canons.

26:30 – Pulse, Metaphor, and the Scholar‑Physician
Pulse as “movement in the vessels”, natural imagery in the Mai Jing, and the distinction between technician and scholar‑physician.

36:00 – Chemicals, Ecology, and ‘Engineering’ Medicine
Chemical medicine, toxins, and the limits of the engineering model; quality of life, chronic disease, and the environment.

47:00 – Ethics, Home Clinics, and Medical Freedom
Working from home, patients as family, and the ethics of not subordinating a symbolic–ecological medicine to throughput and billing.

56:00 – Worsley, Five Elements, and Neoclassicism
Worsley tradition as syncretic and neoclassical; the Nanjing as a source-text of acupuncture; the discovery of style.

1:04:00 – Epidemics, Climatology, and Warm Diseases
Warm diseases, climate change in the classics; Tibetan medical views of epidemics as ecological violations; wu yun liu qi and host–guest qi in a disrupted world.

1:12:00 – Circadian Rhythms and Ministerial Fire
Circadian biology; nature as medicine; Li Shizhen on petroleum and fire; Z’ev’s upcoming book A Room Without Mirrors.

1:18:00 – Global Medicine and Medical Pluralism
Silk Road medicine; medicine as inherently global and plural.

1:23:00 – Closing Threads: Jing as Classic, Thread, and Meridian
Medicine as a way of life and what it means to weave a living fabric of medicine today.

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About Z’ev Rosenberg

Z’ev Rosenberg, L.Ac., began his studies of Asian schools of medicine in the early 1970’s, with studies in macrobiotics, shiatsu, and theory of Chinese medicine.

He received a degree from the Santa Fe School of Natural Medicine in Western herbal medicine and body therapies in 1976, Kushi Institute (Boston, Massachusetts) in 1979 in macrobiotic counseling, Southwest Acupuncture College in 1983 in Acupuncture and Oriental Medicine, and Emperor’s College of Oriental Medicine in 1989. He worked as a macrobiotic counselor and shiatsu practitioner throughout the 1970’s, and has been in full-time practice in acupuncture and Chinese herbal medicine since 1983. At present, Z’ev maintains a private practice in herbal medicine and acupuncture/moxibustion with a specialty in chronic autoimmune disorders.

Z’ev terms what he practices as ‘full-strength Chinese medicine’, designed to manage and treat difficult conditions. He also directs the Alembic Institute, where he teaches advanced seminars in medical classics, pulse diagnosis, and treatment of autoimmune disorders.

Z’ev has written articles for several professional Chinese medical and macrobiotic journals, and is a consultant and product developer for Kan Herb Company in Santa Cruz, Ca. He continues to write articles for professional journals and has published several books:

• Returning to the Source: Han Dynasty Medical Classics in Modern Clinical Practice

• Ripples in the Flow: Reflections on Vessel Dynamics in the Nàn Jing

• Afterglow: Ministerial Fire and Chinese Ecological Medicine

• Humming with Elephants: A Translation and Discussion of the “Great Treatise on the Resonant Manifestations of Yīn and Yáng” with Sabine Wilms

References

Flaws, Bob. The Pulse Classic: A Translation of the Mai Jing by Wang Shu-he. Blue Poppy Press, 1997.

Gyatso, Janet. Being Human in a Buddhist World: An Intellectual History of Medicine in Early Modern Tibet. Columbia University Press, 2015.

Gyatso, Desi Sangyé. Mirror of Beryl: A Historical Introduction to Tibetan Medicine. Translated by Gavin Kilty. Wisdom Publications, 2010.

Li, Lan A. Body Maps: Improvising Meridians and Nerves in Global Chinese Medicine. John Hopkins University Press, 2025.

Manaka, Yoshio. Chasing the Dragon’s Tail. Paradigm Publishers, 1995.

Unschuld, Paul U. Nan Jing: The Classic of Difficult Issues. University of California Press, 2016.

I started Somaraja Press four years ago as a place to house my writings on Asian medicine, astrology, and more. My vision for the press is now expanding from a personal endeavor to a collective project, where the press becomes the locus for an assemblage of voices.

What is the function of the press? The word press originally referred to letterpress printing techniques from the mid-fifteenth century, where words were literally pressed onto the page. Gutenberg developed this approach from the centuries-old tradition of woodblock printing. A return to the press is therefore a revival of the word as a marking, of letters as palpable surfaces, and writing as a visible inscription of thought.

A shift in function is signaled by a change of name: from Somaraja Press to Parlêtre Press.

Parlêtre is a coinage from Jacques Lacan that combines parler (to speak) and être (to be) to connote “speaking being”. In other words, I speak, therefore I am. Parlêtre thus articulates the project of the press as a social link, where speaking beings inscribe a shared discourse through inspired writing.

This is not a transition from one subject to another but a movement that enlarges the frame of possibility—a context where psychoanalysis, medicine, and esoterica can be written and read.

Parlêtre Press is a place for writers who have grown weary of the elitism of big-house publishers and the editorial tyranny of academia. Parlêtre Press is where you can mark the page and print with your own style and symptom, à la lettre.

Ethics and Philosophy

Parlêtre Press is a niche publishing house for long-form essays and conversations at the frontier of the unconscious—where psychoanalysis and medicine weave aesthetic currents.

Parlêtre Press follows Freud in observing the unconscious as the linking factor across disciplines:

It is enough to say that psychoanalysis, in its character of the psychology of the deepest, unconscious mental acts, promises to become the link between psychiatry, medicine, anthropology, and literary history.”1

This understanding gives psychoanalysis a multidisciplinary privilege, by acceding its function to the field of the liberal arts. As Lacan says:

At the present time, psychoanalysis is perhaps the only discipline comparable to those liberal arts [of the Middle Ages], inasmuch as it preserves something of this proportional relation of man to himself—an internal relation, closed on itself, inexhaustible, cyclical, and implied pre-eminently in the use of speech.2

The ethic of the press is thus rooted in the traditional notion of the liberal arts—East and West, antiquity and modernity.

In ancient India, the liberal arts were conceived as the six limbs of the Veda (vedānga): phonetics, poetics, grammar, etymology, astrology, and ritual. This developed into a model of education that encompassed philosophy, medicine, grammar, logic, and the arts.

In medieval Europe, the liberal arts were comprised of seven disciplines divided into the trivium of the language arts (grammar, dialectic, rhetoric) and the quadrivium of mathematical arts (arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, music).

Parlêtre Press reinvigorates these intersections at the through line of the unconscious. Where do we situate the unconscious if not on an axis in time and space? Where is psychoanalysis as a phenomenon that sees the hidden proportion of man? What is the nexus of culture and thought?

Psychoanalysis developed in aesthetic step with surrealism. Parlêtre follows this beat into the thready pulse of transcendental realism, a new clinic of the real that finds its footsteps neither in the past nor the present but a future anterior already prophesied.

Transcendental realism is an assemblage of ecstasy, where desire flows in the jouissance of the speaking subject—where the real, the symbolic, and the imaginary translate to the real, the true, and the beautiful.

Submissions

Parlêtre Press welcomes exceptional writing that charts new territory in relation to the unconscious and the liberal arts. The press is a home for serious thinkers, pioneering clinicians, and independent scholars who desire to move beyond the closures of university discourse and into an open avant-garde of the written and spoken word. Here, the unconscious is the only thread linking the discourse of psychoanalysis with medicine and the esoteric anatomy of the real.

Essay submissions are welcome in the following fields:

• Psychoanalysis—Freud, Lacan, and the wider analytic tradition

• Medicine—Ayurveda, Tibetan Medicine, Chinese Medicine, and related modalities

• Astrology—Eastern and Western traditions of astrology and divination

• Vignettes—Case sketches, personal reflections, and dream fragments

• Poetics—Poetry, short stories, and literary criticism

If you are interested in submitting your work for publication, please send a brief proposal and bio to neeshee.pandit@gmail.com.

Listeners who are intrigued by Lacan’s references to Indian linguistics in this section are referred to my recent essay, “A Hamlet on the Ganges”, which provides an extensive commentary on this thread in Lacan’s teaching and its implications for psychoanalysis.

00:00 - 05:46 The Three Moments in Freud and Lacan
05:47 - 25:27 Time and Punctuation in Analytic Technique
25:28 - 36:56 The Master-Slave Dialectic
36:57 - 46:48 Somatic Therapies and the Speaking Body
46:49 - 1:02:04 Indian Linguistics and Semantic Resonances
1:02:05 - 1:08:23 Recollection and Repetition
1:08:24 - 1:31:19 A Hamlet on the Ganges
1:31:20 - 1:37:57 Hysteria and Obsessionality
1:37:58 - 1:46:28 The Subject's Ego and His Discourse's I
1:46:29 - 1:51:12 Lacan's Short Session
1:51:13 - 2:00:00 What the Thunder Said

A knot may have been tied for long, and yet it can be untied.
A closure may have lasted for long, and yet it can be opened.
If someone says an illness with a long duration cannot be removed, then that is simply an erroneous statement.

—Huang Di Nei Jing Ling Shu

Circulatory tree, arbor vitae of the cerebellum, lead tree or silver amalgam crystals precipitated into a tree that conducts lightning, is it your countenance that traces our destiny for us in the fire-scorched tortoiseshell, or your flash that brings forth from an infinite night that slow change in being in the En panta of language?

—Jacques Lacan, Écrits

Author’s Note

The body of this essay is comprised of five succinct parts:

I. The Warp and Weft of the Speaking Body

II. The Littoral Terrain

III. A Punctuation of Dreams

IV. The Body Without Organs

V. The Clinic of the Real

The style is condensed and aphoristic rather than expository and explanatory. After completing the text, I decided to add an overture to contextualize my theoretical moves in historical and conceptual terms.

My method is discursive and rhetorical—to write the shared discourse of acupuncture and psychoanalysis, and read their inscriptions to each other.

Some readers may prefer to dive headfirst into the body of the text only to return to the overture for afterthoughts; others may prefer a preface before entering the ambiance of the text.

This being said, I stake no claims. My only wager is a structure of inverted forms, suitable for efficacy.

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Overture

Free Associations for a Floating World

From Meridian Therapy to Meridian Analysis

Historical Antecedents

Acupuncture and psychoanalysis are subjects rarely spoken in the same breath. Their histories are vastly different in scope and locus—but I hope to show that their similarity is not across a frontier but through a neighboring landscape. That is, acupuncture and psychoanalysis are distinct languages with common roots in unconscious scripts.

If acupuncture and psychoanalysis can be read as functional articulations of unconscious structures, then it is the consequence of a communicable discourse already embedded at the root. Does discourse have a rhizomatic structure? Are acupuncture and psychoanalysis lateral developments, with anterior methodologies and radial diagnoses? If we follow this line of inquiry, we will be led to a concordance, rather than a synthesis.

We see the first intimations of a convergence between acupuncture and psychoanalysis in the early-to-mid-twentieth century, when both fields were experiencing a renaissance along parallel lines. But these lines of development only met in anticipation of a nexus.

In the early-twentieth century, Japan was facing the influence of modernization in relation to traditional acupuncture—centuries of practice were being revised in the arbitrary image of the West, as Shudō Denmei recounts:

In 1918 the government commission on acupuncture education compiled the so-called ‘revised acupuncture points,’ which became the standard for licensure. The revised acupuncture points bore no resemblance to the traditional meridians and points, but were arbitrarily arranged according to a grid system superimposed over the surface of the body.1

In reaction to this Westernizing trend, a group of Japanese acupuncturists began to advocate for a return to the classical source-texts of acupuncture, where they could retrace the anatomy of their medicine. Following the efforts of Yanagiya Sorei, the neoclassical movement known as keiraku chiryō, or “meridian therapy” was born.

The meridian therapy movement not only returned to the classics of acupuncture but also to a classical period in the history of Japanese acupuncture.2 Yanagiya championed the “traditional approach to acupuncture and moxibustion” and “contended that the information in the classics was valuable but not infallible. He believed that all classical approaches had to be examined with a critical eye, put into practice, and discussed among practitioners before their worth could be determined”.3

By the 1930s, Yanagiya had founded a school dedicated to his motto, “Study the classics!”. Practitioners of meridian therapy took to the Classic of Difficulties as rigorously as Lacan took to The Interpretation of Dreams. And they each carefully deciphered and codified a system of practice “that had never before been so clearly defined”.4

Meridian therapy reached Europe in the mid-1950s, when Yanagiya traveled to France at the invitation of the French International Society of Acupuncture and Moxibustion. Yanagiya’s arrival follows a fertile landscape in French acupuncture and psychoanalysis: Soulié de Morant had published the first Western compendium on acupuncture, L’Acuponcture chinoise, and Lacan had formalized his return to Freud in the seminar.

Meridian therapy develops along a similar longitude as Lacanian psychoanalysis. The closest historical parallel between them is a loop of influence between France and China via Soulié de Morant, a French diplomat to China who not only spoke Chinese but also learned acupuncture from Chinese masters. As Eckman notes, “I think we can say that contemporary traditional acupuncture in the West, whatever that is, started with George Soulié de Morant in 1927 in France”.5 In this sense, the history of acupuncture in France has an earlier inception than Lacan’s psychoanalytic school. But by the 1960s, both movements were in full swing.

Soulié de Morant’s magnum opus, L’Acuponcture chinoise, was published from 1939 to 1941, but the complete text was published posthumously in 1957. L’Acuponcture chinoise is a remarkable text in the history of acupuncture. Soulié de Morant not only translates classical Chinese and Japanese texts, he collects a diversity of East Asian traditions—Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese, and Korean—in a single place. His condensation of East Asian styles makes legible a pluralism intrinsic to the tradition of acupuncture, collating their ethic amidst a new cultural intersection.

Soulié de Morant treated prominent Parisian artists and intellectuals, including Maurice Ravel, Atonin Artaud, Jean Cocteau, Wassily Kandinsky, and Marie Bonaparte.6 Soulié de Morant’s collaborative relationship with Bonaparte is especially notable, since it marks what may be the sole historical convergence between acupuncture and psychoanalysis. Marie Bonaparte was not only the grandniece of Napoleon, she was an ardent follower of Freud, and helped establish Freudian psychoanalysis in France.

Bonaparte asked Soulié de Morant to translate the Yùxiájì (Memories of the Jade Box), a classical Chinese book on dream omens and their interpretations (ca. 239 BCE). In 1927, Soulié de Morant published his translation of the text alongside Bonaparte’s annotations as Les rêves étudiés par les Chinois in Revue française de psychanalyse—the same year that Freud published The Future of an Illusion and the English edition of The Question of Lay Analysis, and Lacan began his clinical psychiatry training at Sainte-Anne hospital.

Soulié de Morant belongs to a tradition of lay practice that Freud advocated for, a mode of work that moves from the institutional to the avant-garde and from academic discourse to analytic discourse. The question of lay practice that faces psychoanalysis also confronts acupuncture, even while the latter has secured both theoretical standardization and regulatory verification to ensure the limits of its “licensure”.7

Synthetic Precedents

Compared to acupuncture, psychoanalysis appears to be a new discipline, founded on Freud’s articulation of the unconscious. But this does not leave psychoanalysis without its antecedents in antiquity. Yanagiya’s “return to the classics” and Lacan’s “return to Freud” are Renaissance movements that revolutionized their respective fields through a retrograde motion. They each find new beginnings for their field at a point of origin, and thus precipitate a future direction. Lacan not only traces psychoanalysis to its founding moment in Freud but to the liberal arts of the Middle Ages—“the series going from astronomy to dialectic by way of arithmetic, geometry, music, and grammar”—that “foreground what might be called a fundamental relation to human proportion”.8

Human proportion is a constitutional ratio and a spatiotemporal complex. By citing the liberal arts, Lacan is suggesting that psychoanalysis concerns itself with constitutional structures. He elaborates:

At the present time, psychoanalysis is perhaps the only discipline comparable to those liberal arts, inasmuch as it preserves something of this proportional relation of man to himself—an internal relation, closed on itself, inexhaustible, cyclical, and implied pre-eminently in the use of speech.

It is in this respect that analytic experience is not definitively objectifiable. It always implies within itself the emergence of a truth that cannot be said, since what constitutes truth is speech, and then you would have in some way to say speech itself which is exactly what cannot be said in its function as speech.9

If the unconscious is a structure that is structured like a language, then it is constituted in proportions unique to the speaking body. As Lacan says, “Language is what constitutes xing, nature”.10 In the context of Chinese medicine, xinghas the connotation of “constitutional nature”. Lacan makes the link between language and constitution clear when he analyzes the Chinese character yan, which “means nothing other than language, but like all terms in Chinese, it can also be employed as a verb. Thus, it can mean both ‘speech’, and ‘what speaks.’ What does it speak? That would, in this case, be what follows—namely, xing, nature . . .”.11

The Freudian map of the unconscious is a topography of the psyche as a structure of signifying associations. The meridian anatomy of the Chinese is a topography of the psyche, written across the signifying terrain of the body. What happens to medicine and psychoanalysis when we take the unconscious as a psychosomatic constitution? If we cannot objectify the proportions of the psyche and soma, then what remains is a ratio of articulation, measured for the moment of its puncture. Thus, acupuncture apportions the body as a field of language through which speech functions.

By the 1960s, European practitioners had begun to absorb acupuncture into the milieu of psychosomatic approaches, in a field inaugurated by Georg Groddeck, a German physician and psychoanalyst who influenced Freud’s concept of the id (das Es).12 In 1965, Denis and Joyce Lawson-Wood published Five Elements of Acupuncture and Chinese Massage,13 an early and influential English-language book introducing acupuncture. In a chapter titled “Psychological Considerations”, they raise the question of synthesizing acupuncture with psychoanalysis.

They open their argument by referencing the work of French physician, Roger de la Fuÿe (a student of Soulié de Morant who promoted a synthesis between acupuncture and homeopathy in his treatise, Traité de’acupuncture). De la Fuÿe referred to his approach as “homeosiniatry”, basing it on a combined repertory of acupuncture points and homeopathic remedies.14 Highlighting de la Fuÿe’s approach to clinical synthesis, the authors write:

Doctor de la Fuÿe emphasizes, and we re-iterate and emphasize this also, that a practitioner must be supple in his outlook and not seek at all costs to make any one method triumph over all others. Above everything else the practitioner must have the desire to heal the patient: and, he says, it would be evidence of narrow-mindedness to reject a priori a synthesis of acupuncture and other methods on the grounds that such a synthesis of methods is not in strict accord with the ancient tradition of ‘pure’ acupuncture.15

This admonition applies equally to psychoanalysts: we must not seek the exclusive triumph of the psychoanalytic method for the sake of a “pure” ideal. The only purity of psychoanalysis is the presence of the speaking subject. Any other erection of purity leaves psychoanalysis impotent in the words of its own sanctimony. For Lawson-Wood, the question of modality is secondary to the primacy of the healing act: “The ideal therapist is one whose spirit is pliable enough, and whose knowledge is broad enough for him to use at one and the same time the quintessence of all known reputable methods”.16

From here, the authors mention Groddeck before formulating a link between acupuncture and psychoanalysis in “the treatment of the psyche”: “When we talk about treatment of the psyche we are not thinking in terms of modern Western psychiatry, with use of shock and drugs, but rather in terms of psycho-analysis and systems derived therefrom”.17 This leads them to pose two issues they associate with psychoanalytic treatment:

(a) Psycho-analysis, from the patient’s point of view, can be an expensive way of having the psyche treated; especially as a beneficial outcome is by no means certain.

(b) Whether it is in the end successful or not, psycho-analysis seems inevitably to be accompanied by a great deal of emotional torment and distress.18

It is difficult to know which methods of psychoanalytic practice or thought were familiar to the authors in formulating this critique.19 Regarding expense, the cost of treatment is typically seen in proportion to the frequency of treatment—and, in this realm, psychoanalysis has privileged an intensive format. Freud typically saw patients for analysis six days a week. Today, it is more common for psychoanalysts to see patients on a weekly basis—the same frequency with which patients also see their acupuncturist.

Who is to say which method is a greater source of distress—the scansion of the subject’s speech or the physical puncture of their skin? It is erroneous to locate these subjective experiences in an objective method of treatment. Patients may engage in analytic work for years, but they may also see their acupuncturist for decades. The duration of healing work is less questionable when we re-locate their effect in the logical time of a preventative praxis. But the question remains: how do we arrive at the “success” of any given treatment, regardless of cost and duration?

The authors continue to suggest that acupuncture may provide a more efficient pathway to the treatment of the psyche than psychoanalysis:

It is desirable, therefore, that there should be some alternative and far speedier method of resolving analytical problems. But this does not mean to say that we regard Chinese acupuncture by itself as an alternative to psycho-analysis in all cases; but rather do we intend to convey a judicious use of Chinese acupuncture points can serve as an extremely useful technique for bringing about more rapid results, without torment, and with greater predictability.20

This critique hinges upon a proper understanding of so-called “analytical problems”, or more accurately, symptoms of the unconscious. If we appreciate that such symptoms are necessarily psychic and somatic, then the question of method becomes the substance of a ritual.

In my clinical work, I have observed an equivalent efficiency between psychoanalysis and acupuncture, as well as the inverse. This is to say that the questions of efficiency and “resolution” are irreducible to method, but are rather a question of discernment on the part of the practitioner. It is perhaps less a question of “which” but of “who” and “when” and “what for”. At a specific point in the analytic process, the frame itself functions beyond the question of intervention and within the locus of transference. It is thus within the palpatory grasp of the practitioner’s hand to determine the precise dialectic of their clinic.

Despite their criticism, the authors conclude their thoughts by positing a classical link between acupuncture and psychoanalysis:

If anyone wants classical justification for linking psycho-analysis with acupuncture, we draw attention to the passages in the NEI CHING dealing with interpretation of dreams. Several thousand years before Freud the Chinese recognized that dreams represent a mechanism for symbolic wish-fulfillment.21

The authors are referring to the classical source-text of Chinese medicine, the Huangdi Neijing (Yellow Emperor’s Inner Classic). In chapter seventeen, “Discourse of Vessels and the Subtleties of the Essence”, the text discusses the affective dimension of dreams and correlates them with organs and elements.22 It is true that the topic of dream interpretation precedes Freud by millennia, as the therapeutic significance of dreams has been recognized for thousands of years in Ayurvedic, Tibetan, and Chinese medical texts.

Freud’s contribution is to chart the phenomenon of dreams within the associative network of the patient’s speech. As Lacan points out, “For a dream is not the unconscious but, as Freud tells us, the royal road to it. This confirms that the unconscious proceeds on the basis of metaphorical effects”.23 Lacan proceeds to situate the unconscious as a signifying structure:

Here, however, the path was not simply traced out for us by Freud: he paved the whole road for us with the most sweeping, unvarying, and unmistakable assertions. Read his work, open his texts to any page, and you will rediscover the foundational stonework of this royal road.

If the unconscious can be the object of a kind of reading that has shed light on so many mythical, poetic, religious, and ideological themes, it is not because it provides their genesis with the intermediary link of a sort of “significantness” of nature in man, or even of a more universal signatura rerum that would be at the core of their possible resurgence in each individual. Psychoanalyzable symptoms, whether normal or pathological, can be distinguished not only from diagnostic indices but from all graspable forms of pure expressiveness insofar as they are sustained by a structure that is identical to the structure of language. By this I do not mean a structure that can be situated in some sort of supposedly generalized semiology which can be drawn from its limbo regions, but rather the structure of language as it manifests itself in what I will call “natural languages,” those that are effectively spoken by human groups.24

Psychoanalysis teaches us that the locus of symptoms—whether psychic or somatic—is in the unconscious, and that a “symptom is language from which speech must be delivered”.25 The symptoms of meridian imbalance are thus analyzable symptoms, treatable through a tonification or scansion of signifiers. “It is via speech, of course, that a pathway toward writing is paved”.26 And this is where Lacan locates the double-transcription of xing and ming, what is inscribed by nature and what is what is written—“The shift occurs between xing, nature—such as it is, owing to the effect of language, inscribed in the disjunction between man and woman—and ming, heaven’s decree, this other character . . . meaning “it is written,” the character freedom shrinks from”.27 Xing and ming is the double transcription that codes the fate and ciphers the destiny of the speaking body.

The analysis of a symptom is the punctuating of a text, written across a signifying body. To puncture and to punctuate is to “point out”, to show the punctum that is the navel of the line. Soulié de Morant says, “It would seem that the action of puncturing is very simple and can only be accomplished in one way. However, the word ‘puncture’ has three meanings: the action of puncturing, the excitation produced by the puncture, and the trace produced”.28

These three meanings can be placed into the three registers of the unconscious: the action of puncturing is imaginary; the excitation produced by the puncture is a symbolic effect; and the trace that remains is the letter in the real.

Here, we approach the body ecologic at its littoral zone. As Lacan says, “What constitutes the ground of the littoral is the crossing out of any trace that may been there before”.29 Whether the punctuation of an associative discourse or the puncture of an associative meridian, it is we who must see the “imperceptible trace of . . . the gazelle’s footprint on the rock”.30 We must “listen for what lies beyond discourse” by taking “the path of hearing, not that of auscultating”.31 A riverbed where currents of discourse once ran, now only the inscriptions of a leitmotif left to read in the lituraterre of the speaking body.

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Après-Coup: Sinography as Semanteme

In the language of Asian medicine, we also find signifiers for unconscious structures and processes, for drives and their vicissitudes, for somatic symptoms and their psychic origins. Acupuncture is founded on a symbolic language that describes the functional apparatus as a psychosomatic structure. The symbolic order is a circulation of signifiers that move in a möbius channel of signification. The body does not keep a score but a name of functions that invoke a symbolic law.

Soulié de Morant’s translation of jīng as “meridian” is now in vogue to detest. Some accuse Soulié de Morant of inventingan imaginary meridian paradigm that is alien to the “scientific” basis of Chinese medicine. These claims privilege a scientific materialist reading of acupuncture that aims at its legitimization in the defiles of colonialist medicine. The new trauma is inflicted from within its co-optation. The trouble is an age-old confusion between the imaginary and the symbolic amidst a naïve realism.

Instead of “meridian”, the term “channel” is advocated as standard nomenclature. Instead of a geography of the body, they prefer the imperialism of chemical signals and vascular pathways, an altogether dissected vessel emptied of symbolic notions for the sake of imaginary captures by false prophets of reality. But to read coffee grounds is not to read hieroglyphics. Acupuncture is not a figment of imagination, projected onto a body double—it is a signifying system, as legible as a written language, whose rosetta stone it is our task to palpate and punctuate.

This becomes clear when we give Soulié de Morant’s translation the instance of another glance. He was not only a French diplomat to China but a polymath who learned the Chinese language from the age of eight and studied acupuncture in China during the cholera epidemic. Soulié de Morant was not only versed in acupuncture and linguistics but also in art, literature, music, theater, and history. Why did he choose the term méridien as a translation of jīng?

In the second chapter of L’Acuponcture chinoise, “The Twelve Meridians”, Soulié de Morant defines “meridian” and justifies his translation:

Knowledge of the meridians (jing), or lines of points, is an essential foundation for true acupuncture . . . The meridians give us an understanding of the relationships among the organs and help us to classify and analyze the effects of a point.

. . . The Yi Xue Ru Men explains (I, 1r): “The meridians (jing) are the longitudinal paths.” The ideogram used to describe these lines of points is formed by the elements “string-line-right-winding-work,” the idea being a string connecting a winding alley into a path. From the most ancient times, the term “jing” was used in astronomy for the lines of north-south longitude. It is still used in the countryside for the north-south paths of a field.

The pronunciation jīng has not changed since antiquity. The British transliteration is “ching” while the old French transliteration is “king.” Sometimes the name “jīngluo,” pronounced “keiraku” in Japanese, is used.3233

Chinese is a tonal language and, as such, words convey distinct meanings depending on their intonation. The term jīng, as in jīngluo (“meridian network”), is pronounced in the first tone. At the level of audition, it is thus indistinguishable from the jīng which means “essence”. Although the jīng of meridian and the jīng of essence are pronounced identically, they are written differently. English transliteration misleads us into the illusion of an identical text, since jīng is transliterated the same in both cases. But when we look at the ideographic script of Chinese writing, we see the distinction in plain sight:

• 經 jīng/meridian

• 精 jīng/essence

Let us look closely at the meaning of jīng (meridian). Jīng means “warp”, “longitudinal lines of the Earth”, “pathways of the sun, moon, and stars”, “channel”, “road, footpath”, “principle, law”, and “classical texts”. This polyvalence of meaning makes obvious the signifying nature of the word jīng. In other words, there is no translation that duplicates the meaning of jīng in a one-to-one correspondence; there are only chosen moments in the movement of its signifying chain.

Consider the definitions themselves:

1. As warp, jīng signifies the threads of a loom, a weave or mosaic, a quilted tapestry.

2. As longitudinal lines, jīng signifies a spatial plane of coordinates, angular distance and span, and an invisible (but locatable) topography.

3. As pathways of the sun, moon, and stars, jīng signifies an orbital plane, a celestial ecliptic, and an evanescent appearance.

4. As channel, jīng signifies a hydrological current, a pathway of irrigation, a furrow which conducts a symbolic passage, a groove which traces the sounds of time.

5. As road or footpath, jīng signifies transportation, traversal, and the vector of desire.

6. As principle or law, jīng signifies a symbolic order, a signifying chain, a structure of articulation.

7. As classical text, jīng signifies a timeless treasure, an enduring word, and a written pedagogy.

Soulié de Morant’s use of “méridien” is now evidently logical. The French meridien comes from the Latin meridianum, meaning “noon”, from medius, meaning “midday”. In astronomy, the term “meridian” describes the phenomenon of solar noon—when the Sun is directly overhead, it crosses a longitudinal meridian at its zenith. Is this not the “law of midday-midnight”34 that governs the logical time of meridian flows? The notion of meridian simultaneously signifies a longitudinal line and a point of intersection—a meridian is precisely the crossing-point of space and time.

This brings us to the Japanese translation, keiraku. Kei means “passing through” or “threading”, raku means “connecting” or “net”. The meaning of “passing through” resonates with the notion of “longitude” and “threading” resonates with “warp”. On a secondary level, keiraku means “thread of connection” or “chain of reasoning”. This meaning set brings us closer to the notion of a signifying chain that is both logical and related to itself, or analyzable.

Meridian Analysis

Does this not take us to the zenith where psychoanalysis articulates its field and function? “Analysis” comes from the Greek analuein, meaning “loosen”. What is loosened in analysis if not the very threads that course a signifying chain? The discourse of the body is already written upon its surface in threads of connection that await communication.

Chiryō means “treatment”, “cure”, “therapy”. Taken together, the phrase keiraku chiryō was consistently referred to in English as “meridian therapy” by the Japanese masters who founded this movement. With the phrase, “meridian therapy”, I felt the masters were not only placing themselves within an historical current at the precipice of a century, but in a momentary suspension in which the instant of their glance was set upon antecedents across milled annals of comprehending.

We cannot conclude an anxiety of influence that holds us still in a moment of temporal tension, suspended between classical threads of thought evolved through thousands of times. The future of medicine is neither a syncretic nor integrative but entirely radical. A return to roots still growing in microbiomes.

If what is classical is merely in step with the past, then how are we to ascertain the lagging moment that drags our feet behind the beat? The classification of classical is an assertive logic that attempts substantiation through historical associations in thought but not necessarily through word and deed. The verification of oral transmissions is a false deduction in the locus of its locution. The anxiety of influence is an existential angoisse, caught between the sense of what was and the discordance of where one is. Lineage becomes the spatial lure of associative lore rather than a treasure trove of scriptural transmission.

A claim is no more than an anticipated certainty, made with hesitant hands that needle synthetic threads. The truth is a dialectic across antiquity and culture, where medicine arose as a collective logic. But this collective is nothing but the subject of the individual.

The truth that depends on the rigor of each is a subjective assertion that will stand the tests of time by anticipating its own return. In returning to the classics, medicine receives its own message in an inverted form. The subject who practices is neither technician nor artist but a clinician of transference, where what is exchanged is not reciprocal but transmissible.

We seek not the duplication of the past in acts that bring us closer to nothing more than our own double, who is neither extant nor invisible but always looking back. The glance we catch is exactly our own, even when we hear it in oracular echoes.

What is divined has been heard before, what is seen has seen us first, and what is foretold has thrust itself upon us. What we listen for to hear a diagnosis and see a prognosis is neither a reflection nor a speculation but the anticipated certainty of an outcome. The intervention of medicine is ever in the company of the three times, where an omnidirection of its text is reciting truths still grasping another time.

This leads us to the revolutionary conclusion that what is classical is original, not a grade but an avant-garde. The experimental form of an intervention leaves half-spun threads open for another hand to loom. My response a century later is to move keiraku chiryō toward keiraku bunseki—from meridian therapy to meridian analysis—an intervention at the midpoint where the psyche meets the soma of a speaking being.

By emphasizing meridian therapy, the Japanese masters were resuscitating the classical locus of acupuncture intervention as meridian-based in distinction to the organ-based locus of herbal medicine. The meridian network is the symbolic layer of the body, a cartography not reducible to organic anatomy and physiology.

Psychoanalysis and acupuncture are symbolic interventions at the level of a linguistic field that is constituted as a chain of signification—a legible and palpable discourse. Psychoanalysis and acupuncture are differentiated by the implements of their intervention, but the essence of their logic is similar: listening to diagnose, hearing to punctuate, and seeing to anticipate.

As we move from therapy to analysis in all our interventions, we move through the registers of our respective fields and approach a clinic of the real. The movement of analytic acupuncture is framed at the intersection of two modalities, but the nature of their intersection is a broad spectrum truth that lives freely in every associative anecdote.

Rather than the administration of a therapeutic cure, meridian analysis attends to the discourse of the patient as a free-associative text, where punctuation is placed with acumen, an audible rendering of an unheard oracle. A physical needle puncturing a symbolic structure is an analytic act that takes the unconscious as the logic of its certainty. And there is an arrival of qi, likened to the feeling of a fish taking the bait, a sinking into subcutaneous signifiers at the tip of the signified, a current of junctures that irrigates the ebbs of speech.

Psychoanalysis and acupuncture are not parallel fields, but semblables likened across a discursive structure. Psyche and soma are the fields where the function of acupuncture and psychoanalysis intersect. The nucleus of their circumlocution is the chiastic composition of the unconscious. When we take acupuncture at the letter of its word, we will practice l’acupuncture parlétre—a method for the madness of the speaking subject.

I. The Warp and Weft of the Speaking Body

The Body is Structured Like a Language

The meridians of the body are quilting points in a current of discourse, the nodal points where verbal forms intersect,35 where the signifier and the signified weave a symbolic order of language. The meridians are structured like a language, signified as they are by ideographic names that picture a law and order.

The name of the point is the holy spirit of the signifier; its character is a sinographic dream. The names-of-the-points are the names-of-the-father that encode the physiology with its heavenly qi.

Qi is the mechanism of the transference that powers communication and relatedness, or the very function of discourse as a social link. Qi is the transferential locus of the relatedness between the Umwelt and the Innenwelt, a likeness that yet yields a difference rather than a reciprocity. The meridians thus describe and inscribe the very meaning of our relatedness as a signifying chain of associations.

How is it that the Chinese drew a topography of twelve meridians that mirror a likeness to the twelve rivers of China? Is not language equally a dialectical phenomenon? The body is structured like a gaze, itself a body politic that is its own double. Thus, the body is structured like a landscape.

It is not that the body is natural or unnatural—it is the individual who inhabits it that is imaginary. The body is not merely biological but a bios of logia—an incarnation of words.

The body itself is an environs of existence, a terrain of signifiers sliding across slippery spheres. The body is in a chain of dependent origination that is discursive in nature. The body is a canvas of tattoos, a carving of diacritical marks in symbolic cuts, etchings of permanence on a mortal frame.

Méridien is the synchrony of noon in a diachrony of day. A spatiotemporal complex standing on a mirrored stage. A mediating structure between the imaginary and the real. A tapestry of language woven in a logic of time and a ratio of space.

The meridian has a pulsion that moves in elemental rhythms and elliptical cycles. The message of the meridian is heard in palpable sounds of diagnosis, where the current of discourse beats in meters and ellipses, scansions and excesses, where speaking stagnates in temporal dialectics and spatial lures skip in arrhythmia.

In neurosis, there is a repression of desire, either in obsessional deficiencies or hysterical excesses. The method is to tonify the meridian at the level of desire. The technique is gentle—moxibustion followed by subcutaneous needling. For the neurotic requires a return of the repressed in a symbolic form.

In psychosis, what is foreclosed reappears. The method is to balance the meridian at the surface of its boundary. The technique is non-invasive—moxibustion followed by non-insertive needling. For the psychotic already fears the penetration by structures they foreclosed, long before they could be erected for real.

In perversion, there is a disavowal of desire. The method is to sedate the meridian in the direction of its counterflow. The technique is invasive—cauterization followed by deep needling. For the pervert disavows what is lacking in a reversal of flows.

The presence of the needle initiates an echo in its absence through a symbolic alternation, where the subject hears the tonification of their own message, returned without a sender.

Acupuncture is thus a discursive intervention in the subject, an invocation that punctuates the symptom in a smoke of signifiers, drifting in divergence from a single space.

II. The Littoral Terrain

The Discourse of the Body Might Not Be a Semblance

The littoral is a literal terrain, a continental divide that constitutes the body ecologic. In Chinese medical anatomy, the natural terrain is mapped onto the human body.

The body is not only a living system but a terrain, a topographical locus with valleys and streams, rivers and seas, mounds and mountains. The body is not a system of correspondences but a juncture of semblances.

The human body derives a natural language without being reciprocal. Semblance is a littoral edge, not a reciprocal relation. There, where the meridian bends in the curve of the body is a geōgraphia—a writing of the earth.

Therefore, the terroir of the body is structured like a language—its breath an inspired writing, its blood an inked inscription. From where do we inhale the calligraphic ink and brush of anatomical character?

We palpate the meridians by hand, sliding across a gap of connective tissues, between the littoral and the literal. The points we palpate are skin-deep depressions made in singular strokes, traces of letters in the parting of clouds. There is no belly in the muscle, only a gully in the real.

To needle is to invoke and evoke a punctual dance of rain, an arrival of jouissance. “What is evoked of jouissance on the breaking of a semblant, this is what presents itself in the real as a gullying”.

The needle is a signifier that ensnares the letter in the net of semblance,^[1] a lure of jouissance waiting to be caught. Where jouissance stagnates, the letter has no agency. To puncture is to reinvigorate an imaginary divide, to liberate a signifier in the symbolic order, to penetrate a hole in the real.

A puncture is a form of punctuating, a periodic break in a sentence that structures a communication. Therefore, the act of puncturing constitutes a discourse. For it is the body that speaks, and one only derives jouissance from it when the word of interpretation rains upon it. In the Ling Shu, it is said:

The essence of acupuncture is that the effect comes with the arrival of Qi. The sign of this is like the wind blowing the clouds away. It becomes clear and bright as if looking into the blue sky. This means the purpose of acupuncture has been fulfilled.36

There is no obtaining of jouissance because there is no relation in which or from which it could be obtained. There is only an invocation between Heaven and Earth, a gully where jouissance arrives like a tidal wave, to part the clouds on the shore of the real.

Acupuncture is a discourse of the body, where the needle initiates a littoral link in a brush with jouissance. Therefore, Sugiyama says, “When there is sinking, heaviness, dullness, tightness, and fullness after the needle is inserted, and it feels as if a fish has swallowed the hook, and there is movement which seems sinking at one moment and floating at another, it means the Qi has come.37

Qi arrives in the form of a discourse in the sound of a social link. What then is the discourse of the acupuncturist? And does it resemble the discourse of the analyst?

The acupuncturist diagnoses the meridian in need of puncture by listening to the twelve pulses. Are these pulses not pulsions—radial urgencies, speaking to the ear?

The acupuncturist thus diagnoses by sound, where what is heard is an invocatory pulsion, in the voice of desire. The acupuncturist diagnoses by sight, where a scopic pulsion meets the gaze of the eyes in the chromatic of desire. The acupuncturist diagnoses by smell, where an olfactory bulb is the pulsion of an orifice, an aromatic of demand. The acupuncturist diagnoses by emotion, where the affect of transference is a pulsion of projection devoid of interpretation, mouthed as an edible demand.

An acupuncturist thus listens to hear and see the causative shape of the subject’s demand and desire, to locate an elemental pulsion in a course where clouds of jouissance gather to precipitate an impulse in the circuit of the real.

Acupuncture treatment is nothing more than the arrival of punctuation in the discourse of the speaking body. A talking cure is not necessarily a spoken cure, but it is a cure whose evidence is found in speech.

Therefore, the biggest mistake we can make as acupuncturists is to forgo the speech of our subjects by presuming an epistemological superiority via subtleties, when it is the speaking body of the subject that provides the articulation we wish to punctuate.

Acupuncture is an interlocution, an orthographic incision between language and speech, where every thread rests on the skin of the real. We will know if our treatment has been effective not by what we feel and see, but by what the subject says. Therefore, the acupuncturist and analyst are both punctuators of a discourse that may not be a semblance.

The role of the acupuncturist and analyst is to help the subject meet the mark, wherever their transcription is presently amiss. In doing so, the subject’s symptom is translated to a sinthome, where the knots and weaves of meridians and points become the warp and weft of aesthetic ecstasy.

III. A Punctuation of Dreams

A Physiology of Interpretation is an Anatomy of Destiny

The meridian network is a physiology of dreams, ciphered in anatomical lines of destiny.

The intersection of function and form is legible as nodal points in a signifying chain, a meshwork where desire grows up its fruiting body in myofascial forms of communication.

The navel of the dream is the abdomen of the body, where the tangle of dream-thoughts reaches unknown depths, unfurling uncharted territory in a remembered course of desire.

Diagnosis is an analysis of the surface, a palpation of the body at the radius of its pulsion and the umbilicus of function. Qi and blood are the psychical forces that determine the syntax and semantics of the dream.

When qi stagnates under an open sky, its vapor condenses to a cumulus of meaning, threatening to flood. Where blood stagnates, it distorts the essence of the message in knotted determinations. When qi is perverse, it displaces the signifier of its communication, leaving only defiles in its wake. When qi and blood combine in stasis, the dream is overdetermined—fated at the nucleus of repression, where only associations can free its predictive strangle.

What is distorted in the vessels condenses in the meridians, displaces in divergent channels, and overdetermines the sinews.

A puncture in condensation invokes semantic precipitation where it was compressed in anticipation. A puncture in displacement brings syntactical order where it was dammed in forgotten channels. A puncture in overdetermination restores an ambidexterity where it was lateralized in residual tendencies.

A puncturing is thus a reading of the body’s text, a deciphering of grammatical formation, to read in the palms of destiny, what was written and still suffices to say.

A puncture is a small wound, a perforation in a text, a traum of punctuation. A puncture is a punctual intervention in logical time, at the zenith of day and nadir of night. A puncture is an interpretation of dreams, a recitation of forgotten tones, the faint traces still spoken on the stave of hand and foot.

The needle is a stylus on recorded grooves etched in revolutions per minute as the oscillating stereogram of ambivalence and ambiguity, reproduced in skips for ambient auditions.

If a puncture projects an image divined in the mind of the puncturist, then only the imagination of meaning has been produced in a false prophecy. When a puncture reads the point of the symbol, then the puncturist becomes hierophant, a revealer of mysteries—carved as they are, these incisive words, born across the speaking body.

IV. The Body Without Organs

What is Foreclosed in the Symbolic is Possessed by the Imaginary and Invaded by the Real

What do we make of the body without organs, or the schizoidal form of psychosis? The body without organs is the foreclosure of the symbolic order. The body without organs lacks the symbolic function of the meridian structure. Therefore, psychosis must not be punctured at the level of the meridian, it must be fumigated on the surface.

The meridians are the territorializing flows in the official regime of the body. The body without organs is thus deterritorialized—it bears no cultural inscription even while it records the real on the anatomy of its surface. Officials without orders are crooked servants in an imperious curse, their master an emperor in abdication.

If the organs hold the spirits, then a body without organs is a hungry ghost, punished with paranoia. What he knows is everything that possesses the open spaces with messages produced by and for the socius. In place of spirits are traces of litter from the defiles of the signifier, a surplus without value in the capital bones of the body.

Psychosis lives in a kaleidoscopic field of human space, where the gaze is a visionary threat from the real. The psychosis of the meridian is a schizoidal splitting of names, where pathways are emptied of organic functions, left hanging like the strings of puppetry acts—the echo of their jouissance a haunt of the real.

V. The Clinic of the Real

Sooth-Saying is the Liturgy of a Boundless Self-Confession

What will suture these loose threads if not the formless acuity of analysis itself? How will the holy spirit of the signifier voice new truths in readable pictograms, rightside up?

Who will cast the last pantomime of this clinical theater? And where will the body without organs take its final flight—at the foolish precipice of the real?

Who will tremble at the second coming and the delirium of its revelations?

Whose hand will anneal the palms of pilgrims,
renunciated and raised,
in a palace of weariness?

The audacity of boundless self-confessions
rings true in a listening palace,
an auricle of the heart,
where the sovereign of the real
eternally enthrones.

If these questions are spoken in vain,
then I submit their testimony
before the audits of a witnessing body,
until only the real remains in place and sight.

00:00 - 08:20 Language and Psychoanalysis
08:21 - 16:25 The Interpretation of Dreams
16:26 - 22:06 The Analyst as Scribe
22:07 - 40:03 The Signifying Field of Language
40:04 - 53:28 The Symbolic Order and the Law
53:29 - 58:39 The Structure of Symptoms
58:40 - 1:05:43 The Mark of Repression
1:05:44 - 1:12:14 Neurotic Regression in Jung
1:12:15 - 1:15:50 Jungian Image vs. Symbolic Law
1:15:51 - 1:22:03 Rapport vs. Transference in Medicine & Psychoanalysis
1:22:04 - 1:27:05 Truth, Knowledge, and Gnosis
1:27:06 - 1:30:50 Repetition and Desire
1:31:51 - 1:36:00 Synchrony and Diachrony
1:36:01 - 1:45:36 The Name of the Father
1:45:37 - 1:46:57 The Oedipal Constitution in Tibetan Medicine
1:48:58 - 1:49:07 Symbolic Possession
1:49-08 - 1:50:55 Poetics and Rhetoric
1:50:56 - 1:57:19 The Symbolic Father and the Function of the Name

In this episode, we discuss the preface, introduction, and first section of the essay, where Lacan begins to distinguish between "empty speech" and "full speech" in psychoanalysis.

Audio episodes are also available on Spotify. Video episodes are available our YouTube channel (embedded below).

00:00 - 2:12 Introduction to Function and Field
2:13 - 5:33 Lacan's Ambition and the Return to Freud
5:34 - 9:28 The Saussurean Paradigm and Language Theory
9:29 - 15:14 Lacan's Critique of Contemporary Psychoanalysis
15:15 - 22:54 The Three Problems in Psychoanalysis
22:55 - 32:31 The Oracular Vernacular of Psychoanalysis
32:32 - 33:37 Symbolic Transference and Countertransference
33:38 - 37:31 Empty Speech vs. Full Speech
37:32 - 50:31 The Copernican Revolution of Psychoanalysis
50:32 - 52:47 The Role of the Analyst as Symbolic Intermediary
52:48 - 1:00:37 The Sacramental Nature of Psychoanalysis
1:00:38 - 1:23:16 The Function of Speech in Psychoanalysis
1:23:17 - 1:24:22 The Three Poisons and Passions of Buddhism and Psychoanalysis
1:24:23 - 1:36:20 Speech, Desire, and History
1:36:21 - 1:50:04 Logical Time
1:50:05 - 1:52:03 Repetition and the Death Drive
1:52:04 - 2:00:00 Love, Grace, and the Redemption of Speech

I’m thrilled to introduce my podcast project, Parlêtre, co-hosted with my friend and colleague, Andrew Flores.

Parlêtre is a long-form podcast dedicated to the work of Jacques Lacan—where we explore the theoretical and clinical intersections of Lacanian psychoanalysis through free-associative conversation. Parlêtre is a neologism coined by Lacan from the French words parler (to speak) and être (to be). Parlêtre thus conveys the meaning of “speaking beings”, signifying the human field of the unconscious and its expression in the function of speech.

Parlêtre podcast exists as an invocation and enactment of analytic discourse, where we speak from the locus of our own desire and engagement with Lacan’s oeuvre. Parlêtre is an invitation to hear Lacan through the conversation of speaking beings—whether you are a philosopher, student, clinician, or simply curious about what psychoanalysis has to offer to the cipher of our mortal destiny.

We are inaugurating Parlêtre with a series of episodes exploring Lacan’s landmark essay, “The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis”. (This is the essay I commented upon in my recent publication, “A Hamlet on the Ganges”). Our first episode, “Empty Speech and Full Speech”, examines the preface, introduction, and first section of Lacan’s essay.

We hope you enjoy listening to or watching our first episode!

Stay tuned for our next episode by subscribing to our Patreon, or following us on Spotify, YouTube, or Instagram:

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Author’s Note: Given the length of this essay, I’ve made a PDF available for those who wish to print and read on paper:

A Hamlet On The Ganges

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Preface: An Aesthetics of Analysis

Is the unconscious an amorphous mass of thoughts, of signifiers sliding above what is signified? Or is the current of discourse an aesthetic mood, an aromatic affect that tastes its own speech in the crafting of syllables? If the unconscious is structured like a language, then the edifice of its hand and foot is a metered lyric, a loose thread that spins an architecture of being, a rhetorical anatomy of lyrical flow.

In India, the field of linguistics (along with its associated disciplines of grammar and poetics) has been placed in the category of “aesthetics” since antiquity. Long before the Freudian discovery of the unconscious, Indian sages elaborated the literary structure of the human psyche and the structural nature of language. The Rig Veda, for example, is one of the oldest surviving written texts and is composed entirely in metrical verse. This is because Indian aestheticians revered poetry as the highest form of art, and thus cast their philosophical and spiritual treatises in poetic forms.

In Sanskrit, the study of linguistics and grammar is referred to as vyākarana,1 a term that means “analysis”, “explanation”, “prediction”, and “the sound of a bow-string”. The prefix vyā means “analysis” and kārana means “to effectuate”. Thus, vyākarana is the process of analysis. Vyākarana is also consonant with vāk (“speech”) and vākya (utterance). Here, the Sanskrit signifier has already laid bare the very meaning of psychoanalysis and language: an enigmantic art of discourse that divines an oracular speech, or what we may declare an “analytic discourse”.

A similar meaning is discovered in the Sanskrit term, upanishad. “Upa” means “near”, “ni” means “down”, and “sad” means “to sit”. Thus, Upanishad is commonly translated as “to sit near [a master]”, suggesting a primal circumstance of oral transmission where the disciple hears and receives the teachings from a master, typically in a forested setting. However, the eighth-century sage, Shankara, derives the meaning of upanishad from the substantive sad, meaning “to loosen”. According to Radhakrishnan, “If this derivation is accepted, upanisad means brahma-knowledge by which ignorance is loosened or destroyed”.2 This is an acceptable rendering given the philosophical context of the Upanishads. Yet, I wish to take Shankara’s derivation further, in order to point out the semantic resonance between upanishad and analysis.

The English term analysis is derived from the Greek analuein, meaning “to loosen”. If analysis and upanishad render the connotations of “loosening” in two distinct tongues, then the linguistic link between psychoanalysis and Upanishadic thought is already tied together. The influence of Upanishadic Advaitism on Greek philosophy is an anthropological inquiry we will leave aside, except to note that scholars have posited the influence of the Upanishads on Plato, Socrates, and Pythagoras. In addition to their philosophical similarities, the Indians and Greeks both employ a dialectical method of discourse as a format of philosophical inquiry, a structure which the Upanishads are an early example of. The discourse of the Upanishads is thus an analytic discourse—in its structure and its pedagogy.

What is analytic discourse? In Seminar XIX, Lacan asks, “What is the function of speech? The discourse of the analyst is formed in such a way as to make this question emerge. The function and field of speech and language—that’s how I introduced what would lead us to the present point of defining a new discourse”.3 Lacan is referring to his topological paradigm of the four discourses, a quadration that begins with the “discourse of the master” and concludes with the “discourse of the analyst”. Lacan continues to introduce his notion of analytic discourse by citing linguistics:

To introduce what is involved in the analytic discourse, I had no qualms about helping myself . . . to the facilitation provided by what is called linguistics. To quell the ardour that might have been too quickly aroused in my vicinity . . . I reminded you that this something that is worthy of the title linguistics as a science, which seems to have language and even speech as its object, was supposed only on the condition that the linguists swear amongst themselves never—or never again, because this is what people had been doing for centuries—even remotely, to allude to the origin of language. This was one, among others, of the watchwords I gave to the form of introduction that was articulated in my formula the unconscious is structured like a language.

. . . On no account is it a matter of speculating about any origin of language. I said that it’s a question of formulating the function of speech.4

Months before he delivered his essay, “The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis” in Rome, Lacan gave a prefatory talk titled, “The Symbolic, the Imaginary, and the Real”. Here, speaking to the existence rather than the origins of language, Lacan says, “Language exists. It is something that has emerged, we shall never know either when or how it began, or how things were before it came into being”.5

Lacan is clear that the question at hand is not one of historical or evolutionary linguistics. Rather, the question is a structural inquiry into the function of speech, which he regards “to be the only form of action that posits itself as truth”.6 Speech functions as truth because of its autonomous activity—“Not only do I speak, do you speak, and even ça parle, it speaks, as I said, but this carries on all by itself . . . A word that founds a fact is a fact of saying, but speech functions even when it doesn’t found any fact. When it gives a command, when it prays, when it insults, or when it voices a wish, it doesn’t found any fact”.7

In other words, the function of speech is the truth of its enunciation, of its incarnation in the letter that speaks in revolutionary tongues. It is from here that Lacan continues his discussion with references to Plato, the Stoics, and Saussure, asking, “Where does meaning arise? It is in this respect that it’s very important to have made the division . . . that Saussure made between the signifier and the signified . . . Moreover, this was something Saussure inherited from the Stoics . . .”.8 To complete Lacan’s thought, I will suppose that this was something the Stoics inherited from the Indians.

Indeed, Lacan ultimately concludes that the question of meaning is an enigmatic riddle (the likes of which we will soon encounter in the poetic verses of the Rig Veda): “When all is said and done, this meaning is an enigmatic riddle, and it’s an enigmatic riddle precisely because it is meaning”.9

In his introduction to The Principal Upanisads, Radhakrishnan positions the Vedic concept of speech (vāk) as analogous to the Greek logos. He writes:

For Plato, the Logos was an archetypal idea. For the Stoics, it is the principle of reason which quickens and informs matter. Philo speaks of the Logos as the ‘first born son’, ‘archetypal man’, ‘image of God’, ‘through whom the world was created’. Logos, the Reason, ‘the Word was in the beginning and the Word became flesh’. The Greek term, Logos, means both Reason and Word. The latter indicates an act of divine will. Word is the active expression of character. The difference between the conception of Divine Intelligence or Reason and the Word of God is that the latter represents the will of the Supreme. Vāc is Brahman. Vāc, word, wisdom, is treated in the Rig Veda as the all-knowing. The first-born of Rta is Vāc: yāvad brahma tisthati tāvatī vāk. The Logos is conceived as personal like Hiranya-garbha. ‘The Light was the light of men’. ‘The Logos became flesh’.10

Hiranyagarbha means “golden womb” and refers to the primeval source of the universe. In the Rig Veda, hiranyagarbha is associated with the deity Prajāpati, the lord of all creation. In the Yajur Veda, Prajāpati self-emerges from Brahman and co-creates the world with Vāc, the lord of speech. (In section III, we will return to Prajāpati’s prominence in the Upanishads, as the one whose utterance bestows the gift of speech).

The Vedas and Upanishads thus pose the function of speech as the process of incarnation, a scriptless verse of vowels and consonants, a speaking body become avatar in enunciation. Thus, in Indian thought, speech is seen as the intersection of psyche and soma, where the breath of life makes itself known in free associations.

This brings us to the foot upon which the speaking body of this essay has erected its structure: the radical essay, “The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis”, where Lacan articulates a poetics of psychoanalysis. Lacan accomplishes this noble task not only by returning to Freud but by tracing the field of the unconscious to its roots in Indian poetics. My task in this essay is to trace the links between Indian linguistics and Lacanian psychoanalysis, so as to map the aesthetic topography of the psychoanalytic art as an East-West dialectic, not only to return to a past but to chart a future of its practice.

My approach revolves around a close and chronological reading of Lacan’s “Function and Field”:

In section I (From Sanskrit to the Signifier), I trace the influence of Indian grammarians on Ferdinand de Saussure and the eventual influence of Saussure on Lacan’s conception of psychoanalysis. I introduce Lacan’s notion of the “field of language” and the “function of speech” as operative in the unconscious and in the analytic frame.

In section II (The Gift of Speech, or the Prosody of Prasad), I focus on Lacan’s references to Indian linguistics via Abhinavagupta and the concepts of dhvani and laksanalaksanā. I add essential context to Lacan’s discussion by quoting from a text on Indian aesthetics that he references.

This commentary culminates in section III (What the Thunder Spoke), where I place the convergence of Indian poetics and European psychoanalysis in Lacan’s concluding reference to the Upanishads.

My writing mirrors my practice—I punctuate threads of association with lucid intervals of interpretation. For if psychoanalysis offers us anything, it must be the realization of an inimitable style of symptom. If anything, I hope that I have not only illustrated the influence of Indian linguistics on Lacan’s psychoanalytic theory but have also crafted a key that unlocks an aesthetic force in the navel of the unconscious—a rasa that colors and tones the speaking body with its gifts.

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I. From Sanskrit to the Signifier

In 1953, Lacan delivered one of his most seminal discourses to the Rome Congress at the University of Rome—“The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis”. Also known as the “Rome Discourse”, this essay was first published in Lacan’s Écrits in 1966.

As an essay, “Function and Field” is a remarkable written text—not only substantial but literary, oratory, and even oracular. Lacan illustrates the function and field of speech and language in his own rhetoric, as he declares in the Preface, “If, then, my talk was to be nothing more than a newborn’s cry, at least it would seize the auspicious moment to revamp the foundations our discipline derives from language”.11

Lacan’s title is a parallel structure—the function of speech and the field of language. As he says in the Introduction, “My task shall be to demonstrate that these concepts take on their full meaning only when oriented in a field of language and ordered in relation to the function of speech”.12 For Lacan, the field of language extends into the very roots of Proto-Indo-European—the Sanskrit language. On this basis, Lacan articulates the function of speech as a discourse of poetics, especially the poetics of Abhinavagupta.13 In the course of the essay, Lacan ties the knots of Indian poetics and his psychoanalysis by citing the linguistic concept of dhvani to illustrate the function of speech. But the link between Indian linguistics and Lacanian psychoanalysis was first transferred in the influence of Ferdinand de Saussure on the core of Lacan’s teaching—that “the unconscious is structured like a language”.

Saussure taught Sanskrit and Indo-European languages at the University of Geneva. He was significantly influenced by Indian linguistics, especially Pānini,14 the “father of linguistics”, whose Astādhyāyī had reached European scholars in the early nineteenth century. Saussure’s interest in Sanskrit was foundational to the development of his linguistic theory, a fact that is especially evident in his earlier works—Memoir on the Primitive System of Vowels in Indo-European Languages (1878) and his doctoral thesis, On the Use of Genitive Absolute in Sanskrit (1881). According to Ananta Shukla, who translated Saussure’s thesis into English, Saussure

did not simply take up the subject [of Sanskrit] at random; but worked on this topic deliberately as it taught him two foundational aspects of his general linguistics (1) the synchronic system of language (that is actually spoken) is a system of relations (sambandha) and (2) it is use rather than any imposition of preconceived system of rules that constitutes a language either living or dead.15

In “The Function and Field”, Lacan implies a connection between Indian linguistics and European psychoanalysis as the core thread woven in a poetics of psychoanalysis. As Saussure asks, “But what is language? It is not to be confused with human speech, of which it is only a definite part, though certainly an essential one. It is both a social product of the faculty of speech and a collection of necessary conventions that have been adopted by a social body to permit individuals to exercise that faculty”.16

We already hear the echoes of Lacan’s structural distinction between language and speech: language exists in a field of signifiers, speech exists as the function of enunciation. Lacan thus opens the first section of the essay by saying, “Whether it wishes to be an agent of healing, training, or sounding the depths, psychoanalysis has but one medium: the patient’s speech”.17 In putting this remark forward, Lacan establishes the relevant ground of his exploration, that psychoanalysis is not only concerned with speech but with the function of speech.

The patient free associates and thus enunciates a transcript of their unconscious scripture, to which the analyst functions as a scribe who transcribes and punctuates the spoken word. Here, the analyst is less concerned with what the patient says as the fact that the patient says it. As Lacan elucidates, “. . . Speech, even when almost completely worn out, retains its value as a tessera. Even if it communicates nothing, discourse represents the existence of communication; even if it denies the obvious, it affirms that speech constitutes truth; even if it is destined to deceive, it relies on faith in testimony”.18 The analytic art is thus not a symbolic interpretation but a carefully placed mark in the grammar of the real, for “it is . . . a propitious punctuation that gives meaning to the subject’s discourse”.19

Speech as tessera is speech as word-fragments in an obscured mosaic of meaning. A tessera is a portion of the real, a phonetic fragment that enunciates in the gift of speech, whether it knows yet what it says. This leads Lacan to his famous admonition to a young psychoanalyst, “Do crossword puzzles”, placed as an epigraph to the second section of his essay.

In section two, Lacan continues to develop the textual implications of speech. Lacan returns to Freud’s comment that the “dream is a rebus”, which he interprets to mean that “a dream has the structure of a sentence or, rather, to keep to the letter of the work, of a rebus—that is, of a form of writing, of which children’s dreams are supposed to represent the primordial ideography, and which reproduces, in adults’ dreams, the simultaneously phonetic and symbolic use of signifying elements found in the hieroglyphs of ancient Egypt and in the characters still used in China”.20 Lacan’s reference to hieroglyphs is notable, as twenty pages later he compares Freud to Champollion, the French philologist who famously deciphered Egyptian hieroglyphs. Here, Lacan is emphasizing the nature of the dream as a coded message, but a message that is nonetheless written even in its delivery. For “what is important is the version of the text”, Lacan declares, “and that, Freud tells us, is given in the telling of the dream—that is, in its rhetoric”.21

“Rhetoric” is the art of speaking and writing that makes use of compositional or stylistic techniques. Lacan follows his remark with a list of the rhetorical devices that the analyst must listen for: “Ellipsis and pleonasm, hyperbaton or syllepsis, regression, repetition, apposition—these are the syntactical displacements; metaphor, catachresis, antonomasia, allegory, metonymy, and synecdoche—these are the semantic condensations . . .”.22 Lacan’s list includes a combination of grammatical, orthographic, and poetic techniques, the reading of which he proposes as the basis of analytic interpretation.

Analytic listening thus requires a sensitivity to the poetics of speech—its puzzling and enigmatic nature. This esoteric mode of rhetoric is well-established in the riddling hymns of the Vedas, the puzzling inquiries of the Upanishads, and the paradoxical utterances of Zen koans. The register of poetic discourse is spoken with an esoteric intent, or concealed meaning, that differs from the exoteric intent, or obvious meaning, of everyday speech. Commenting on the poetic rhetoric of the Rig Veda, Jamison and Brereton explain that

[m]uch of the Rigveda is enigmatic, not only because of our distance from the time of its creation, but also because the poets meant it to be enigmatic. They valued knowledge, especially the knowledge of the hidden connections . . . between the visible world, the divine world, and the realm of ritual. They embedded that knowledge in hymns that were stylistically tight and elliptical, expressively oblique, and lexically resonant.23

Lacan’s emphasis on poetic rhetoric is innovative. His attention for the patient’s speech is rooted in Freud’s observations, but Lacan articulates this insight with an incisive clarity on the relationship between speech, language, and symptom:

. . . [I]f [Freud] teaches us to follow the ascending ramification of the symbolic lineage in the text of the patient’s free associations, in order to detect the nodal points of its structure at the places where its verbal forms intersect, then it is already quite clear that symptoms can be entirely resolved in an analysis of language, because a symptom is itself structured like a language: a symptom is language from which speech must be delivered.24

Speech is given an elevated power, bearing the function of deliverance from the symptomatic syntax in which language has been ciphered. Since the symptom is structured like a language, speech has a curative diction. Lacan ultimately develops this emphasis as the “gift of speech”, a notion we can trace to the Vedic and Vedāntic understanding of speech.

II. The Free Gift of Speech, or the Prosody of Prasad

Lacan initiates his argument with a reference to the Yijing:

Through the word—which is already a presence made of absence—absence itself comes to be named in an original moment . . . . And from this articulated couple of presence and absence—also sufficiently constituted by the drawing in the sand of a simple line and broken line of the koua [gua] mantics of China—a language’s world of meaning is born, in which the world of things will situate itself.25

The solid and broken lines referred to here are the six lines that compose one of the sixty-four hexagrams of the Yijing, or Book of Changes. The solid line represents the yang principle, the broken line represents the yin principle. In Daoism, it is the ceaseless alternation of yin and yang that is said to give birth to the ten thousand things. Or, as Lacan says, “It is the world of words that creates the world of things”.26

Lacan also draws on the Greek concept of logos—he places the Word as the creative origin of the world and thus bestows upon speech its primordial function. This leads directly to Lacan’s articulation of the “name of the father” as the dawn of the signifier of the symbolic pact in which language derives its law. He comments on Levi-Strauss’s notion of the elementary structures of kinship to further ground the relation between the name of the father and the symbolic register of language and social communication: “Isn’t it striking that Lévi-Strauss—in suggesting in myths of language structures and of those social laws that regulate marriage ties and kinship—is already conquering the very terrain in which Freud situations the unconscious?”27 Speech thus becomes the very basis for psychoanalysis, since it holds within its Oedipal tongue the matrimonial ties of paternity and maternity. Therefore, Lacan holds that psychoanalysis must concern itself with poetics.

Lacan now ties the thread of poetics and psychoanalysis with pedagogical intent. After noting the “list of disciplines Freud considered important sister sciences for an ideal Department of Psychoanalysis”,28 Lacan proposes the addition of “rhetoric, dialectic . . . grammar, and poetics—the supreme pinnacle of the aesthetics of language—which would include the neglected technique of witticisms”.29

Now, we come to the third section of Lacan’s opus, where he makes the first direct reference to Indian linguistics. Lacan is discussing what he calls “primary language”, that is the language of the subject’s desire, which “he is already speaking to us unbeknown to himself . . . in the symbols of his symptoms”.30 It is these symbols in the symptom that analytic technique evokes “in a calculated fashion in the semantic resonances of his remarks”.31 This amounts to a commentary on interpretation as a semantical evocation, an analytic discourse whereby the analyst delivers the patient’s speech from the language of its symptom.

Lacan concludes his discussion of analytic technique saying, “This is surely the path by which a return to the use of symbolic effects can proceed in a renewed technique of interpretation”,32 and then proceeds to introduce the Indian concept of dhvani—“We could adopt as a reference here what the Hindu tradition teaches about dhvani, defining it as the property of speech by which it conveys what it does not say”.33

Lacan defines dhvani as a property of speech by which it conveys what it does not say. Dhvani is, in fact, an intrinsic feature of speech, where a meaning is evoked without being explicitly stated. Before going further, Lacan gives us an illustration of the notion in the form of a parable:

This is illustrated by a little tale whose näiveté, which appears to be required in such examples, proves funny enough to induce us to penetrate to the truth it conceals.

A girl, it is said, is awaiting her lover on the bank of a river when she sees a Brahmin coming along. She approaches him and exclaims in the most amiable tones: “What a lucky day this is for you! The dog whose barking used to frighten you will not be on this river again, for it was just devoured by a lion that roams around here . . .”.34

Initially, the story appears nonsensical. A girl sees a Brahmin and exclaims to him that the dog he fears was eaten by a lion. Readers who are puzzled by Lacan’s recounting of this story should also not fear, as Lacan has not left us in opacity. Rather, the clue to deciphering this illustration and the concept it signifies is given in Lacan’s footnote to dhvani, which reads: “I am referring here to the teaching of Abhinavagupta in the tenth century. See Dr. Kanti Chandra Pandey, “Indian Aesthetics,” Chowkamba Sanskrit Series, Studies, II (Benares: 1950)”.35

Lacan gives us the reference to the English translation of Pandey’s doctoral thesis on Indian aesthetics, which features a substantial chapter on Abhinavagupta’s interpretation of dhvani. Indeed, in this very chapter, we find the original story of the Brahmin at the river in a section titled “An Illustration of Dhvani”:

There is a garden on the bank of [the] river Godāvari. It is far from public haunt. A pair of lovers fixes it for a secret meeting at a particular time. One of the pair comes to this place a little before the fixed time. She sees a religious minded man going about here to collect flowers for worship. His sight is not quite welcome. She wants to drive him away without letting him know her intention.

A ferocious dog used to be kept here. She knew that the man was very much afraid of it. This dog, for some reason, is away from this place. She cleverly tries to explain the absence so as to scare him away and says:—

“O religious minded man! You can now roam freely over this place. For, the dog, of whom you were so afraid has been killed to-day by the proud lion, who, as you know very well, lives in the impervious thicket on the bank of Godāvari.”36

The original passage gives us essential background: the girl has ordained a meeting with her lover at a river away from the world, when she encounters a Brahmin whom she wants to drive away from the place. The story is an illustration of dhvani because the girl never explicitly says to the Brahmin that she would like him to leave. She conceals the truth in order to communicate what she wishes to evoke. Pandey gives his commentary:

It is not difficult to understand what meaning such a statement will have to such a person, as above described. Will the man, who fears a dog, freely move about at a place, where a lion, which has given a positive proof of his ferocious nature by killing the dog, is abroad? Will he, after hearing the above statement, stay on in the garden, or will he run away as quickly as possible? If the latter, is it not because of the negative meaning understood by him in a positive statement? And if so, the question arises: “Why does a positive statement have a negative meaning?” The exponents of the fourth power of the language maintain that the negative meaning, which the hearer gets, is due to Dhvani.37

In other words, the secondary meaning of the girl’s speech, while not stated as such, was heard by the Brahmin. Therefore, there is a function in speech that is primarily evocative, and this invocation is not itself said but heard.

Lacan interprets the story in the frame of absence/presence, which he remarked upon before as the source of meaning in language. Here, he says, “The absence of the lion may thus have as many effects as his spring—which, were he present, would only come once . . .”.38 There is an absence of the explicitly stated intent of the communication—the girl does not simply tell the Brahmin she wants him to leave. But amidst this absence of statement, the real intent of her message is present in the fact of her enunciation, however concealed its truth appears to be—“For the function of language in speech is not to inform but to evoke”.39

If speech can convey a coded message, then it functions on the basis of something given. Therefore, Lacan declares, “Speech is in fact a gift of language, and language is not immaterial. It is a subtle body, but body it is”.40 He then applies this to the analytic frame, suggesting that the patient pays the analyst a gift of money in exchange for the gift of speech as the “link between speech and the gift that constitutes primitive exchange”.41 This means that the patient does not merely pay the analyst for the rendering of professional services but engages in a symbolic exchange of gifts.

The symbolic exchange of gifts between two parties is what is known in Sanskrit as daksina, which means “a present or gift to Brahmanas (at the completion of a religious rite, such as a sacrifice)”, or simply a sacrament of universal sacrifice. The term is often applied in the context of the guru-disciple pedagogy or in sacramental rites. As a primitive exchange, daksina implies an economy of desire, where what is given is offered on the basis of one’s desire, and what is received is an excess that constitutes jouissance in its reception. In Indian rituals, this principle is illustrated in the devotee’s offering of daksina (whether in the form of money, fruit, or flowers) and the teacher or priest’s subsequent offering of prasād, a blessed object, often the return of what was offered by the devotee to the devotee. Prasād is defined as “that which is propitious”, or an object intended to convey blessing by virtue of having been consecrated and given. A return of the repressed in the real of the blessed.

Is this the meaning of transference? Is it prasad that the analyst offers when he propitiously punctuates the gift of the analysand’s speech? Is it the gift of speech which offers itself to be heard, so as to be given the jouissance that lingers in the speaking body, in the presence and the absence of words?

The hymns of the Vedas are crafted for the enunciation of a sacrificial rite, a genre of poetry known as dānastuti, the “praise of the gift”:

The [Rig Vedic] poet’s reward comes as a second-hand or indirect benefit of the success of his verbal labors: the patron should receive from the gods what he asked for, and he provides some portion of that bounty to the poet in recompense. This payment from his patron is sometimes celebrated by the poet at the end of his hymn, in a genre known as the dānastuti, literally “praise of the gift,” . . . .42

Dāna literally means “gift”—the daksina offered to the priest, the poet, or the analyst—and the discourse which celebrates its excesses. The Vedic poet may sing the praises of his patronage, but the analyst speaks to the free gift of the patient’s associations. What is given in the analytic exchange is no longer what the subject does not have, but the giving speech that constitutes the translation of consciousness. Therefore, the end of analysis is the completion of a ritual, or a prayer of changes, where the last word is a somatic syllable, an essential renunciation and realization.

The gift of speech is a prasād of prosody, a sound that leaves an echo of its truth to be heard at the water’s edge, where Narcissus loses face in the resonance of the real.

III. What the Thunder Spoke

The final pages of Lacan’s opus are climactic, an epic moment of concluding that resounds with what the thunder said. Before we come to Prajāpati’s discourse, Lacan draws a parallel between psychoanalysis and Zen before making further inroads into Indian linguistics.

Commenting on the function of time in analysis, Lacan describes his earlier practice of “short sessions”, noting “that it bears a certain resemblance to the technique known as Zen, which is applied to bring about the subject’s revelation in the traditional ascesis of certain Far Eastern schools”.43 Lacan is likely referring to the Zen practice of sudden awakening (or satori) in which a disciple is spontaneously awakened through contemplation of a koan or hearing their Master’s paradoxical words. The techniques of sudden awakening are forms of crazy wisdom that provoke the subject’s enlightenment through an evocative use of speech that cuts through the barriers of the conventional mind.

A similar technique is found in the Dzogchen school of Tibetan Buddhism, where a Master points out the nature of the mind to the disciple through an oral transmission that, upon being heard, awakens the disciple to the truth of what was said. In the Vedantic tradition, the Master similarly speaks a great utterance (or mahāvākya)44 that either suddenly awakens the disciple who hears it or eventually awakens the disciple who chants its recitation.

For Lacan, the Eastern techniques are notable because they utilize speech in order to effect awakening, not at the level of didactic teaching but with the deepest pedagogical intent of an oral transmission of truth, receivable in the instant of being heard. They also function as examples of punctuation, the absence of which is a “source of ambiguity”45, as Lacan notes in regards to the lack of punctuation in Chinese canonical texts.

From here, Lacan returns to a discussion of Indian linguistics via the “classical problem posed to semantics in the determinative statement, ‘a hamlet on the Ganges,’ by which Hindu aesthetics illustrates the second form of the resonances of language”.46 Lacan’s footnote to this sentence reads, “This is the form called laksanalaksana”. The phrase appears mysterious: what is meant by a hamlet on the Ganges, and from where does Lacan derive this example? Our answer is, once again, in Pandey’s volume on Indian Aesthetics.

In a section titled “The Theory of Meaning Before the Acceptance of the Theory of Dhvani”, Pandey lists laksanāśakti as “the secondary power of words”:

Often we find in the existing literature linguistic constructions which convey a complex of ideas . . . The following illustration will clear the point in hand:—

gangāyām ghosah

(Hamlet on the Ganges)47

Gangāyām means “on the Ganges”, a rather straightforward translation. Pandey translates ghosah as “hamlet” in this context, but ghosah resonates in a signifying field that is relevant to our consideration. Ghosah carries various meanings in different textual contexts: the “thundering of clouds” (Rig Veda), “the whir of a bow-string” (Taittirīya Brāhmana), “a sound of speech” (Chandogya Upanishad), “proclamation” (Lotus Sutra), “a cry or roar of animals” (Rig Veda), and the “the sound of the recitation of prayers” (Mahābhārata). The usage of ghosah meaning “a hamlet; a station of cowherds” is found in the Mahābhārata. The exact origin of the phrase, gangāyām ghosah, is difficult to pinpoint, but it is a classic phrase that appears throughout canonical texts of Indian poetics (kavyashāstra). The example of the hamlet on the Ganges thus invokes the entire field of our discussion—the thunderous sound of speech itself as a resonance of meaning.

Pandey cites the phrase gangāyām ghosah in order to present the concept of laksanāśakti as a secondary power of language and as a concept that precedes Abhinavagupta’s articulation of dhvani. He writes:

. . . [T]he complex would be a meaningless jumble of ideas and not a harmonious whole, because it would stand for what in actual experience is not possible. For, a hamlet cannot exist on a current of water. Such sentences are, however, found in the standard works, not only in Sanskrit but in other languages also. And tradition finds a meaning, and a good one too, in them. For instance, when the aforesaid sentence is used, it is understood to mean that the hamlet is situated on the bank of the Ganges and that it is cool and holy.48

The hamlet on the Ganges illustrates the secondary power of language (laksanāśakti) by evoking what it means even while stating the impossible. Is this how speech approximates the real? The hamlet cannot literally exist on the Ganges, but the phrase “a hamlet on the Ganges” is immediately understood as a dwelling on the banks of the river. Pandey explains how this illustrates laksanāśakti:

To explain this third power of words, the Laksanasakti, is postulated. When some such words are intentionally used as do not arouse a harmonious complex of meanings in the mind of the hearer by means of conventional power of language: on the contrary, the meaning of one opposes that of another; under such circumstances the function of the secondary power of language is to arouse additional ideas as are necessary to put them in harmonious relation and to reveal the purpose of such use by the speaker. Thus the additional idea of the bank, aroused by this power, removes the lack of harmony; and the purpose of the speaker in using such construction is understood to convey the idea of coolness and holiness of the hamlet.49

Now, we must ask in what ways dhvani is distinguished from laksanāśakti? Or should they be considered parallel concepts? The notion of laksanāśakti precedes dhvani, if not anticipates it. However, the necessity for maintaining both concepts is contested in the traditional literature. The primary distinction between dhvani and laksanāśakti is the difference between “suggestiveness” and “secondary meaning”. Pandey summarizes one critical position:

Laksana is defined by some as a power of language, which arouses the consciousness of any meaning that is different from the conventional, but has invariable concomitance with it (abhidheyāvinābhūtapratītih). The followers of this definition deny the difference of the suggestible meaning from the secondary . . . The opponents, therefore, maintain that in the case of the so called suggestible meaning, in the arousal of which the different stages from the conventional to the contextual and from that to the secondary are not noticeable, is really the secondary meaning; because the so called suggestible meaning also is one that has invariable concomitance with the conventional.50

This position holds that dhvani is an unnecessary concept, since its implication is already subsumed in the earlier concept of laksanā. In other words, the connotative and suggestive aspect of language is an inherent power, not a distinct property of suggestibility itself. A variant of this position proposes laksanalaksanā as a substitute for dhvani. Until now, Pandey has referenced the term laksanāśakti (“secondary power of language”) and has used this interchangeably with laksanā. Here, he introduces laksanalaksanā as a “variety of laksanā” and a “secondary power”. This is to say that laksanalaksanāis the most precise reference for that power of language (laksanāśakti) which is secondary in nature. Pandey says:

The ordinary secondary meaning is got out of a construction by simple laksana, for instance, the meaning of “Gangāyām ghosah” as “Gangātīre ghosah”. But the meaning that “Ghosa” is cool, holy and so on, is got by laksanalaksana. That is, the secondary power of language, after having aroused the secondary meaning, the bank, works again to arouse the additional ideas of coolness, etc. The rise of suggestible meaning, therefore, according to the opponent, can be explained by assumption of the said variety of laksana.51

Laksanalaksanā and dhvani both describe the signifying function of speech—that what is said slides in a chain of signifiers that always stand for another signifier. If we take the term ghosa (translated as “hamlet”) at the level of the signifier, then we see a signifying chain—ghosa not only means “hamlet” but also “sound of speech”, “the thundering of clouds”, and “proclamation”. As such, it appears that the classical example of a hamlet on the Ganges illustrates the function of speech in its own language.

Pandey concludes his examination of the debate between laksanalaksanā and dhvani with the following summary:

The ideas, which the suggestive power of words is intended to arouse, are certainly different from those which the secondary power is said to give rise to. The necessary condition for the power to operate in the latter case is the apparent lack of harmony in the different constituents of a sentence. But the former does not presuppose this condition. If a statement is intended to suggest what is not directly expressed, or rather under circumstances cannot be so expressed, but is suggested by a peculiar arrangement and choice of the words, it requires the power of visualization (Pratibhā) in the hearer, and not simply the knowledge of the secondary convention (Laksanā). Hence the distinction between Laksanā and Dhvani has got to be admitted.52

It is simple enough to accept that dhvani and laksanā describe different aspects of the signifying process inherent in the field of language and invoked in the function of speech. Notably, Pandey uses the term pratibhā to describe the “power of visualization in the hearer” that dhvani evokes. Pratibhā means “reflection”, “brilliance”, “understanding”, and “genius, especially poetic genius”. Pratibhā evokes the mirror stage as the genesis of language, where the spatial lure of identification becomes a grammatical and pronominal reflex.

Is it pratibhā that the analyst must cultivate as he listens to the free associations of the patient? Must he not only auscultate but see their sonorous rhythms, metrical arrhythmias, and slippery spheres? Does this explain Lacan’s desire to formalize the unconscious with topology?

In the penultimate page of his essay, Lacan writes:

To say that this mortal meaning reveals in speech a center that is outside of language is more than a metaphor—it manifests a structure. This structure differs from the spatialization of the circumference or sphere with which some people like to schematize the limits of the living being and its environment: it corresponds rather to the relational group that symbolic logic designates topologically as a ring.

If I wanted to give an intuitive representation of it, it seems that I would have to resort not to the two-dimensionality of a zone, but rather to the three-dimensional form of a torus, insofar as a torus’ peripheral exteriority and central exteriority constitute but one single region.53

Lacan sees the field of language and the function of speech as a singular structure, a region where the contours of dhvani and laksanalaksanā slide across a sphere of signification. In Lacan’s structural assertion of the unconscious, we discover a resolution beyond the traditional debates of Indian grammarians, where secondary powers and suggestiveness are free-floating across the smooth surface of circular speech.

Before concluding what could be called his dharmic exposition, Lacan articulates the place of psychoanalysis in the very locus of the human being:

Psychoanalytic experience has rediscovered in man the imperative of the Word as the law that has shaped him in its image. It exploits the poetic function of language to give his desire its symbolic mediation. May this experience finally enable you to understand that the whole reality of its effects lies in the gift of speech; for it is through this gift that all reality has come to man and through its ongoing action that he sustains reality.

If the domain defined by this gift of speech must be sufficient for both your action and your knowledge, it will also be sufficient for your devotion. For it offers the latter a privileged field.54

Lacan then proceeds to quote a passage from the Brihadāranyaka Upanishad, titled “What the Thunder Said”. In this section, Prajāpati (the god of thunder and lord of all creatures) responds to the request of the devas (gods), the humans, and the asuras (demons), who, upon finishing their novitiate with Prajāpati, begged of him, “Speak to us”. To each of them, Prajāpati utters the syllable, “Da”, and then asks, “Did you hear me?” The devas answer, “Thou hast said to us: Damyata, master yourselves—the sacred text meaning that the powers above are governed by the law of speech”. The humans answer, “Thou hast said to us: Datta, give—the sacred text meaning that men recognize each other by the gift of speech”. And the asuras answer, “Thou hast said to us: Dayadhvam, be merciful—the sacred text meaning that the powers below resound to the invocation of speech”.55

Do the devas, humans, and asuras each hear their own message, returning to them in an inverted form, perfectly resonant with subjective meaning? For Prajāpati utters the same syllable for each to hear in accordance with their own ear of heart.

Prajāpati’s utterance (“Da”) and the response heard by the novitiates (“damyata, datta, dayadhvam”) was famously quoted by T.S. Eliot in 1922 in the concluding stanzas to “The Waste Land”. It may be that Lacan first encountered this Upanishadic reference from reading Eliot’s poem, as he does cite a different poem from Eliot, “The Hollow Men”, earlier in the essay.56 However, Lacan’s engagement with the Upanishads is already well-established, as he cites the mahāvākya “Tat Tvam Asi” (“Thou Art That”) in the concluding lines of “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function” just four years before delivering “The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis”. Nearly ten years after the writing of “Function and Field”, Lacan returns to this Vedāntic utterance in Seminar X, in the chapter “Buddha’s Eyelids”—“Tat tvam asi, the that which thou dost recognize in the other is thyself, is already set down in the Vedānta”.57

The syllable “Da” means “the one who gives” and “what is given”, and with each utterance, Prajāpati gives the gift of speech to devas, humans, and asuras. “Da” is the root-syllable in the variants they hear: damyata is the calling to mastery, datta is the calling to generosity, dayadhvam is the calling to mercy. Prajāpati speaks the Name-of-the-Father—Da—and thus invokes the laws of speech in the three realms. For who is Prajāpati if not Brahma himself, he who sovereigns the symbol of creation? Is it he from whom the seed of the world springs from formless resonance into the form of sound?

Prajāpati speaks a proper name in a divine voice, and thus translates the signifier in the real. The name and the voice form the binary structure of speech, as Lacan notes, “The relationship between the proper name and the voice must be situated in language’s two-axis structure of message and code, to which I have already referred . . . It is this structure that makes puns on proper names into witticisms”.58

The devas, humans, and asuras hear the Name-of-the-Father, echoing from the Other in their subjective fields. Thus, they receive the inheritance of the law through a morphological family, a morpheme unified in a common root from which they are each derived. Prajāpati says, “Da”, but the beings of the three worlds receive their own message, in a form suitable for baptism—as it is the holy spirit of the signifier that falls from the Father’s lips to bless his children in the eucharist of speech. Prajāpati thus returns the repressed signifier to his children in its primordial text, a transmission of filial inheritance and spiritual regeneration. It is the tone of his divine voice that slides the signifier across the register of the real.

This is why it is said, in the Chāndogya Upanishad, that “[w]hen the gods and the demons, both descendants of Prajā-pati, contended with each other, the gods took hold of the udgītha, thinking, with this, we shall overcome them”.59 Here, the reference to gods and demons is condensed within a single signifier—devāsurā—where its usage depicts the existential conflict between light (illumination) and dark (ignorance) within the human being. This section of the Upanishad is titled “Life (Breath) as The Udgītha”, where udgītha refers simultaneously to the breath, speech, and the syllable Om. The relationship between speech and breath is elucidated in the third section:

. . . [O]ne should meditate on the diffused breath as the udgītha. That which one breathes in, that is the in-breath; that which one breathes out, that is the out-breath. The junction of the in-breath and the out-breath is the diffused breath. The diffused breath is the speech. Therefore, one utters speech, without in-breathing and without out-breathing.60

The function of speech originates in the still-point, the median void between inhalation and exhalation, where a pervasion of syllabic resonance is already heard in the heart of what is spoken. The notion of udgītha thus brings us to the very essence of speech as a circulation of sound. In the Chandogya Upanishad, Prajāpati admonishes the devas and asuras to meditate upon Om as the basis of speech, but in the Brihadāranyaka Upanishad, Prajāpati commands “Da”. What is the relationship between Om and Da? “Om” is more accurately transliterated as aum, where we see its tri-syllabic structure. These three syllables correspond to various trinities in Indian thought—Brahma-Vishnu-Shiva; waking, dreaming, sleeping, and so on. Dissecting this further, the syllable “a” is most prominent in the pronunciation of “Da” (and this may also be why the Tibetan tradition has adopted “A” as their primordial syllable)61; the combined sound of “a” and “oo” becomes the long vowel (ō)at the root of “Om”; and the “m” is the origin of the syllable “Ma”.

The modern spiritual master, Adi Da, dissects the Om-sound into three primary syllables constitutive of the mahāmantra—Om Ma Da—where Om represents the “Self-Father”, Ma the “Mother-Power”, and Da the “True and First Son” of their union.62 If we interpret this as a homology for the Christian trinity, then “Om” is the Father, “Ma” is the Holy Spirit, and “Da” is the Son. As the “son”, “Da” functions as the condensation or epitome of “Om” and “Ma”, and thus signifies via inheritance the totality of reality.

If we translate this paradigm in psychoanalytic terms: Om is the Name-of-the-Father, Ma is the holy spirit of the signifier, and Da is the signifier in the real. “Om” is the name of the symbolic, “Ma” is the measure of the imaginary, and “Da” is the name of the real. Together, the three syllables constitute a primordial structure of kinship that originates in the three registers of human reality. As Lacan notes, “any analyzable relationship . . . is always inscribed in a three-term relationship”.63

If “Da” is the Son, then Prajāpati’s utterance is the birth of language, an incarnation made of love. As Lacan says, “Giving someone a child as a gift is the very incarnation of love. For humans, a child is what is most real”.64 Therefore, “Da” constitutes, at the level of the signifier and its signified, the very gift of speech.

Adi Da continues his exegesis by expounding on the significance of Da as a “name” (a name he notably adopts as his own appellation)—specifically a function of the name that stands as a signifier for the real:

The One and Only . . . Divine Person . . . Is, By Tradition, Named—In Order To Be Invoked By Humankind.

Therefore, Traditionally, The Divine Source and Person Has Been (and Is) Named (and Invoked) By Many Names. In The Practice Of Some Traditions, The Divine Source and

Person Is Named “Da”.

The Name “Da” Is A Name Of Real (Acausal) God65 (or The Necessarily Divine Reality, Truth, and Person That Is).

This Name Has Appeared Spontaneously To Many (and Many Kinds Of) Realizers, In Traditional “Religious” and Spiritual Cultures All Over the “world”, During and Ever Since Ancient times.

The Name “Da” Signifies (or Points To) The Transcendental (and Inherently Spiritual) Divine Reality, Truth, and Person—As The “Giver” Of Life, Liberation, Blessing, Help, Spirit-Baptism, and Awakening Grace.66

Adi Da’s commentary emphasizes the function of the name as the means for invocation. Lacan has already given us the link between the name and the function, when he says, “the name of the father creates the function of the father”,67 a point he elaborates upon in “Function and Field”: “It is in the name of the father that we must recognize the basis of the symbolic function which, since the dawn of historical time, has identified his person with the figure of the law”.68 Is it not Prajāpati, the father of creation, who utters this syllable to his children?

Adi Da also suggests that “Da” is a universal name, found in cultures around the world since antiquity. I read this statement in the tone of an oracular vernacular rather than the silence of a scholastic notation. We cannot verify the truth of the statement with anthropological serums. The real of Adi Da’s utterance is, in fact, located in the very function of the name, as Lacan has already remarked: “A name . . . is a mark that is already open to reading—which is why it is read the same way in all languages—printed on something that may be a subject who will speak, but who will not necessarily speak at all”.69 I read Lacan’s reference to the name as the mark in the code of Sanskrit etymology, where lingam means “phallus” and “mark”. If the phallus is the signifier of desire that raises its primordial rank in the Name-of-the-Father, then the question of the name is the question of consciousness.

The syllable “Da” may indeed be at the very origin of spoken language, already on the tip of every tongue. In Sanskrit, “Da” is a dental syllable, spoken with the tongue behind the front teeth—a location that forms a circuit of conductivity in Indian and Daoist yoga.70 Commenting on this yogic mudra, Adi Da references Patanjali’s Hatha Yoga Pradipika:

The Hatha Yoga Pradipika and other similar yogic texts speak of the soma as “the nectar of the moon.” By pressing the tongue up through the roof of the palate and closing off the passage in the head above the sinuses and above the mouth, and entering into meditation, the yogis prevent the nectar of the moon from burning up in the “sun,” which is the lower body or digestive region, the digestive fire of the navel.71

The association between speech and soma was originally formulated in the Rig Veda. In verse VIII.100.10-11, speech is likened to the milking of a cow:

When Speech, saying indistinguishable things, sat down as gladdening ruler of the gods, she milked out in four (streams) nourishment and milk drinks. Where indeed did the highest of hers go?

The gods begat goddess Speech. The beasts of all forms speak her. Gladdening, milking out refreshment and nourishment for us, let Speech, the milk-cow, come well praised to us.72

The goddess Speech (Vāc) is described as a “milk-cow”, who pours forth a somatic stream of words. The context of these verses is cryptic but revolves around the pressing of soma for the ritual sacrifice that is central to the Vedic hymns. Speech is thus regarded as an oblation, a devotional offering sacramentally milked for the gods.

Unlike most of the hymns in the Rig Veda, the goddess Vāc speaks in the first-person (aham) in a self-confessional mode known as ātmastuti. In verses 2, 3, and 4, Vāc speaks of herself as bearing the “swollen soma”:

2. I bear the swollen soma, I Tvastar and Pūsan and Bhaga. I establish wealth for the man offering the oblation, who pursues (his ritual duties) well, who sacrifices and presses.

3. I am ruler, assembler of goods, observer foremost among those deserving the sacrifice. Me have the gods distributed in many places—so that I have many stations and cause many things to enter (me).

4. Through me he eats food—whoever sees, whoever breathes, whoever hears what is spoken. Without thinking about it, they live on me. Listen, o you who are listened to: it’s a trustworthy thing I tell you.73

If the Rig Veda casts Vāc in feminine, then how do we understand the relationship between speech and the father—for Vāc herself says, “I give birth to Father on his head; my womb is in the waters, in the sea.”74 Is it Vāc who embodies the name of the father? Later texts attempt to resolve this riddle by placing Vāc as either the daughter or consort of Prajāpati, where Vāc is seen as the manifestation of the creation generated by Prajāpati.

Is Vāc the function of speech through which the concealed truths of creation are penetrated in the names-of-the-father? Is “Da” that dawning syllable of the speech circuit, the locutional link generated in the current of discourse? Is “Da” the soma we press in our own mouths to sever umbilical ties?

“Da” is spoken by children before they speak in sentences—in English, “Da” has phonetic resonance with “Dad” (in British English, “Da” functions as a direct reference to one’s father) and in Sanskrit dādā is the signifier for one’s paternal grandfather.75 It may be with this intention that Lacan recalls the child’s game—Fort! Da!—only two pages prior to Prajāpati’s speech:

These are occultation games which Freud, in a flash of genius, presented to us so that we might see in them that the moment at which desire is humanized is also that at which the child is born into language.

. . . We can now see that the subject here does not simply master his deprivation by assuming it––he raises his desire to a second power . . . the child thus begins to become engaged in the system of the concrete discourse of those around him by reproducing more or less approximately in his Fort! and Da! the terms he receives from them.76

In German, “Fort” means “gone” and “Da” means “there”, a spoken alternation of absence and presence. As the child receives the function of his speech from the field of the Other, the novitiates receive the gift of initiation in Prajāpati’s spoken deliverance. As novices, the gods, humans, and demons are completing their training for entry into a religious order, when they ask Prajāpati to grant them the initiation of their submission. This context is not lost upon Lacan, who on the preceding page mentions the sublimity of the psychoanalytic undertaking and the ordeal of its training:

Of all the undertakings that have been proposed in this century, the psychoanalyst’s is perhaps the loftiest, because it mediates in our time between the care-ridden man and the subject of absolute knowledge. This is also why it requires a long subjective ascesis, indeed one that never ends, since the end of training analysis itself is not separable from the subject’s engagement in his practice.77

Lacan is thus presenting psychoanalysis as an initiatory rite and a rite of passage, a training homologous to a novitiate’s entry in a religious order. Indeed, Freud had formed a secret order of initiates, to whom he gave seven rings. Earlier in his essay, Lacan mentions this fact in a passing remark about Ernest Jones, who is “the last survivor of those to whom the seven rings of the master were passed”.78

It is as the initiatory rite that the function of the name is discovered as a transferential transmission by which an esoteric order is founded. As Lacan says, “We are aware of the use made in primitive traditions of secret names, with which the subject identifies his own person or his gods so closely that to reveal these names is to lose himself or betray these gods; and what our patients confide in us, as well as our own recollections, teach us that it is not at all rare for children to spontaneously rediscover the virtues of that use”.79 The guarding of the name is the protection of the holy, the setting apart of the esoteric from the exoteric via the passwords of sacred law.

In the Rig Veda, the notion of the secret name is posed in a hymn on sacred speech, which opens with the following stanzas:

1. O Br̥haspati, (this was) the first beginning of Speech: when they [the seers] came forth, giving names. What was their best, what was flawless—that (name), set down in secret, was revealed to them because of your affection (for them).

2. When the wise have created Speech by their thought, purifying her like coarse grain by a sieve, in this they recognize their companionship as companions. Their auspicious mark has been set down upon Speech.80

Is “Da” the secret name of the Father uttered for initiation? Does its invocation restore the devas, the humans, and the demons to the laws that govern their worlds? Is it the nature of “Da” as a dawning signifier in the real that grants it the gift of inauguration? If the real resists symbolization absolutely, then it can only be called upon by name. This is why Adi Da refers to “Da” as a “Meaningless Pointer (or Name)”,81 emphasizing its phonetic, rather than symbolically meaningful, function. The meaningless phonetic of the signifier is the meaning of mantra—a syllable behind thought that is spoken for the resonance of its invocation.

We return to an enigmatic riddle of meaning. Is meaning intrinsic to the phonetic of the word and thus to the function of speech? Or does meaning reside in the field of linguistic implication, in the grammatical rule of the spoken, where what is heard is the suggestion of the enunciation? This is the rebus that Indian grammarians have attempted to read in their articulations of dhvani, which indicates the “articulate sound” because the word produces “sound waves very much like the ring of a bell”.82 Pandey writes that “the grammarians explain the sound-sensation as due to the contact of one of the sound-waves, proceeding in a regular series from the source, with the drum of the ear . . . Just as sound comes to the hearer’s consciousness through succession of meanings, the conventional, the contextual and the secondary”.83

The grammarians place sound as the universal component of meaning and thus attribute meaning to a function of speech. Here, dhvani emerges as an intrinsic suggestibility that is conveyed in the resonances the word evokes. As Lacan notes, a signifier always stands for another signifier. The signifier constantly slides across the signifying chain and thus elides a singular meaning. A signifier functions at the level of speech as the totality of what it can signify in the field of language. As such a slippery sphere, it is the unseen but audible that makes itself known across the field of meaning, where the signified grasps the last tail of its winding signifier. “For these chains are not of meaning but of enjoy-meant [joui-sens] which you can write as you wish, as is implied by the punning that constitutes the law of the signifier”.84

The phonetic mechanism of speech is explained by Indian grammarians as a function of “the universal sound, called Sphota . . . According to them, the awareness of the Sphota of a word, is necessary for the consciousness of meaning of a word”.85 The concept of sphota was popularized by the Indian linguist Bhartrihari in the fifth century CE, and later expanded upon by Abhinavagupta. Sphota means “bursting”—it is the eruption of meaning that flashes forth in the sound of the word.86 The notion of sphota resonates with the theory of spanda in Kashmir Saivism, which Abhinavagupta popularized. Spanda bears the connotations of “throbbing” and “palpitation”, and is used to mean the “pulse of the supreme level of speech” and the “pulse of the vibratory universe”. It is the causal root of language and suggests the heart as the circulatory locus of sacred speech, an atrial fibrillation of meaning. As Lacan says, “I know better than anyone that we listen for what lies beyond discourse, if only I take the path of hearing, not that of auscultating”.87

Language is the construction of a symbolic order, but its spoken sound is heard in the real. Therefore, the function of speech is not the communication of meaning but an invocation by name. When Prajāpati thunders “Da”, his speech erupts the sound with a flash of meaning, heard by each in the tone meant for their listening. Prajāpati thus “shatters discourse only in order to bring forth speech”88 in a sudden storm of language.

Speech is the primal sound of cosmic existence, or nāda brahma. Adi Da thus positions “Da” in precisely this category when he makes it synonymous with “Om” as the sound-vibration at the root of the cosmos. He writes:

The Cosmic Divine Sound-Vibration “Om” (or “Da-Om”, or “Da”) Corresponds To and Signifies and Points (Beyond Itself) To The Native (Soundless, Silent) Feeling (and The Very Condition) of Being (Prior To All Separate ‘I’-ness) That Is The . . . Root Of All Vibratory Modifications (and, Therefore, Of all sounds, and Of all thoughts, or all ideas, including the “I”-thought, or the “Separate-self”-idea, and Of all things, or Even Of all the kinds of conditional forms and states) In The Cosmic Domain.89

In other words, “Da” and “Om” are sounds voiced in the real, that even when spoken, resist symbolization utterly. The assertion of “Da” as a signifier in the real is elaborated in the Brahmana following Prajāpati’s discourse. After declaring Brahman as “the True or Real”, the Upanishad equivocates Prajāpati with Brahman, and locates the real in the locus of the heart. The Brahmana structures this argument by elaborating on “Da” as the central syllable of the tri-syllabic hridayam—a word meaning “heart center”:

This is Prajapati (the same as) this heart. It is Brahman.90 It is all. It has three syllables, hr, da, yam. Hr is one syllable. His own people and others bring (presents) to him who knows this. Da is one syllable. His own people and others give to him who knows this. Yam is one syllable. He who knows this goes to the heavenly world.91

“Da” is the core syllable of the Sanskrit word for the heart––hridaya. Yet, hridaya does not merely signify the physical or spiritual heart of man. Hridaya is all that is held within the chest, a “divine knowledge” and “guarded secret” of one’s “innermost desire”. As it is said in the Nārāyana Sūktam of the Mahānārāyana Upanishad:

The Heart, the perfect seat of meditation, resembles an inverted lotus bud.

In the region below the throat and above the navel there burns a fire from which flames are rising up. That is the great support and foundation of the Universe.

It always hangs down from the arteries like a lotus bud. In the middle of it there is a tiny orifice in which all are firmly supported.

In the middle of it there is a great fire with innumerable flames blazing on all sides which first consumes the food and then distributes it to all parts of the body. It is the immutable and all-knowing.

Its rays constantly shoot upwards and downwards. It heats the body from head to foot. In the middle of it there is a tongue of fire which is extremely small.

That tongue of fire is dazzling as a streak of lightning in the midst of a dark cloud and as thin as the awn at the tip of a grain of rice, golden bright and extremely minute.

In the middle of that tongue of flame the Supreme Self abides firmly. He Is God. He is the Immortal, the Supreme Lord of all.92

The heart that hangs an inverted lotus below the throat is the speech that thunders the syllable to lumen the real. We receive the function of speech in an inverted form, hanging on symbolic threads of meaning, echoing in the field of the Other. But when the real speaks its own name aloud, it gives a baptism in tongues of fire, that its eternal law may be heard in conveyance of its submission, gift, and grace. As Lacan clarifies in a footnote to the Upanishadic passage, “It should be clear that it is not a question here of the ‘gifts’ that novices are always supposed not to have, but of a tone that they are, indeed, missing more often than they should be”.93 What is to be understood is not a meaning but a hearing, a tonal truth that transfers itself in Prajāpati’s oral transmission to the ears of the novices.

At last, Lacan concludes, this is “what the divine voice conveys in the thunder: Submission, gift, grace. Da da da. For Prajapati replies to all: ‘You have heard me”.94 There is no absence of understanding or confusion of tongues, no babbling aspirations for an other world. Prajāpati translates the Oedipal errors of ignorance, love, and hatred into submission (to the laws of speech), gift (of recognition through speech), and grace (of the invocation of speech). Thus, the three worlds are purified by Prajāpati’s utterance, as thunder restores a light in the dark cloud.

The beings of the world thus find the law in the place of the real, where they currently stand. A hamlet appears on the Ganges is always already the case. There, in the current of sound, betwixt the knots of head and heart, churns the throated consonance of a nectarous nādī—immortal in its shapeless synecdoche.

Preface

I recently got together with my friend, Andrew Flores, Jr., to discuss Lacan’s essay, “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function” (video above). Our free-associative and wide-ranging conversation inspired me to write this essay about the mirror stage.

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In what follows, I offer a textual afterthought to this conversation by tracing the chronological development of Lacan’s mirror stage, its confluence with the cultural context of surrealism, its parallels with Upanishadic Advaitism, and the implications for a radical psychoanalysis that approaches the threshold of the real. I ground my analysis in ample selections from Lacan’s works to give new readers a feel for his evocative, aphoristic style.

Psychoanalysis and Surrealism

“The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function” is published in Lacan’s Écrits, a collection of his written works, where it is placed as the second essay. Since the Écrits is not organized chronologically but conceptually, the early placement of this essay marks its significance as a paradigmatic foundation of Lacan’s articulation of psychoanalysis. However, Lacan’s concept of the mirror stage dates to 1936, predating the publication of this essay by thirteen years.

Lacan’s exploration of the mirror motif arises in the milieu of surrealism, where mirrors and labyrinths were employed as tropes for the unconscious. In the Spring of 1937, Salvador Dalí painted the Metamorphosis of Narcissus, a double-image painting depicting the Greek myth of Narcissus. In Dalí's painting, Narcissus is drawn as a figure of stone whose head takes the form of a cracked egg. On the left side of the image, roots grow from the cracked egg, and on the right side, a Narcissus flower blooms from the egg.

The timing of Dalí’s painting (one year after Lacan presents the mirror stage) and the close friendship between Dalí and Lacan illustrate a confluence of considerations. In one sense, we can say that Lacan’s notion precedes Dalí’s painting, but this does not guarantee the genesis of the notion. The intermingling of psychoanalysis and surrealism in Paris is already evident in Lacan’s 1932 doctoral thesis, On Paranoiac Psychoses in its Relationship with Personality, where we see a confluence between Lacan’s notion of “paranoiac knowledge” and Dalí’s “paranoiac-critical method”.1

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A Textual Chronology of the Mirror Stage

Marienbad Congress (1936) and La Famille (1938)

Lacan first presented his notion of the mirror stage at the IPA Congress in Marienbad in 1936, where he was famously interrupted by Ernest Jones. In Lacan’s own words:

. . . [T]he structure that is characteristic of the human world—insofar as it involves the existence of objects that are independent of the actual field of the tendencies and that can be used both symbolically and instrumentally—appears in man from the very first phases of development. How can we conceive of its psychological genesis?

My construction known as “the mirror stage”—or, as it would be better to say, “the mirror phase”—addresses such a problem.

I duly presented it at the Marienbad Congress in 1936, at least up to the point, coinciding exactly with the fourth stroke of the ten-minute mark, at which I was interrupted by Ernest Jones who was presiding over the congress.2

There is no apparent record of the presented paper, to which Lacan adds, “I did not submit my paper for inclusion in the proceedings of the congress; you can find the gist of it in a few lines in my article about the family published in 1938 in the Encylopédie française”.3 Thus arrives the first articulation of the mirror stage in print in Lacan’s article titled La Famille. The term “article” is misleading, since this piece is a significant essay that explores the Oedipal complex in relation to the “formation of the individual”. Early in the essay, Lacan presents the mirror stage:

Affective identification is a psychic function whose originality has been established by psychoanalysis, especially in the Oedipus complex, as we shall later see. But the use of the term at the stage we are studying remains ill-defined in the doctrine. That is why I have attempted to fill the gap with a theory of this identification whose genesis I describe by using the term ‘mirror stage’.

The stage thus designated corresponds to the final phase of weaning, that is, to the end of those six months during which the dominant psychic feeling of discontent associated with a retardation in physical growth expresses the prematurity of birth that underlies weaning in the human being. Now, the recognition by the subject of his image in the mirror is a phenomenon that is doubly significant for the analysis of this stage: it appears after six months and its study demonstrates the tendencies that at that time constitute the subject’s reality. Because of these affinities, the mirror image is a good symbol of this reality: of its affective value, illusory like the image, and of its structure in that it reflects the human form.4

Here, we find Lacan’s most basic definition of the mirror stage as a developmental phase, beginning at six months of age, and as reflective of a “prematurity of birth”. Lacan will continue to employ this phrase in his writings on the mirror stage, but his association of this with the final phase of weaning is notably explicit here. Lacan also makes clear that, in associating this phase with the phenomenon of a mirror, he is elucidating the affective and illusory nature of the egoic structure.

We can already see how Lacan’s mirror stage is an elaboration of the myth of Narcissus. And he proceeds to give direct commentary on this:

The narcissistic structure of the ego: The world appropriate to this phase is thus a narcissistic world. In so describing it we are not simply evoking its libidinal structure by the same term to which from 1908 on Freud and Abraham assigned the purely energetic meaning of investment of libido in the body. We also wish to penetrate its mental structure and give it the full meaning of the Narcissus myth. Whether this meaning is taken to indicate death—a vital insufficiency from which this narcissistic world grows; or the mirror image—the imago of the double is central to it; or the illusion of the image—this world, as we shall see, has no place for others.

Parallels in Adi Da’s Teachings

Lacan’s observation of the narcissistic structure of the ego precedes an identical observation by Adi Da, marking a significant parallelism between psychoanalysis and spirituality. To my knowledge, Adi Da was not familiar with Lacan’s teaching, though he studied Freud and incorporated the Oedipus complex into his considerations of spiritual development. In his earliest publication, The Knee of Listening, Adi Da presents his discovery of Narcissus as the “controlling myth” of human life:

Eventually, I began to recognize a structure in my humanly-born conscious awareness. It became more and more apparent, and its nature and effects revealed themselves as fundamental, inclusive of all the states and contents in life and mind. My own “myth”—the governor of all patterns, the source of presumed self-identity, the motivator of all seeking—began to stand out in the mind as a living being.

This “myth”, this controlling logic (or force) that structured and limited my humanly-born conscious awareness, revealed itself as the self-concept—and the actual life—of Narcissus. I saw that my entire adventure—the desperate cycle of Awakeness and its decrease, of truly Conscious Being and Its gradual covering in the mechanics of living, seeking, dying, and suffering—was produced out of the image (or mentality) that appears hidden in the ancient myth of Narcissus.

The more I contemplated him, the more profoundly I understood him. I observed, in awe, the primitive control that this self-concept and logic exercised over all of my behavior and experience. I began to see that same logic operative in all other human beings, and in every living thing—even in the very life of the cells, and in the natural energies that surround every living entity or process. It was the logic (or process) of separation itself, of enclosure and immunity. It manifested as fear and identity, memory and experience. It informed every function of the living being, every experience, every act, every event. It “created” every “mystery”. It was the structure of every imbecile link in the history of human suffering.

He is the ancient one visible in the Greek myth, who was the universally adored child of the gods, who rejected the loved-one and every form of love and relationship, and who was finally condemned to the contemplation of his own image—until, as a result of his own act and obstinacy, he suffered the fate of eternal separateness and died in infinite solitude. As I became more and more conscious of this guiding myth (or logic) in the very roots of my being, my writing began to take on an apparently intentional form. What was before only an arbitrary string of memories, images, and perceptions, leading toward an underlying logic, now proceeded from the heart of that logic itself—such that my perceptions and my thoughts began to develop (from hour to hour) as a narrative, completely beyond any intention or plan of my external mind.

I found that, when I merely observed the content of my experience or my mind from hour to hour, day to day, I began to recognize a “story” being performed as my own conscious life. This was a remarkable observation, and obviously not a common one. The quality of the entire unfolding has the touch of madness in it. But people are mad. The ordinary state of human existence—although it is usually kept intact and relatively calmed by the politics of society—is founded in the madness of a prior logic, a schism in Reality that promotes the entire suffering adventure of human lives in endless and cosmic obstacles.5

Adi Da arrived at the discovery of Narcissus through a process of writing, fueled by the inquiry, “What is Consciousness?” He describes writing everything that came to his mind throughout the day, in the hopes of uncovering the fundamental structure of consciousness, a practice that bears more than a resemblance to Surrealist automatism and Dalí’s paranoiac-critical method. Thus, the myth of Narcissus became central to Adi Da’s teaching, where it is featured in the title of his first (unpublished) work of auto-analysis, Water and Narcissus (1967), and as the central motif of his literary work, The Mummery Book (1969).

The Structure of Paranoia

In Adi Da’s description, we encounter Narcissus as the structure and source of madness. Lacan establishes the link between the mirror stage and madness as an intrinsically paranoiac structure:

In my view, this activity has a specific meaning up to the age of eighteen months, and reveals both a libidinal dynamism that has hitherto remained problematic and an ontological structure of the human world that fits in with my reflections on paranoiac knowledge.6

The structure of paranoia is evident in the gaze of Narcissus, which not only sees its own reflection but sees a mirage staring back. In Seminar XI, Lacan describes the “pre-existence of a gaze” as “I see only from one point, but in my existence I am looked at from all sides”.7 The paranoiac structure of the ego is also aphoristically articulated in the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad: “Wherever there is an Other, fear arises”. This parallels Lacan’s formulation of the encounter with one’s mirror image as the genesis of the Other, which echoes Lacan’s aphorism: “The unconscious is the Other’s discourse in which the subject receives his own forgotten message in the inverted form suitable for promises”.8

The Tripartite Mirror

In the aforementioned passage on the narcissistic structure of the ego, Lacan describes a threefold structure of the Narcissus myth:

1. death as a “vital insufficiency” that becomes the fertile ground of narcissistic delusion,

2. the mirror-image as the “imago of the double”,

3. the illusory image as a “world [that] has no place for others”.

These three aspects can be seen as constitutive of the self, Other, and world. The vital insufficiency of death is the mortal confrontation facing the specular self. In the mirror-image, the self encounters its double in the form of an Other. This illusory image conditions the existence of a world in which the mirage of subject-object relations remains bound to a narcissistic structure of imaginary identifications.

The tripartite structure of the mirror stage can also be seen in relation to the Buddhist ontology of the mirror: the essence of the mirror is primordial purity, or intrinsic clarity, which allows is to self-reflect phenomena; the nature of the mirror is luminosity, which allows it to reflect phenomena without being altered by the otherness of the images it reflects; the energy of the mirror is reflected image itself, which constitutes the world of appearances.

When we apply this to Lacan’s three registers of the real, the symbolic, and the imaginary, we can trace the following correlations: The essence of the mirror itself is the real; the nature of the mirror is the symbolic; the energy of the mirror is the imaginary.

Now that we have grasped Lacan’s mirror stage as the ontological structure of Narcissus, let us continue the chronology of his articulation.

Presentation on Psychical Causality (1946)

After La Famille, Lacan gives a significant commentary on the mirror stage in his 1946 “Presentation on Psychical Causality”. This paper was delivered as a critique of Henri Ey’s organicist theories of psychosis and principally functions as a commentary on Lacan’s doctoral thesis. Lacan reintroduces the mirror stage by commenting on his earlier work in La Famille:

My aim there was to indicate the connection between a number of fundamental imaginary relations in an exemplary characteristic of a certain phase of development.

This behavior is none other than that of the human infant before its image in the mirror starting at the age of six months, which is so strikingly different from the behavior of a chimpanzee, whose development in the instrumental application of intelligence the infant is far from having reached.

. . . What I have called the triumphant assumption of the image with the jubilant mimicry that accompanies it and the playful indulgence in controlling the specular identification, after the briefest experiemental verification of the nonexistence o the image behind the mirror, in contrst with the opposite phenomena in the monkey—these seemed to me to manifest one of the facts of identificatory capture by the imago that I was seeking to isolate.9

Lacan is referring to the experiments of the French philosopher and psychologist, Henri Wallon, whose developmental theories influenced his conception of the mirror stage. Lacan then proceeds to survey “man’s prematurity of birth”, citing the origin of this notion in Louis Bolk’s theory of “fetalization”. The following passages detail this correlation and are among the most beautiful of Lacan’s writing on the mirror stage:

I have, in fact, taken my conception of the existential meaning of the phenomenon a bit further by understanding it in relation to what I have called man’s prematurity at birth, in other words, the incompleteness and “delay” in the development of the central nervous system during the first six months of life. These phenomena are well known to anatomists and have, moreover, been obvious, since man’s first appearance, in the nursling’s lack of motor coordination and balance; the latter is probably not unrelated to the process of “fetalization,” which Bolk considered to be the mainspring of the higher development of the encephalic vesicles in man.

It is owing to this delay in development that the early maturation of visual perception takes on the role of functional anticipation. This results, on the one hand, in the marked prevalence of visual structure in recognition of the human form, which begins so early, as I mentioned before. On the other hand, the odds of identifying with this form, if I may say so, receive decisive support from this, which comes to constitute the absolutely essential imaginary knot in man that psychoanalysis—obscurely and despite inextricable doctrinal contradictions—has admirably designated as “narcissism.”

Indeed, the relation of the image to the suicidal tendency essentially expressed in the myth of Narcissus lies in this knot. This suicidal tendency—which represents in my opinion what Freud sought to situate in his metapsychology with the terms “death instinct” and “primary masochism”—depends, in my view, on the fact that man’s death, long before it is reflected (in a way that is, moreover, always so ambiguous) in his thinking, is experienced by him in the earliest phase of misery that he goes through from the trauma of birth until the end of the first six months of physiological prematurity, and that echoes later in the trauma of weaning.10

Lacan is not only echoing Bolk’s embryology but furthering Otto Rank’s theory of birth trauma as the primal (and pre-Oedipal) source of repression.11 There is another key elaboration in this passage: the relation between the mirror stage and suicidal aggression, which Lacan lays bare as “the fundamental structure of madness”.12 Thus, Lacan places the origins of aggressivity in the narcissistic structure of the ego, as constructed in the mirror stage. This is why he places the essay, “Aggressivity in Psychoanalysis” after “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function”.

Aggressiveness in Psychoanalysis (1948)

“Aggressiveness in Psychoanalysis” brings another dimension of commentary on the mirror stage. Here, Lacan focuses on the imago of the fragmented body as “elective vectors of aggressive intentions”. These aggressive intentions originate through a “formal stagnation” in the dialectic of the mirror stage. Lacan writes:

Now, this formal stagnation is akin to the most general structure of human knowledge, which constitutes the ego and objects as having the attributes of permanence, identity, and substance—in short, as entities or “things” that are very different from the gestalts that experience enables us to isolate in the mobility of the field constructed according to the lines of animal desire.

Indeed, this formal fixation, which introduces a certain difference of level, a certain discordance between man as organism and his Umwelt, is the very condition that indefinitely extends his world and his power, by giving his objects their instrumental polyvalence and symbolic polyphony, as well as their potential as weaponry.

What I have called paranoiac knowledge is therefore shown to correspond in its more or less archaic forms to certain critical moments that punctuate the history of man’s mental genesis, each representing a stage of objectifying identification.13

On this basis, Lacan briefly explores Charlotte Bühler’s theory of transitivism in children, and then presents a fresh sketch of the mirror stage:

What I have called the “mirror stage” is of interest because it manifests the affective dynamism by which the subject primordially identifies with the visual gestalt of his own body. In comparison with the still very profound lack of coordination in his own motor functioning, that gestalt is an ideal unity, a salutary imago. Its value is heightened by all the early distress resulting from the child’s intra-organic and relational discordance during the first six months of life, when he bears the neurological and humoral signs of a physiological prematurity at birth.

It is this capture by the imago of the human form—rather than Einfiihlung, the absence of which is abundantly clear in early childhood—that dominates the whole dialectic of the child’s behavior in the presence of his semblable between six months and two and a half years of age. Throughout this period, one finds emotional reactions and articulated evidence of a normal transitivism.

A child who beats another child says that he himself was beaten; a child who sees another child fall, cries. Similarly, it is by identifying with the other that he experiences the whole range of bearing and display reactions—whose structural ambivalence is clearly revealed in his behaviors, the slave identifying with the despot, the actor with the spectator, the seduced with the seducer.

There is a sort of structural crossroads here to which we must accommodate our thinking if we are to understand the nature of aggressiveness in man and its relation to the formalism of his ego and objects. It is in this erotic relationship, in which the human individual fixates on an image that alienates him from himself, that we find the energy and the form from which the organization of the passions that he will call his ego originates.14

Here, Lacan references Hegel’s master-slave dialectic, emphasizing the capture of the subject by its specular image. Later in the essay, Lacan remarks, “The question is whether the conflict between Master and Slave will find its solution in the service of the machine”.15 He continues to describe the implications of this lure of spatial identification, drawing on ethology:

The notion of the role of spatial symmetry in man’s narcissistic structure is essential in laying the groundwork for a psychological analysis of space, whose place I can merely indicate here. Animal psychology has shown us that the individual’s relation to a particular spatial field is socially mapped in certain species, in a way that raises it to the category of subjective membership. I would say that it is the subjective possibility of the mirror projection of such a field into the other’s field that gives human space its originally “geometrical” structure, a structure I would willingly characterize as kaleidoscopic.16

Lacan is proposing that the subject’s spatial encounter with its own specular image represents its entry into the social world, a point he develops further in “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function”, which we will now examine.

The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function (1949)

Lacan delivered “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function” in Zurich on July 17, 1949, at the International Congress of Psychoanalysis. This essay is succinct and dense with his aphoristic style, and it is here that we find Lacan’s most poetic and precise formulations of the mirror stage. Lacan associates the mirror stage with what he calls the “I function”. This relationship is explained in the following passage:

The jubilant assumption of his specular image by the kind of being—still trapped in his motor impotence and nursling dependence—the little man is at the infans stage thus seems to me to manifest in an exemplary situation the symbolic matrix in which the I is precipitated in a primordial form, prior to being objectified in the dialectic of identification with the other, and before language restores to it, in the universal, its function as subject.

This form would, moreover, have to be called the “ideal-I”—if we wanted to translate it into a familiar register—in the sense that it will also be the rootstock of secondary identifications, this latter term subsuming the libidinal normalization functions. But the important point is that this form situates the agency known as the ego, prior to its social determination, in a fictional direction that will forever remain irreducible for any single individual or, rather, that will only asymptotically approach the subject’s becoming, no matter how successful the dialectical syntheses by which he must resolve, as I, his discordance with his own reality.17

Lacan describes the “I” as a “primordial form” that exists prior to the ego’s “social determination”, a vector which he regards as a “fictional direction”. And this fictitious structure and vector of the ego-“I” will “only asymptotically approach the subject’s becoming”. The term “asymptotic” means “a line that continually approaches a given curve but does not meet it at any finite distance”.18 Here, Lacan is invoking the spatial nature of ego-identification, and the fact that no matter which direction it decidedly moves upon, the “I” never intersects the axis of reality. The Greek root, asumptōtos, gives us yet another connotation: “not falling together”, or simply, “apt to fall”. The birth of the ego-“I” is thus a fall from the real, through a looking-glass, where the subject encounters the mirage of its form, and the fictional character of a so-called “self”.

Lacan proceeds to illustrate how the lure of spatial identification attains a temporal projection in the formation of a historical self:

This development is experienced as a temporal dialectic that decisively projects the individual’s formation into history: the mirror stage is a drama whose internal pressure pushes precipitously from insufficiency to anticipation—and, for the subject caught up in the lure of spatial identification, turns out fantasies that proceed from a fragmented image of the body to what I will call an “orthopedic” form of its totality—and to the finally donned armor of an alienating identity that will mark his entire mental development with its rigid structure. Thus, the shattering of the Innenwelt to Umwelt circle gives rise to an inexhaustible squaring of the ego’s audits.19

The mirror stage is now presented as the inaugural drama of the human being, a “temporal dialectic” that moves from vital insufficiency to functional anticipation, in a process that marks the very production of fantasy. Lacan places the root of egoic fantasy in a perceptual discordance between its fragmented body that nevertheless assumes an orthopedic totality. This observation is analogous to Adi Da’s insight that “the ego is not an entity but an activity”, an activity he often describes as a “total psycho-physical” activity of “self-contraction”:

The ego is an activity, not an entity. The ego is the activity of avoidance, the avoidance of relationship.

Therefore, any thought, any function, anything that generates form, that appears as form, that seems to be form, is produced by the concentration of attention—or self-contraction. Thus, apart from “radical” self-understanding, all processes—even life itself—tend to become an obstruction. The root of all suffering is called the “ego”, as if it were a “thing”, an entity. But the ego is actually the activity of self-contraction—in countless forms, endured unconsciously. The unconsciousness is the key—not the acts of concentration themselves (which are only more or less functional). Apart from present-time conscious self-understanding, the self-contracted state is presumed to be the inevitable condition of life. That unconscious self-contraction creates separation, which manifests as identification (or the sense of separate self).

As Lacan points out, the ego functions as a “finally donned armor”, a reflexively protective mechanism that, in the presumption of its own separate identity, maintains perpetual alienation. This “rigid structure” gives rise to the “shattering” of the Innenwelt (inner world) and Umwelt (environment) in what Lacan terms a “primordial Dischord”. It is on this basis that Lacan says “the specular I turns into the social I”,20 where the field of the Other becomes perceptible via aggressivity:

This moment at which the mirror stage comes to an end inaugurates, through identification with the imago of one’s semblable and the drama of primordial jealousy . . . the dialectic that will henceforth link the I to socially elaborated situations.

It is this moment that decisively tips the whole of human knowledge into being mediated by the other’s desire, constitutes its objects in an abstract equivalence due to competition from other people, and turns the I into an apparatus to which every instinctual pressure constitutes a danger, even if it corresponds to a natural maturation process.21

Adi Da describes this dialectic of jealousy and fear as a hedge of enclosure, critiquing the mystical notion of “inwardness”:

Ultimately, all psycho-physical experience serves the separate being, the separate psycho-physical person that is “I” . . . Experience, or inwardness is the hedge around Narcissus, the enclosure of the self. The archetype of Narcissus, who avoids the world by gazing into a pond at his own image, is a metaphor for the ego, the independent self-mind. Like the pond, the mind is a reflective mechanism. Therefore, the ego or the self or Narcissus is a reflection, an illusion of independence. To enter into the realm of the mind, to persist in our flight toward subjectivity, our obsessive experience of separate self, is to be possessed of the self, not of God, no matter how profound the inward phenomena may seem to be at any time.22

Adi Da’s criticism of inwardness as a function of the Narcissistic gaze extends not only to traditional forms of mysticism but also to Jung’s preoccupation with archetypal images. The pastimes of Narcissus leave us locked in traces of self-image, gross and subtle fantasms that function as primary haunts.

Psychoanalysis in the Real

Having traced the development of the mirror stage to its alienating conclusion in the locus of the Other, Lacan now brings us to the radical import of psychoanalysis:

At this intersection of nature and culture, so obstinately scrutinized by the anthropology of our times, psychoanalysis alone recognizes the knot of imaginary servitude that love must always untie anew or sever.

For such a task we can find no promise in altruistic feeling, we who lay bare the aggressiveness that underlies the activities of the philanthropist, the idealist, the pedagogue, and even the reformer.

In the subject to subject recourse we preserve, psychoanalysis can accompany the patient to the ecstatic limit of the “Thou art that,” where the cipher of his mortal destiny is revealed to him, but it is not in our sole power as practitioners to bring him to the point where the true journey begins.23

Lacan is referencing the Upanishadic utterance, Tat tvam asi,24 a mahavākya which asserts the primordial identity of the manifest being (ātman) with the transcendental real (Brahman). In the context of Vedanta, Tat tvam asi functions as an oral transmission that awakens the subject from imaginary identification to the non-dual nature of the real. Lacan thus implies that psychoanalysis can serve as a dialectical reversal of the mirror stage, undoing the firmament of imaginary identification and thus untying the “knot of imaginary servitude”. Therefore, the transcending of the misrecognition of the mirror stage allows for the radical recognition of the real—it is at this ecstatic limit, where the subject sees the “cipher of his mortal destiny” that Lacan says “the true journey begins”.

With this, Lacan is effectively positioning psychoanalysis as a preliminary to the Eastern conception of awakening to the real. Lacan looks forward from psychoanalysis and sets his gaze on the Upanishads. Adi Da looks back from the real to psychoanalysis by emphasizing the Oedipal complex as a block to spiritual development.25 How do we set our sights on the horizon of the unconscious and the real? How does a radical psychoanalysis proceed from its roots to a clinic of the real? We must await the foretold day of translation, when analysis not only meets its end but marks a passage to its future, where the hardened head of Narcissus cracks on the knee of listening, sounding its destiny to echo in the stone and mirror of the real.

The astrological zodiac signifies a 360-degree circle that circumscribes a relational field. If we understand the zodiac as a signifier rather than a thing, then its function as a symbolic order becomes available to us. What Ernst calls the “Aditya circle” is thus a meta-structure of meaning that reveals a new field of astrological inquiry—the question of what it means to incarnate love in the law of our being.

There is yet so much to explore in the Adityas from astrological, philosophical, and psychoanalytic perspectives. The Adityas are not only symbols in and of themselves, they are a symbolic structure that contains other signifiers. As Ernst notes, each Aditya travels with a Rishi that extends the paternal law of that Aditya, or what Lacan would refer to as the “Name-of-the-Father”. How do we incarnate the love we are here to give, so that love is no longer the egoic phenomenon of giving what you don’t have to someone who doesn’t want it? Is this the import of an astrology that unchains the symbolic order and encounters the real? We explore the Adityas as aspects of love, the purpose of astrology readings, and what it means to incarnate love.

For more on the Adityas, see Ernst’s introductory video here and his series analyzing the Trump cabinet using the Aditya zodiac here. Those interested in seeing their natal charts with the Aditya zodiac can access Ernst’s Aditya calculator here.

The audio recording and edited transcript of our conversation are both given below.

Neeshee Pandit: Hi Ernst, welcome, and thank you so much for being here with me to have a conversation about astrology, zodiacs, and whatever else we get into!

Ernst Wilhelm: Thanks for inviting me. It’s been a long time since we’ve hung out together, so it feels good.

Neeshee Pandit: I know you’ve been pushing the boundaries of zodiacal astrology as usual with this new concept of the Aditya zodiac, so I thought you could introduce that notion for people.

Ernst Wilhelm: In the Puranas (which are the mythological textbooks of India), a few of them, including the Srimad Bhagavatam, give this arrangement of Adityas, which are solar divinities related to different parts of the circle. And they basically tell us that a solar month corresponds to an Aditya.

The interesting thing about this circle of solar months is that the first month doesn’t start at the vernal equinox (where we have the first degree of Aries), but 30 degrees before that. That’s a very, very different thing. And these Puranas are old texts—the Bhagavatam is from the time of the Mahabharata. In these old books, they never mentioned zodiac signs. Instead, they are taken in 12 sutras.

They are talking about the Sun God traveling through the sky, and in each part of the year, he takes on a certain guise, a certain divinity, and that is the Aditya. One of the beautiful things about it is that it doesn’t stop there. Each Aditya (and there are twelve of them) is spending time with six other celestial beings. One is a rishi, one is a rakshasa, one is a gandharva.1 So there are these other beings there. This means we have a symbolism of six beings for every 30-degree portion of the sky, which adds a lot to that part of space. The first Aditya starts before the vernal equinox, and the second starts at the vernal equinox. And then it just goes around the circle.

What is really interesting about the Adityas is if we reflect on what they mean. “Aditi” means “the undivided”, or “the whole”. She is the wife of the Rishi Kashyapa, and they had these twelve children called the Adityas. If we think about this in mythological and astronomical terms, we have Aditi—the undivided. That is a perfect circle. It’s just this undivided circle. We can look at the circle as a symbol of love, of unity. We have the full circle of connection. A circle represents connection, right? I say we have this circle of perfect divine love, and Aditi is this unbroken circle of divine love. And then we’ve got seven planets to throw around in that circle. We are not going to cover the entire circle.

Then we take the circle, and there are twelve Adityas, twelve children, which are really twelve different aspects of love. So each of us has a way that we can love. Each of the Adityas, as a child of Aditi, represents an aspect of love.

We are really here to live that type of love in our lives. If we have healthy planets in a particular Aditya, we will be using that love in a healthy way, and through that we will be productive to ourselves. We’ll be productive to other people, and we’ll really be doing what we’re meant to be doing. But, of course, if we have afflicted planets in an Aditya, then we’re struggling with how to make that love work in our life. And then we’re having problems.

One of the things I love about the Adityas is that when we look at it, we’re looking at what love are you here to express? You are not going to express perfect love—because it’s mathematically impossible. There are seven planets and twelve Adityas, twelve parts of Aditi only. The circle is perfect, but we don’t get to be the whole circle. Even when we take the perspective of the Kālapurusha2: one of the most basic divisions of the circle is that it’s Vishnu, and each part, each rashi3 of 30 degrees, is one of Vishnu’s body parts. So every one of Vishnu’s body parts is going to do something useful. But every body part is not going to be in use.

In our charts, we have seven planets. At most, we’re using seven body parts. Same with the Adityas. At most, we’re using seven Adityas. No one can give complete perfect love and every type of love that somebody might need or want, or that we might need or want.

It’s really interesting to start looking at this whole circle as what kind of love are you giving and what kind of love are you needing back, because maybe you don’t have an Aditya, and so not having that, you are thinking “that’s love coming to my life that I could really benefit from”. Of course, the Aditya on your seventh house is a love that is the most remote from you unless you have planets in there. We have to look at everything as the context of the type of love that a person is capable of expressing.

One of the things I love about the Aditya symbology is that we go around and we tell people there’s this big thing going on these days that “we should live as ourselves”. We shouldn’t be programmed entities. We shouldn’t be following cultural programming, television programming. We have to find out who we are and live with ourselves.

I don’t know what other people hear when they hear that, but when I hear that, I feel like I have to be this badass at something. I can’t just go draw. I have to be an amazing artist. I just can’t go write a novel. I have to be on the New York Times bestseller list, otherwise, I’m not living as myself. If I want to get into politics, I have to be the president. Being the mayor is not going to cut it. When we start thinking this way, it feels like living as yourself is this big thing in the world. But if you think about that, that’s mathematically impossible—because if that were the truth, and everyone who got into politics was meant to be president, it wouldn’t work. Everyone can’t be president. The New York Times bestseller list is only so long—everyone can’t be on it. You know what I mean? There are only so many museums. There are only so many galleries. Everyone can’t have their art in there because they’re all the best artists. If everyone is the best artist, it doesn’t work.

None of those things means living as ourselves. That is just what we’re doing, in this movie, in this role. So imagine this Western movie. We have one guy who’s a sheriff. We have one guy who’s the outlaw. We have one lady who’s the lone woman on the farm. We have one guy who’s a roaming bandit. We have one guy who’s a Civil War veteran, wandering across America—hopeless. We have all these different characters doing completely different things.

Yet none of that is living as themselves. Just like being president, being a doctor, being an astrologer, being an artist—none of that means we’re living as ourselves. Living as ourselves on the deepest level means to express the love that is contained within us. And that is seen as the Aditya. It’s living out this Aditya.

One of the Adityas is Varuna. He is the fourth Aditya, and he falls where tropical Gemini would fall. Varuna is the all-encompassing sky. It’s the force that can encompass everything. And it is essentially the all-encompassing love. It’s the love that can accept everything. People might have lots of planets there, but how healthy are those planets? They might need some work. But let’s take the example of a person who had this pure. They could just sit there, and somebody could come up to them who’s done severely evil things and say, “Oh, I’m a horrible person, this is what I did”. They explained everything they did. The pure Varuna person’s response to that would be so all-encompassing. They could embrace all the horrible things that person had done—without giving any signals of what’s wrong with you, without any judgment, without anything except pure sheer acceptance. In that, the person would find healing. It’s that level of all-encompassing love. It’s not a love that does anything. It’s the love that just encompasses everything. It gives room for everything under the sun that happens to happen.

Now, if that same person went to anyone else, to any other Aditya, that Aditya wouldn’t have that love to give. Say it came to Tvastha. Tvastha wants to build something; he wants to build forms. That is the seventh Aditya, and where we would have tropical Virgo. He wants to build forms, and he is all about making a workable, real life that contains real things that have form and value for yourself and others. This person feels horrible and evil about what they’ve done to such a point that all they can do is continue to do evil things. Because when someone is at that level, the way they feel about themselves only makes them do more evil things. So the minute they’re told, all you have to do is this and make up for it, they’re going back to do evil things because they just can’t even begin to see themselves doing good things. They just can’t live with themselves enough to do anything good. They came to a Tvastha person, and the Tvastha person listened. He’d be showing micro-expressions in his unconscious, but he would be responding with, “Man, you really could have done something useful down here, and you did this and you were self-indulgent and you weren’t building anything”. He’d be thinking these thoughts—“You weren’t building, you idiot”. A person’s unconscious would register all that stuff and not be able to forgive himself as a result. That would be the wrong person to go to. Each of the Adityas has a love. Tvastha is the love of building. Somebody comes and you say, “Hey, how about we just build this?” You build something with someone, and they heal because they’re building something.

I remember when I was a kid, one of my dad’s friends visited from overseas, came for a week, and while we were there, we built this amazing kite together. I was seven years old, and that was one of the most helpful phases of my development. Just having someone building something with me, just showing up saying, “Hey, let’s build this together. We can build this thing”. It was extravagant—it wasn’t like this simple little thing. It was an amazing thing. To develop this confidence in building and to have an experience of brotherhood and building, that one week really was one of the most impactful weeks of my childhood. He was giving this seven-year-old a love of building, giving the love of let’s build something, let’s make something, see how that feels, see what that does to us. The love of the Adityas has a way to transform us, and living as ourselves essentially means living out that love.

Any of those guys in the Western movie, it doesn’t matter what the role is. The outlaw could be the guy with the all-encompassing love. He’s meeting people along the journey and just being so accepting of them. They heal. They get better. They make shifts. And the Civil War vet who’s wandering in dissolution doesn’t know where he goes. Maybe he’s got the love of Tvastha, and when he shows up somewhere and that barn is in disrepair, he just can’t help himself. He has to just build it.

Living as yourself essentially means living out our Adityas. Now we actually have a focal point. What does that actually mean? Live as myself? It’s to live as an Aditya. Are you living out this thing?

What’s really interesting is this psychic I know. He doesn’t use astrology or anything, but people take pictures of themselves or other people. I’ve heard about a few readings from people who have gone to this guy, and he effectively tells them their Aditya and says, “This is where your strength comes from. Live this way. This is how you have to be. This is how you live”. He just sees the Aditya in these people, and he approaches it from a very spiritual point of view. He had visions of Christ coming to him at age three, so he is a mystic. And the things he’ll say are like he’s talking about their Adityas and how this is where your power comes from. This is where your strength comes from. This is where your love comes from. And it’s just very clear to him.

So there really is a way of living to live as ourselves, and that’s living out the love that we embody, because that’s the only thing that’s really doing any good for ourselves or other people. It’s a whole different way to look at the astrology of it. There is also lots of practical value to using the Adityas. The symbology can just be so practical. For instance, the second Aditya, Aryaman, is the companion. So, how qualified are you for companionship? I’ll get to your seventh house and your karma with the opposite gender. I’ll get to that. But first, how capable are you of companionship? Because if you’re not, it doesn’t matter.

You have a wonderful seventh house, and a wonderful person shows up. The love of companionship—do I have that kind of love to give or not? It’s really interesting to just see the circle this way.

Neeshee Pandit: It just brings up so many things for me. And for the record, you and I haven’t actually had a discussion about this.

Ernst: No, we’ve never talked about this.

Neeshee: I think you’re bringing in a cultural symbology. We talk about Vedic astrology, but we’re using the Greek language a lot of the time. Here, you are actually looking at the Indian symbology. I think that makes absolute sense. But, even more important, is that we’re getting at something much more profound and even philosophical, which is that you’re looking at the zodiac as a structure through which we actually incarnate love and who we are­—in a way that is even prior to the roles we might play. Something that brings up for me is a quote from Lacan, who says, “Love is giving something you don’t have to someone who doesn’t want it”.

And I think that that very much describes the dynamic of lowercase “love” that human beings engage in. They go to the place where they don’t have the thing, they try to give it to somebody, that person doesn’t even want it. And there you have the ritual of human ego-based love—which is seeking. On the other hand, you could actually say, well, where do I actually have love to give? We’re going to actually offer something that is truly mine to offer. When you do that, you’re no longer in this reciprocal game of I need something from somebody else to validate who I am, where I’m really just reaching for myself in the other person. What would it mean to actually access love itself, as something that’s even a spiritual phenomenon?

I think this is what you are getting at that with the Adityas. And you pointed out the meaning of the word. The root in there is “Adi”, which means “primordial”, “first”, “original”. We can think about the zodiac as a constitution: what is our true constitution? Not just in the sense of an Ayurvedic constitution of doshas and elements, but what about something even more fundamental than that? You are actually describing the fact that we all incarnate love in a unique way. And that is what there is to realize.

Ernst Wilhelm: It’s really true. And you know, this whole thing of love versus need. Most people approach relationships from a point of need, like you said, they are trying to give what they don’t have to somebody who doesn’t want it. That’s one way of looking at it, and that’s a whole other discussion, of course. But that’s basically the love of me. People say, “I love you, I love you”. What they’re saying is, “I need you. I need you. I need you most of the time”.

But see, when a person is expressing love, they don’t need love because they have it already. And that’s really what the Adityas are. By expressing this part of yourself, which is really your most primal part, your most truthful part, then you don’t need back—you’ll get back because that’s how life works. But you don’t need back. If people come from a need point of view, that they need something back, and they don’t get that, they get upset. A lot of things they need, they have not even voiced to the people around them that they’re supposed to get back from. It’s just this unconscious, unqualified expectation, and when they don’t get it, they create drama.

When we’re in a state of expressing love, we’re fulfilled in that state. And that’s the beautiful thing about it. So when we say live as yourself, it means live as a fulfilled being who’s expressing love. Rather than living as an empty being who thinks they have to be on the New York Times bestseller list, and when they’re not in front of the camera and looking great, they’re having drama with their loved ones.

Neeshee Pandit: That brings up the issue of what we are even using astrology for when we give people readings or when people study it? I certainly have seen my fair share of people who use it in a way that I think they’d be better off not even engaging with it. It’s just building up ideas and a sense of self that may be somewhat accurate, but it’s actually delusional. It’s using symbology to avoid actually incarnating yourself. And I’ve always thought of astrology as something that actually helps an individual become who they are, actually helps them incarnate themselves.

Astrology shouldn’t be an abstracting modality. It should actually be an incarnating modality. You’re getting to the core of that with this articulation of the Adityas, and maybe you are describing a circle that is getting at the very essence of what it means to be embodied.

Ernst Wilhelm: I think so. I think that Adityas really spell out what we are on a really truthful level. I’ve really come to see the zodiac signs, those 30-degree portions, to be more important than the planet. It’s not “Okay, what planet is strong?”. It’s, “What Adityas are really prominent here? Are they healthy or unhealthy?”

If you have a prominent Aditya and it’s unhealthy, your life is not going to work until you turn that around, until you heal those planets in there. But if your most prominent Aditya is a healthy Aditya, then you’ve always been expressing a kind of love. And you’ll only get better at it, and it’s going to make a big difference in your life. It’s not possible to be happy if our prominent Aditya is our most afflicted Aditya. And our afflicted Aditya will always be the one who’s causing us the most stumbling blocks. That’s why we have to develop a more truthful love, because love is a very confusing thing.

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Everyone who does everything we are making fun of about people and being in love, well, they are not trying to cause trouble. We think this is how it works; we simply are playing the game wrong, and that’s why we have the Lajjitaadi Avasthas.4 Are you using this planet in the way that you win at the game, or are you going to lose every time because that’s not how the game works?

If we have trouble in our chart, it doesn’t mean that person is mischievous and trying to ruin everything around them. It’s that they’re sincerely trying to play by rules that they believe and think are going to work. They feel like they’re working so hard to make life better for themselves and others, and then when it doesn’t, they feel so cheated, and they’re trying to figure out why. You must have done that wrong, and this person did this. From their point of view, they’re trying their damnedest to do the good, beautiful, loving thing. But they have ideas about love they have that simply aren’t true and that aren’t the way things work.

It’s really, really sad when humans are putting so much energy into this love thing. If we approach it with ideas that aren’t true, we’re going to muck it up. We need a model of what really works—what kind of love is really there, and what does that love look like? And, second of all, are you seeing this clearly, or do you have wrong concepts about it? Why? Because when you’re raised in certain environments, you learn from your environment. In this day and day and age of Earth, we’re not really getting a lot of great examples of what works for people; what working love is, what working family is, what working anything is.

The astrology with the Lajjitaadi Avasthas gives us a perfectly working model of how love works. We can look at a planet and say, “Oh, I’m using this planet in a way that every time I lose”. Every time somebody gets hurt, including me, everyone gets hurt. As opposed to, every time I touch something, it’s gold because it works. And we’re all capable of making everything we touch gold, if we just learn and look in our charts to see where we’re confused about what works, what’s going to create love and connection, versus what we think will create love and connection but doesn’t.

Neeshee Pandit: You’re really digging into the 30-degree portions of the zodiac circle in a way that’s more fundamental than the planets.

What is it, and how do we understand it? How do we structure it? How do we read it? Your whole movement from sidereal to tropical, and now the movement from tropical to the Adityas. Some might wonder, what’s right? What’s correct?

My view on it is that you can really draw the circle however you wish. It’s a 360-degree circle, and there are patterns of twelve in all kinds of ways. There are twelve meridians, too. So you can take the solar value however you want and put it into 30 degrees times 12. This is a basic mathematical pattern of reality, you could say.

Somebody might say, “Well, how come you’re getting rid of zero degrees Aries?” You can think about that. In the traditional notion of seasonal dynamics, there’s always the idea that a season begins before it actually manifests its energy. We have this ebb and flow, and you can either place the beginning of a season at its manifestation or you can place the beginning of the season before its manifestation—

Ernst Wilhelm: In seed.

Neeshee: Yes. So you can put 30 degrees before and say that’s where the zodiac starts. It is just as valid as putting it at the vernal equinox.

Ernst Wilhelm: How I see it all lines up is that we have this circle, and that circle is created by the apparent motion of the Sun around Earth. There are four times when that motion is unique. That is, at the vernal equinox and the autumnal equinox, where we have equal day and night and the Sun crosses the equator. At the summer solstice, the Sun reaches its peak, and then it begins to descend and move more south. At the winter solstice, the sun reaches its lowest point relative to Earth, the most southern point. And now it’s going to begin to move north.

We have these four points, this axis. We have to take this model of zodiac signs, the twelve Adityas, and relate them to that axis in a way that essentially works. Because we are working with that axis, the Adityas are tropical divisions of that circle using that axis. This is very clearly mentioned in the old books—they relate to axes differently than the Persians and the Greeks did, who put the first sign at the vernal equinox. What they do instead is they have the first sign here, the equinox here, second sign. The equinox divides the first and second signs, but that’s because the first and second signs are seen as reflections of each other.

So we have this axis. Imagine we put a mirror up, and we can see this reflection along this axis. These are reflections, and so they reflect across the axis, and we can just fold the whole chart along these four axes to see how different signs of the zodiac, different Adityas, are reflections of each other.

Rashi aspects are based on this axis. There is also some Greek astrology based on this idea of reflections. Jaimini astrology is so much about reflections. We have the ardasha rashi, which means the reflective rashi, which is a rashi that is on another part of the zodiac from another one.

We have to look at it in the structure of what these signs really are. What are they? How are they interacting? And then it becomes clear how to put them against this axis of the equinoxes and solstice.

Neeshee Pandit: That’s exactly the word I was thinking of: structure. You are really structuring the zodiac and looking at what its intrinsic dynamics actually are. It’s a movement. And the fact that that movement has vectors and an axis means that it also mirrors itself. This is the structure of reality.

That also reminds me of something I thought earlier, which is how do we move beyond looking at astrology in our charts as something narcissistic? And I think the only way you can really do that is by seeing the ways in which something that’s actually beyond you can move through you, which we are talking about as love. Rather than just sort of analyzing yourself in a mirror, in the sense of personality, you are actually analyzing yourself in a functional way.

Rather than thinking, well, I guess I should do this, I should do that, I’m this kind of person, I’ll never be happy, and my seventh house is trashed. People get these ideas about themselves and their life, and then they try to structure themselves inside that, and that’s not healthy.

Ernst Wilhelm: One of the tricky things about dealing with astrology as a language of symbols is that whenever somebody looks at their chart, they’re approaching their chart with all these ideas about themselves already. When they look at the chart, the first things they’re going to see in that chart are things that support those ideas of themselves.

The problem with that is we’re all walking around with a lot of ideas about ourselves that simply aren’t true. We think we’re a certain way, but we’re not. We think that we don’t care about this, that we’ll never have that, and this is what we really need. But if we watch our lives develop over decades and we get the maturity, we more and more have the ability to observe our lives and observe ourselves, and start saying, wait a minute, I was really never that thing. And it’s proven because now I’m fifty years old and none of that even happened. And then this thing over here happened, and I didn’t even try. It just kind of just happened.

There are always parts of ourselves that need to prove ourselves to mom, to dad.5 In our imaginations and our ideas of ourselves, we see ourselves as this thing that will please mom or dad. And then we think we’re that thing. We identify with that thing. And then you realize, I’m really not that thing.

One day, you finally start allowing yourself to exist as yourself. And that’s when you can really start seeing the horoscope working. Until then, we’re using it in a very limited capacity in that we’re only allowing ourselves to see the stuff in the chart that supports our perception of ourselves, our preconception of ourselves, which may not even be correct. How much of what we think about ourselves is true? Compared to what is false, you can say on average it’s 50/50. That’s if we take the world as an average. Statistically, on average, half of what you believe about yourself is true, and the other half has nothing to do with who you really are.

Of course, one person might have 10%, one person might make 90% of something. But collectively, we’re at 50%. So you need to realize, as you look at yourself and you look at your chart, that you need to observe—don’t just believe shit about yourself until it’s proven, until you see it actually happening. You need to stand back and say, I’m going to watch and see, does she really have the Sun in Aries? Or is this something else I’m seeing? Or do they have Saturn in Aries, and they’re trying to prove that they’re strong? The difference is that the Sun in Aries, one day, will have just done things that show they are strong, and the Saturn in Aries person will die trying to prove that they’re strong. But in their mind, oh, I’m strong. Because they need to prove that. And the only way to prove it is to start with positive thinking. You have to see yourself as that, but maybe you’re really not, and it’s not that you’re not strong, but maybe it’s not Aries strength. You have a different strength. And all the Adityas take great strength to express, so we have to always keep that in mind.

It’s been really, really interesting to look at charts of people who don’t have an observational attitude about themselves and about astrology and so on. And how they’ve been very stuck in the astrology. I mean that they don’t learn a lot of new things. Because they don’t spend time learning to go deeper and deeper. They’re like, okay, I’ve got the structure explained. My preconceptions of myself are working, and I don’t want to observe more than that. I can function in this place. Then you’ll see people who are observers, who are watching themselves, watching their lives going, wait, something’s not adding up. I need to go deeper into the astrology.

I’ve just had hands-on experience with this, with people, and having them look at different things in their chart without them knowing it was their chart. And they are seeing really profound things and realizing that it’s sort of like me. But then not wanting to follow up on those deeper techniques because they’re happy living in this paradigm of what they are, and for them life is not about going deeper, it’s about, “I want to make more money,” or “I want to be more famous,” or “I want to go on more vacations”, whatever. They want to focus on other parts of their lives besides self-knowledge.

But when you start digging into it from a self-knowledge point of view, it doesn’t take people long to realize the limitations of their astrology techniques, other astrology symbols. Because of what they know about those so far, and they really see themselves, something’s not adding up. But it’s so easy, like you said, just to have to walk in there, explain yourself away, and get stuck. And that’s not how we want to do it. We have to have a good Mercury to use our astrology, which means we want to observe. That’s the use of Mercury we watch—we observe and we learn and we don’t come to any conclusions, any opinions. We’re just gathering information, and then we’re seeing if it adds up. That’s step one.

And we need to do that very much in regard to observing ourselves and everything. “Oh, I’m really great. I’m a great guy. I treat all the girls right”. Okay, now stand back and observe yourself. And see, how are you really treating the girls? What happens after two years? Seemed like you were treating well, but where weren’t you? Just take that step back and gather information about ourselves. Or, “I’m really a loving person. I treated my husband so well for so long”. All right. You’re in divorce court—step back. Observe. Really watch your behavior. Drop this idea. Just drop all your ideas of how you were and observe: how were you in your five years of marriage?

Neeshee Pandit: When we’re looking at our natal chart, we’re looking at the past in so many ways. It’s at the moment of birth. It’s this idea we also find in psychoanalysis of needing to retrace our memories. But you can also challenge that and say, you know what? It’s all actually evident right here, right now, in your actual life. We don’t even need to go into this retro-regression to discover what’s actually going on in your unconscious. You’re unconscious is speaking right now, and with everything that’s happening in your life. Same with astrology. As you’re saying, we can actually understand astrology by just looking at our actual life, and not just going into the abstract. I think that’s so key.

Ernst Wilhelm: Our life is a symbol of everything we’ve done right here, right now. This is you. This is what you’ve created. This is what you’ve done. This is what you’ve screwed up.

Neeshee Pandit: In that sense, there is no objective truth to astrology. And that’s why I always start my readings by letting the client talk for a while. What’s going on in your life? Where are you at? What’s your actual query? Because what’s the point reading a chart in abstract to somebody—it doesn’t really make sense on that level. I need to read to the actual person in the moment in their life in which they’re coming to me for a reading. At that point, it’s improvisational. I’m just looking into the mirror for them—I’m reading their chart for them, and there’s benefit to that. It’s the function of an astrologer. You can have that third-party perspective. You’re not looking at it with your own perceptions.

That’s the value of a reading. Then you have students of astrology, who are ideally studying the way you’re describing—to actually understand themselves, how they function, what’s real about it.

Ernst Wilhelm: I think the thing with using astrology in readings, there are so many different ways we can help people.

I remember once when I was first doing readings, a woman came in. She came in with her boyfriend, actually. She was just holding, like the whole time she had her hands clasped way down low by her womb. Usually, people across their arms here. She had it way down here, and I didn’t really think much of it. I just got into reading the chart, and I just noticed that she’s not looking very comfortable for some reason. This is like a weird way to watch, having your arms crossed across your womb. I didn’t think about it because I didn’t really read body language back then. This is when I was starting. But during the reading, I said, Oh, it looks like y’all had an abortion a year ago. And, you know, I didn’t ask, I didn’t let them talk. I didn’t say, What are your questions? What are you talking about? I just jumped in and started reading it. “I’m sorry to say it, but it looks like you had an abortion a year ago”. And the minute I said that, her arms just came off her womb.

The fact that, without any information, I just said, Hey, this happened in your past, made her feel like, Wait a minute, maybe I don’t have to feel so responsible. It’s in my chart; it was destiny. I’m holding all this pain and guilt. This was destiny. You know, it’s in your chart. Sometimes that really helps people. So there are times when I think it’s better not to have any interaction with them. You just go in. And then there are other times that I figure we always have to be so sensitive to the person because sometimes the person will come in, and they have to express before they can be in a place of receptivity to anything. And so you just have to kick back and say, okay, and then jump into it. And of course, those people can be easier to read because, you know, they give you enough cues to know where to focus. That’s always nice—it makes our job easier.

Neeshee Pandit: Those people who come in and they say, “I don’t really know why I want an astrology reading. I just know that I’m here asking for that”. And you just have to respond.

Ernst Wilhelm: The beautiful thing about astrology is we can work with someone who’s trying to figure things out, but who’s running around in circles. We can talk with them, have them open, and then we can say, “Hey, there’s a door here. There’s a door here. You can stop running in circles”. We can do that. Or we can just blast them with information and they’re like, “Holy shit, that just totally makes sense”.

I remember one of the funniest readings I did. A lady came in, just bowled over her for an hour—just read her chart, and she goes, “Well, that feels so good to hear all that. And now I know I’m not going crazy”. Then she says, “It feels good to know I’m not going crazy”. Because there was so much stuff that she was going through and thinking and feeling. And for someone just to say, Hey, and just explain all that.

Astrology is so validating, you know? Because it’s not you going crazy. It’s the universe making you go crazy. It releases you from the judgment and, in that, lets you take the next step in being yourself. That’s all we can do. We take another step towards ourselves and astrology. There are millions of ways it can help. I think we have to be very fluid, and somehow I think there’s a talent. I don’t even know how to teach it, but I think we astrologers all have to develop it, of just knowing what the person is going to need when they show up. And there are no rules to that. In modern counseling, they have different ways. The reality is that only works for the client who needs to be handled that way, you know?

Neeshee Pandit: Exactly.

Ernst Wilhelm: One day, I had a lady come in for a reading, and the day before, I had learned a yoga that makes a person poor and not good with money. Right before she walked in, I said, Let me see if she has that yoga. I just learned this yoga yesterday in a book. I looked up there, and she had the yoga. So she comes in, I say, “Hey, I know you’ve told me you’ve been to lots of astrologers”. She goes, “Yeah, I’ve been to a lot of vague astrologers”. I said, “I know they all said that you are wealthy”. She goes, “Yeah, they all said that”. I said, “And when you said, No, I’m not wealthy, they all said, You’ll certainly be wealthy one day. She goes, “Yeah, they all said that”. And I said, “Well, I’m here to tell you you’re never going to be wealthy”. Which is a totally inappropriate thing to say. And she just lit up. She goes, “That feels so good to hear, because I’ve been going to Vedic astrologers for twenty years. And I feel like I’m doing something wrong because I’m not wealthy. In fact, I don’t even care about money. I never think about money. I’m focused on these other things that matter to me. So it’s such a relief to hear I’m not doing something wrong, because I’ve been thinking, what have I been doing wrong this whole time?”

Neeshee Pandit: The other interesting thing in that story is the fact that you learned that yoga, and then somebody showed up with it.

Ernst Wilhelm: It was the only time I’ve used that yoga my whole life. I know the yoga by heart because it was such a profound moment with the client. But I’ve never felt the need to look that yoga up again. It’s just what she needed to hear. It’s not that she was poor in the sense of destitute. She owned a house in a town where real estate has gone wacko. That house she bought years ago must be worth over a million now. It’s not that she was poor. She had every financial yoga there is. She had all the money yogas in the chart that you can.

Every astrologer, from the best to the worst, was going to say you’re wealthy. That’s the first thing I thought too. I was working on donation at the time. I’m like, oh, finally a wealthy client, because I need some good donations this week. And then I go, oh, let me check that yoga.

Neeshee Pandit: It speaks to the fact of just how much an astrologer has to cultivate themselves. Because I’ve often noticed the same thing—that my clients reflect something to me. I’ll have a client who really somehow is just right on par with something that I’ve been going through or processed in myself. And now they’re coming and asking that query.

And that’s why we really, like you said, have to study and dig deep into the astrology. Not just take it as a mere technique or at a surface value, or get comfortable with it.

Ernst Wilhelm: Totally true. And also, if we’re dealing with something, we have an idea of what the right thing to do is. When that client shows up, we have an idea of what the right thing for them to do is. But maybe if we really focus on their chart, we might find the right thing for us to do, you know?

It’s pretty much a two-way street. We learn something about astrology every time we handle the chart. Sometimes the thing we’re learning about astrology applies to our own charts. It’s back to the mirroring situation.

Neeshee Pandit: And also being able to hold that ethical position as an astrologer, like you’re saying, where you actually can voice their truth to them. It may not be yours. You may advise them in a way that wouldn’t be appropriate for you, that you may not even totally agree with, because that’s not your design, really. But it is true for them, and it should be voiced to them.

Ernst Wilhelm: All we’re here to do is inform them. One time, I had a client who was referred by a woman who had had readings with me, and she had a really nice chart. I never actually met her, just did phone readings before video. She had a nice chart, though, when it came to a person that’s livable with, that you can go out and have a nice time with, and a free-from-drama life. So this guy is like, “I’ve been spending time with this woman and this woman, and I’m not really sure what to do”.

One woman was this nice client who referred him, and I said, “Yeah, she’s a great girl. You’ve spent time with her, you know what a quality person she is. And this other girl, she is a total hellcat. I mean, nothing is going to be easy with this girl. It’s going to be full of drama. She’s never going to be happy with whatever you do or give”. This is the girl I say run from her. And I said, “You know, but looking at your chart and the dynamics you have going on, I think you’re going to pick the hellcat”.

And he goes, “You know, I think I’m going to”, because he had to explore that part of his seventh house at that time of his life. But I told him the truth. That’s what he needed to do. It wasn’t going to be the road to instant gratification and happiness, but it was just going to be an experience that he was going to have to go through to develop into the person who could be happy with a girl who wasn’t going to be sticking knives in him.

Neeshee Pandit: We put a burden on astrology to try to save us from all that. I remember you saying this to me a long time ago that we’re here to have the experiences that we need to have. And sometimes they hurt. A lot of times they hurt, mostly even. But that’s what it’s about. That takes you deeper into your incarnation. It takes you deeper into the discovery of what love is. This whole Aditya revelation that you’ve brought forward is a powerful way of relating to astrology, relating to the zodiac, relating to who we are and how we can actually learn and become and incarnate ourselves, fruitfully.

Ernst Wilhelm: I think that is the best thing about people jumping into the Adityas a little bit, not that you have to do the whole Adityas circle thing, but just the basics of Aditya symbology: which is the twelve Adityas, twelve Sun gods, and twelve Rishis. Each Aditya travels with a Rishi, and the Rishi is the law.

For instance, for the law of Tvasta, the Rishi is Jamadagni, who is the father of Parashurama, the sixth incarnation of Vishnu. And Jamadagni represents the paternal law that what the father says, that’s God, that’s the law. If someone has that Aditya full of terrible stuff, all you have to say is, you were raised in a household of extreme paternal law, that if you didn’t do what dad said, you were in trouble. He was God in the house, and you were miserable because of it. And they’ll go, oh yeah. Or, if you have beautiful planets in that sign, you can just say you’ve had really big benefits from your father and your family, and they’re like, yeah, I’m doing the same business my great-great-grandfather is doing, and I love it. You’ll see there’s this huge paternal influence for good or ill, that builds them into something beautiful if the Aditya is healthy, or which is the foundation of everything going wrong in their lives if it’s unhealthy.

There are very practical things we can pull out from these Adityas. Between those two things, everyone has an idea of Aries towards Gemini before they even start astrology. You know what I mean? They’ve already got some brainwashing in about what they’re supposed to be like just from their Sun sign and the newspaper, and from bad TV shows. The beautiful thing about Adityas is that you’re approaching this circle now without any idea. Nobody knows who these people are. We don’t have these deities being explained in terrible, useless ways all around us. People aren’t tattooing them on their bodies. But we have to change that. My wife’s working on the artwork right now!

So anyway, it gives you an opportunity, if you just learn these symbols, to look at your chart and learn something new about yourself, and to be able to see, is that true or not? Without any mind nonsense getting in the way. And that’s the coolest thing about me having taught this class.

I just got done with this first part, where we just talked about these twelve Adityas with the twelve Rishis. So many people have emailed me, and they said, Oh, now I really see that. I never really grasped that I had all these planets in this sign. It opens up a whole new world of being to them, a whole new validation of their being. And it’s not that if they didn’t understand that tropical sign more, they wouldn’t have come to a similar conclusion. But they only understood that tropical sign to the ability and brainwashing that they had experienced, a lot of which is not correct.

What’s a Scorpio supposed to be like? “Oh no, I’m a Scorpio. I don’t want to be that”. I have people do anything to make sure they’re not a Capricorn lagna now. “Oh, I hate Capricorn”. Let’s make you this Aditya. And we talk about that Aditya. And they’re like, oh yeah, I’m totally like that. I love being that one. I’m like, well, that’s kind of where Capricorn is, you know?

It gives you a fresh start to really learn something about yourself without anything in the way. So I think it’s really good for every astrologer or student of astrology to take a circle around this, the Aditya circle, to see what you can learn about yourself without prejudice.

Neeshee Pandit: It strikes me that the Aditya zodiac is a metastructure. It accommodates all of the tropical signs, but it is also giving you a broader meaning-field to participate in.

Ernst Wilhelm: I think it looks at the 30-degree spaces on a deeper level of what it really means to be human, where humans really get joy, what humans are really here for. Not that the zodiac signs don’t show the same thing—they do. It’s the same portion of space. It’s just that we haven’t looked at them in that context. Whereas with the Adityas, we’re looking at those parts of the space in that context.

Neeshee Pandit: It also reminds me of the fact that, in ancient cultures, the most primordial form of astrology was worshiping the Sun. The rising and the falling of the Sun was a ritualized event.

Ernst Wilhelm: The basis of all religions was the Sun.

Neeshee Pandit: Yes, agni.

Ernst Wilhelm: That’s what’s happening in us—the rising Sun. The Sun is the energy movement along our spinal chakras, developing us spiritually every year. And so it’s all about the Sun.

I remember a friend of mine was with this very advanced yogi hanging out one day. He was lucky to spend some time with this person. And they happened to hit a really beautiful sunset. My friend commented, “Wow, it’s such a beautiful sunset”. And this very advanced yogi said, “When you really learn to do those techniques right, you will really understand the beauty of the Sun”.

And so it is about the Sun. The Aditya is the Sun God that has to do with you. So it’s really a beautiful thing to learn.

Neeshee Pandit: This whole idea that the energy of the Sun is the energy of incarnation, of being alive—the vital force.

Ernst Wilhelm: It is. It’s all the intelligence that makes us what we are. All the other planets just reflect that light. The only planet that emits any of its own light is Jupiter. So Jupiter is giving some of its own intelligence, but it’s a very small amount.

But if we turned off all the other lights. Jupiter would still show a light, whereas Moon and Mars, we wouldn’t see them. They’d be black. All the other plants are reflecting the light of the Sun. Jupiter’s mostly reflecting light of the Sun, adding a little mix of his own individual spark.

Jupiter is that individual spark of soul in ourselves. And one of the names of Jupiter is jiva, which means living—that little individualized soul of creative spark in everyone. But most of everything is the Sun. I think that really makes the Adityas powerful.

Neeshee Pandit: That’s also the meaning of jyotish, the illumination.

Ernst Wilhelm: Right, exactly.

So what do we call it? A zodiac? I try to call it the Aditya circle. By definition, “zodiac” comes from zoology, which means it has to do with animals and earthly creatures. But we’re dealing with heavenly beings now. As a joke, I call it the Aditya “Godiak”, as in Gods, because we’re looking at the signs, not as these earthly creatures anymore, these zoological beings, which include humans. We have three humans in this zoo of the astrology circle. We’re really looking at the circle in the context of divinities now, so it’s definitely a different perspective. It raises the perspective of what we’re doing with these portions of space.

Neeshee Pandit: You’re moving beyond the animal and plant level and into the human level because the gods are often depicted as human incarnations of a sort.

Ernst Wilhelm: We’re looking at our essence. What is it really to be human? Is it being a doctor? No. The gardener can have a greater love than the doctor and often does. The gardener could be living more as himself than the president because he gardens with love, as himself with the love that he is.

And that’s really what it means to be human—to be a loving creature. That’s as close to God as we can be while we’re on Earth, to be a loving being. That’s really what it’s about—bringing that God, which is love, into our daily lives as ourselves. And living the human truth of being a spiritual being versus an earthly being.

Neeshee Pandit: That’s why it’s so fascinating that you’ve brought out such an old doctrine, but you’re applying it in a modern context in a very evolutionary way to point out that we can even move beyond the animism of astrology and into a truly human engagement with it.

Ernst Wilhelm: Exactly. And it makes sense if you follow Sri Yukteswar’s yugas.6 It was at the end of the Dwapara Yuga that we have the Adityas mentioned in the books. Then the Adityas disappear, and we replace them with the tropical zodiac. We replace them with zodiac signs with earth-dwelling creatures. And now we’re at the beginning of the Dwapara Yuga, according to his calculations. So it makes sense that we’re going to bring back an astrological symbology that really hasn’t been used in a widespread fashion since at least 300 BCE.

There are no astrology books that mention the Adityas. It’s only the philosophical and spiritual books that mention these beings and connect them to different parts of the sky. In the Jaimini Sutras, Jaimini uses the names of the zodiac signs, but tells us to ignore the names when he says them, and to take the name and turn the letters into a number. And that number will indicate the sign he is talking about. So he’s talking about the signs, not as Aries, Taurus, but as sign number one, sign number two.

Sometimes I wonder, did he do this because he wants us to use the Adityas? I don’t know. But why did he do this? Why did he go through all this trouble when it’s not necessary? He specifically tells us he’s going to do it this way. It’s not like it’s part of the mysterious hidden code. He tells us very clearly he’s going to do it this way. And so he’ll say Sagittarius, but he doesn’t mean Sagittarius, so I think that he was definitely trying to tell us there’s another way to use these portions of space beyond the zoological worldly creatures. Maybe the tropical zodiac creatures are more Kali Yuga manifestations of the symbology. Because the last time the Adityas were being used in any way was in the last Dwapara Yuga.

So it’s pretty cool to be diving into them. And it’s really been wonderful to see people develop a relationship with this part of their horoscope.

Neeshee Pandit: It also makes sense because, if you think about it, today we don’t really relate to the animal world as we once did. We don’t have totems in the same way. We don’t see animals as an entry point to the spirit world. We need an astrology for where we are now.

Ernst Wilhelm: It’s true, we don’t live with animals anymore. We don’t watch animals. Some people know about animal omenology, but if we were living close to nature, we would have a completely different relationship to those animal signs—we would have a much deeper relationship to those animal signs than we’re going to have living up here on our cell phones.

Neeshee Pandit: But in a way, there’s also something positive to be said about moving beyond a certain element of naturalism. You can idealize nature, but at the end of the day, it’s still samsara. It’s still a cycle of birth and death. We’re just—

Ernst Wilhelm: trading one illusion for another. One that’s going to work better for the people born at this time.

Neeshee Pandit: Right. But as you’re getting into the idea of divinity and the Sun God, I think we’re getting closer to something that’s actually in our destiny as a human species—to evolve, to become fully conscious.

Ernst Wilhelm: Astrology is going to evolve as people evolve. And it’s going to decline as people decline. There’s a reason why it was only predictive astrology. Every culture was only predictive because all people cared about was the concrete reality.

Now, we’re realizing more and more that we just want to feel good, that how we’re feeling matters. In the concrete reality, everyone has too much food in their fridge. We can’t get away from people. No one has any reason to be lonely. There are crawling all over the Earth. People in most of the world have jobs. People don’t have to work eighty hours a week and still be hungry. We live in a different reality now, where things aren’t as important because we already have access to them. It was a very different thing when the majority of humanity went to bed hungry every day.

Our needs are not as physical anymore. It’s the emotional needs that we’re desperate for now because we have fat stomachs and empty hearts, even though we’re living in a world where you can’t go out without meeting a million people. We’re surrounded by people, yet there’s more loneliness than ever. Why? Because we’re not living out the love that we are. We have our physical needs met, and so now we’re recognizing the greater need of the emotional stuff.

Food, you just go out there, you hunt it, you shoot it, you pick it, you get it, and you swallow and you eat it, and you make it yours. Love doesn’t work that way. It only works from being a loving being. And the Adityas show us what that means for us.

Neeshee Pandit: What we need in the world today is meaningful connection.

Ernst Wilhelm: Which starts with ourselves.

Neeshee Pandit: We have all this connectedness, but we’re not connected.

Ernst Wilhelm: Exactly. We’re missing the part we need to be connected to first, and that’s our true self, what we really are. And not selling that out or avoiding that and chasing food. Bodily food starts with the outside. Emotional food starts with the inside.

Neeshee Pandit: Thank you so much, Ernst, for taking the time to hang out and talk, and as always, you give me a lot of inspiring thoughts and something to really consider.

Ernst Wilhelm: My pleasure. I hope people check out the Adityas. It’s just another layer of fun.

Ernst Wilhelm has been a Vedic astrologer and teacher for over thirty years. His research into the philosophy and techniques of classical Vedic astrology, alongside his published translations of traditional texts, has been influential for a generation of practitioners. His prolific course content can be found at www.astrology-videos.com.

Conversation provides an opportunity for a discourse of free associations. When conversation becomes collaborative, it becomes a dialectic. In this conversation, Paul Arellano and I explore the energetic dynamics of Late Summer and the Earth element, through the lens of Chinese medicine. In the agency of an unstructured dialogue, we found ourselves speaking and structuring a meaning-field of medical, ecological, and alchemical associations. We hope you enjoy the terrain we traversed.

What follows is the first part of an edited transcript of our conversation. Section headings have been given to aid the logical flow of topics discussed. Audio is given for those who prefer to listen.

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Neeshee: Paul, thank you for joining me today. We are here to discuss and consider the energetics of the Late-Summer season, which is a time associated with the Earth element in the five-element system.

I thought this would be an interesting discussion to have because Late Summer is a unique season identified in Chinese medicine. It is not really discussed as such in Ayurveda or in Tibetan medicine. So I think this is something very much tied into Chinese five-element theory. And it's also one of these surprising seasons because you already have Summer, but now we have a Late Summer. There is really no other season that has a division this way, if you want to consider it as a division.

So, what is Late Summer?

Paul: Thank you for having me again, Neeshee, it is always great to talk to you. As you said, Late Summer is this interesting division of one season into two parts. And I think there are a few different ways to look at that. Of course, we're looking at it through the sense of Earth primarily. But I think it's also interesting to note that before the Heart was described as a Fire organ in the Mawangdui manuscripts,1 it was described as an Earth organ.

And that's a little esoteric, but there are four Fire organs in the Chinese medicine system: Heart, Small Intestine, Pericardium, and the San Jiao. There is a very physiological component (with the Heart and the Small Intestine) as well as a more energetic aspect of the physiology (which is the Pericardium and the San Jiao).

The importance of Late Summer is that summertime is the peak of yang energy. In the course of the year, it is when the transformative, invigorating potential of something that is invisible but strongly changing the world around us reaches its peak. There is the greatest amount of change and transformation happening.

And right as it hits its peak on the Summer solstice, it begins to decline back into yin. So all of that potential energy is then turning back into form. I think what Late Summer emphasizes is that there really are two aspects of that great energy and potential that we feel in the summertime: the excitement to be engaging in activities but also how that winds down into the Fall.

We really begin to see things as all that energy is brought into form. It's brought into plants, fruits, and into our own life. It's brought into tangible projects or products. And so the Late Summer is emphasizing that second part of how all this energy of Summer comes into crystallization, into form.

Ultimately, all the yang energy that is poured into material becomes what sustains us through the rest of the year until the next Summer. It becomes what we preserve through the Winter and the Fall. It becomes what creates seeds for the next Spring. So Late Summer is this really important moment when all of the yang energy—all the potential of the world—is crystallizing into form.

Paying extra attention to honor that and to understand what we can learn from it is why I think the Late Summer is important, and I'd be interested to know your thoughts on that.

Neeshee: Something I'm thinking about while you're speaking is how Late Summer is a midpoint between the Summer solstice and the Autumn equinox.

We don't usually identify the midpoint with a season. There is also the additional issue of seasonality that is not necessarily astronomically defined. It can be but, for example, in the five-element system (especially the Worsley style), the focus is more on the seasons as something that arrives in a regional context.

It may be Late Summer here, but it's not yet Late Summer somewhere else. There is an emphasis on the relativity of it, as opposed to saying, “Oh, it's Summer solstice, now it's Summer”. It might have already been Summer. So there are two things going on (which we may or may not need to get into), but its interesting to note that Late Summer falls at this midpoint, at this intermediate point in the year where we are pivoting.

With the Summer solstice, we are already pivoting towards the yin, which seems so counterintuitive, but it's so valuable to note that paradox of how it seems so bright, the days are so long, and yet we're actually decreasing. And the power of the Earth element is decrease. You produce something, you harvest what's been ripened through all of this yang energy, as you noted, and that results in a decrease, even though it's a form of nourishment.

That highlights the yin-yang cycle that is so intrinsic to the Chinese way of looking at life. I also reflect on it regionally in the sense of how medical systems come out of certain places in the world and very much reflect the weather patterns of those places. I can't recall the specific example now, but there are some variations in the classification of tastes in Ayurveda and Tibetan medicine where they say this taste has this quality, whereas this taste has this quality. There are some slight adjustments on that across the two systems (which otherwise share that entire paradigm) because the climate is different.2

The Tibetan plateau is one thing. India is also a vast subcontinent of its own. I find those variations interesting and even moreso the division of Summer into Summer and Late Summer by the Chinese. In contrast, the Tibetans have divided Winter into “Upper Winter” and “Lower Winter”.3 Of course, it makes sense—they must have long winters in the Tibetan plateau. Lhasa is at 12,000 feet. Much of Tibet is in the tundra, above the tree line. We are looking at a long Winter, so it makes sense to have a division of Winter.

So how do we come to this division of Summer? Does it apply universally? Is it a theoretical construct? For example, Ayurveda and Tibetan medicine talk about six seasons. Why is that? Is it because they literally have six seasons or is it because it's convenient since they rely on a tridoshic paradigm? There's three, and two times three is six. It's just a convenient numerology. With five elements, of course it makes sense that we would need five seasons, even though a lot of people talk about a four-season climate. How do we understand that?

The Alchemy of Earth

Paul: I think because we are looking at the Chinese medical system and the cosmological system, there are the five elements. And so five seasons is sensible. And I think what the teaching is there—if we're looking at it to try and learn something, to glean into our own lives—there is that transition between Fire and Earth, which, as you say, is a reduction. The way I think about that is the famous equation of E = mc², how energy equals mass times the speed of light squared. As you are creating mass, it takes a huge amount of energy to create material.

So it's a decrease of this vast amount of energy into a very small piece of matter, which is the process of nuclear fusion. It's a decrease, but it's also a storage. It's holding onto that energy and bringing into a state where it can be sustained and held and kept for later use—which is the process (not in a nuclear sense, but in an energetic sense) of the Late Summer.

That applies to everybody, and I think it applies in every climate as well to different degrees. It is the process of all this massive amount of energy that exists in the environment during the summertime. Long days, lots of heat, lots of transformation coming into a form where that energy can be held and preserved and passed along to the next year, which is really an alchemical process. We're getting energy from the Sun every year and the Earth is capturing that energy, creating form to store that energy. and retain it here on the Earth so that abundance can proliferate, so that things can begin to develop and grow.

Where if there wasn't that transition into material? The heat would come and then it would leave again and we'd be in the Winter. It would be cold, but none of the heat would be preserved. None of the yang energy would be preserved if there wasn't this moment when we are (consciously or unconsciously) bringing that wealth of yang energy in Summer into form, into Earth, into something very tangible that we can see and feel and hold and even eat.

Neeshee: It makes me think about how the decrease that's happening is, as you say, a consolidation. And that consolidation is a digestive process, and that's very much a reflection of the Earth element and its association with Late Summer and its correspondence with the Spleen and the Stomach.

Earlier you mentioned the Heart. Of course, the traditional idea now is that the Spleen and the Stomach are associated with Earth. There is also an Earth school of thought that really emphasizes treating the Spleen and the Stomach as the gateway to health.

I'd even say that Ayurveda is largely an Earth school, with its emphasis on digestion and digestive health being the source of well-being and the prevention of disease as well. That strikes me as very much a focus on Earth as a central entity, the central element, the homeostatic principle even of all things.

There are other emphases that we can find. There is a Fire school of thought. I think the five elements, as it was taught by Worsley, seems to emphasize Fire more. Fire is given the Roman numeral I because the clock starts there in the Worsley style.4 There are other ways to do the clock. There's no reason it has to start at Fire, except that is the sovereign. In TCM, they start the order of the organs with the Lung. Its an emphasis on the etheric—Metal as source. You can also have Fire as source. You can also have Earth as source, because it's only through digestion that anything can be created. And that's why the body part associated with Earth are the muscles, because it's only through digesting—through this decrease that we need to engage in, where food is reduced into its refined essence—that we're able to build the body, that we have a body.

Paul: I think that's a really important thing to point out, that Earth is literally the transformation of other things we take into our body, into us. How is it that we can eat food and then our body has created our nerves, our muscles, through things we take in?

I think of Fire being the creative principle, the Heart being the sovereign that directs the organization of everything, but Earth is really how that creative principle comes into being, comes into matter. You could look at either one as the most important. From a very tangible way of how we impact our own health, how we work with our physical bodies, it makes a lot of sense that the creation of our physical bodies through the Earth element, through digestion, is a great place to work on any kind of physical disharmony.

Neeshee: Absolutely. And this whole idea that our health is an alchemical process of digestion. From an Ayurvedic point of view, proper digestion allows for the transformation of all of the seven tissues of the body into a refined essence, which is called ojas. We can also call it the jing-qi-shen transformation process, which is discussed in Daoism.5

The idea is that you take physical food and it actually becomes a subtle essence over time. So our digestive process isn't just physical, it also has an energetic component, also has what we could call a spiritual component, in the sense of that more refined vitality, the shen that Daoism talks about. All of that is related to the digestive process. That's why, in Ayurveda, we are very concerned if someone doesn't have good digestion. Not only are they going to be physically compromised, they are compromised in their metabolic process altogether.

Paul: There are different aspects of Earth: Earth being the position of Late Summer but also the intermediary that all other elements flow into. We're able to eat food and from the food (if we have strong digestion) to be able to glean actual spiritual essence or something of that refined creative principle that doesn't just form the matter of our body, but also gives us the capacity for transformation, for evolution in a sense, because that pure yang that can be liberated from the food in the sense of jing-qi-shen transformation in our bodies.

Neeshee: Exactly. And that also speaks to Earth as stability, as ground, as a throughline through everything. If it's an intermediary—if we're looking at the five-element cycle with Earth depicted in the center—that is very much the idea of Earth as ground, Earth as basis, Earth as what links everything together in the cycle too.

It is a linking substance, and that makes sense also because here we are in a human body. As Daoism points out, the purpose of the human being, even anatomically, is to stand between Heaven and Earth, our head oriented to heaven, our feet on the ground. That allows us to be this alchemical vessel. All of this is even tied into the way that the number five has been depicted in Chinese culture. It shows a human being as an alchemical vessel (X).6 So this is very much the import of five-element theory, you could say.

But the reason I'm bringing it up is to show that this alchemy is not something that happens in an ethereal sense only. If we talk about spirituality, we talk about transcendence of the body, of the material—there are all these motivations, all of these fascinations with something beyond all of this. And Earth brings us back to where we really are, on the Earth in our bodies, that we are embodied in fact, that there is a real value in that embodiment, even an alchemical process to go through in that embodiment that our practice. Our spirituality is something that happens in and via the body. It's not reduced to that, but it certainly requires the mechanism of that.

The Body Ecologic

Paul: What that makes me think of is how even the medicine that we practice relies on the physical body, that the physical body is the access point to all these other energies, to the organ systems. Acupuncture points are all located on the physical body, but at the same time, they have their own particular elemental associations and more refined functions. I think that highlights what we were talking earlier, how this idea of Late Summer is not a familiar concept to most people, and how do we understand it if it looks different in different places.

I'm living here in Portland, Oregon, you're in Colorado. How does Late Summer land differently? It's an energy, but as it's brought to bear on the Earth where we are on the Earth, it will manifest differently based on the the energetic composition of our ecologies and locales.

You can also visualize that on the body too—how there are Fire points on the channels, there are Earth points, there are Water points. On the physical body, there is an understanding that different elemental energies are concentrated in different places. So trying to access the Earth energy through a Fire point, it's possible, but you're going to be better off accessing it through an Earth point.

Similarly, there are different ecologies. Through my study of bāzì—which is taking a natal chart of somebody to understand their elemental composition—it evokes a landscape, it evokes an ecology for me. In other words, the elemental makeup of somebody is like an ecology in the world where if, for example, somebody is very heavy in Fire—maybe they have all Fire and all Earth—that is like a dry, hot desert.

The desert differs from a tundra or from a watershed or from a big dense forest, so the Earth energy is going to manifest differently there. This is a universal energy of Earth. But at the same time, on our physical bodies, on the planet we live on, the microcosmic and macrocosmic Earth energy is not evenly distributed.

There is a purpose for that. A desert is like a Fire point on the body or maybe even a Fire channel—it is representing and emanating Fire energy, it's consolidating Fire energy in a particular environment and then radiating and emanating it to the rest of the world. This creates weather systems that then go and affect the entire globe. If we don't have any deserts, that will be a problem. If we have too many deserts, that will also be a problem. There is the need for this differentiation of ecologies because they all refine the particular essence of their elemental composition.

What is important about Earth is that, in all of these cases, environments need to be renewed. They need to be sustained and even transformed as climate shifts, as the Earth changes. That all occurs through the medium of the Earth, through the medium of the soil changing the properties of moisture, and the minerals and the water stored in the soil allow things to grow or create a desert. Again, there is this physical structure underlying everything that Late Summer really invites us to engage with and notice in our environment, whatever that might be.

Neeshee: I think that's a huge point in linking what five-element theory and Chinese medicine is about: to look at the human body as something structured like an ecological terrain, that we are in many ways a natural landscape and unique in that just as every landscape is unique.

Here in Colorado, we have so many microclimates. I'm up here on the mountain and it's different in Boulder proper, 2000 feet below. I experience a different range of climatic phenomena that wouldn't even be noticed in Boulder. It can snow up here and not snow down there, at the same time. And what is interesting about altitude is that the ecology is stratified vertically, which is such a phenomenon to be aware of and present with.

But I'm also thinking about the body again. As we've been saying, that Earth expresses itself uniquely when it reaches the immanency of the material plane. It's even a misnomer to discuss any element in isolation, which we're doing simply for the sake of meaning, but we also know that Earth depends on Fire, because the Mother of Earth is Fire, the Child of Earth is Metal. And Wood controls Earth. All of these dynamics are essential in making Earth what it is as a functional process.

Also, in the body, there are these different zones. I have the image of ST-36 because it's an Earth point on an Earth meridian. Here it is by the knee. When you're locating it, you feel this zone that it is. It is a he-sea point after all, a large point, and it's in this part of the body just below the knee. I think that is such an earthy area for that point to be.

The assignments of elements to points or the meridians and the elements is not random. Here we are on the leg. It's the knee articulation, where we stand and how we move our bodies. And so much weight is bearing on the knee. It is just such a physical zone.

Paul: I think we're getting to the essence of Earth here. I love what you said because, yes, it's where we bear our weight. Where we bear our physical structure is also close to where we bend the knee, which allows us to articulate through space and move.

And I think that's the key to understanding why Earth is the Child of Fire. So Earth is a process of transformation. Earth is what allows something to change into something else. It's what allows Fire to change into Metal. It's what allows Metal to change into Water through Earth as the intermediary. It's also how yang energy is consolidated into a fruit. It's how the soil is gathered and all the nutrients are enriched into a physical strata of soil. So it allows transformation but, at the same time, it is a physical structure.

It’s a process of transformation, which would be the position of Earth in the generative cycle. But it's also a physical structure, which is more like Earth in the center of the cycle, where all other elements are anchored to Earth. If there wasn't the Earth, the elements would all disperse.

So Earth is the physicality, like standing firm on the ground. It's also that energy of transformation where the ability of things to change is the signature of Earth, but it's also a singular, solid material.

Neeshee: I can go even further: Earth and even all the elements are primarily signifiers, which means they function archetypally to accommodate a number of resonances in a number of realities in various dimensions of experience. So Earth is all of the things we can say about it.

Why are there two conceptions of the five elements cycle, Earth in the center and then Earth as a supposedly distinct element? And it just struck me that Earth is very much emblematic of the five element cycle itself. The generative cycle is the Mother-Child dynamic. In a way, Earth signifies that dynamic, as a Mother principle, even as a basis. Earth is very much the Mother of the Mother.

Earth is the Mother that creates the Child of the generative cycle of the five elements, but it also appears within itself. There is this constant birthing, and I don't see it as only metaphorical. I see it as even being very literal. There is no possibility that you and I could exist if we had not grown in a womb in a Mother. We all come from the Mother. The Mother is an irreducible principle of life.

Paul: And I like what you said that it occurs within itself.

It is the fractal nature of reality where life can perpetuate. Materialization allows for another process of materialization to occur and so on. And that is this wonderful mystery of how something can be created. As the saying goes: within the seed is an entire forest. A tiny bit of material has the potential to replicate and to grow more material.

I'm excited we're talking about this now because the more I think about it, the more I see how Earth is really foundational to all the other elements.

Neeshee: Earth is such a unique element to consider for all these reasons.

No other element shares that functionality—of being placed in the center, of being an intermediary, and also being part of the cycle. Again, the fact that it's so emblematic of the Mother-Child dynamic, the generation itself, the making manifest of something. That is very much what the five elements are showing us—something in the range of manifest observable phenomena.

That's why five-element theory—which I think may surprise people to think of it this way—is an empirical movement in the history of Chinese medicine, because it moves away from demonology and apparently superstitious and invisible notions of health and illness and into the observable world. Of course, it is because of agricultural phenomena as well that five-element theory was derived. But it is a movement toward empiricism, toward observability.

Paul: There's the function of Earth and the form of Earth.

Earth is interesting because its function is form, its function is to bring things into form. It's function is to transition and transform between forms. So it's the transformation of form and the bringing into form. We talked about Fire and the Fire school and how, in a way the form of Fire is function.

The way that Earth works is by bringing things into material form and the way that Fire works is by bringing things that are material into life. And so they're really closely linked together in that way, both as the Mother-Child but also as this principle of Late Summer of that bringing the Fire into material.

Neeshee: This juncture of form and function for me is fascia. This idea that the body part corresponding to Earth is muscles—I would modify that a bit and say we're looking at fascia.

That is where form and function intersect. It is arguably where the meridians are located, if we can even say such a thing. It's somewhere in that realm of the body where form meets function, where structure meets process. As acupuncturists, we are very interested in that nexus, because that is precisely what we're working with. We're working with something that's simultaneously anatomical and structurally embedded in the body that has functional consequences. That's such an interesting revelation of what health is: it's not just form or function, it's a nexus between them.

We were talking a while back and I posed a query of what is really happening when we needle somebody. We have this physical object in our hand, this needle. It's very thin, but it still exists physically. And we are puncturing the skin into what exactly? A meridian—which is an invisible thing.

But why would we need a material object to accomplish that? The whole ritual is so interesting to consider for that reason—that what is really happening is a kind of a nexus between form and function. I'm using an invisible tool to somehow invoke something invisible yet palpable, structurally locatable but fundamentally energetic.

This is so much about how Earth contains. It has this function as containment. It holds the reality of form and function. It's also something that allows things to exist in simultaneity.

Paul: We talk a lot about the Earth being the middle of the five-element cycle and the go-between.

But I think, as you're saying with the container, it holds all the others within it. It's not that the others are on the outside. It's that Earth holds everything within it. There are energetic pathways in our body, like the meridians. But they exist in a physical structure, and you can't deny that physical structure is important to the cohesion and making sense of these energetic structures.

Just as I've been talking about the physical body and the acupuncture points being like the Earth and the different ecologies, acupuncture points themselves are convergences of energies. The one commonality in my understanding of where acupuncture points are on the body is that they are at intersections of different tissues.7 It's where energies are converging and likewise different elemental energies, different principles of function are converging at these points that we can activate on a physical system. We can activate function at a point where different functions are converging. Earth is what holds that together.

We can think of our body like an acupuncture point. Our body is like a convergence of energy. The Earth itself is a convergence of energies that then are given form so that it can develop and grow. The whole universe is a convergence of energies that's being stored in a physical form so that it can develop and grow and unfold. That's like the Earth element—holding everything within it so that there's a place for these other energies to be contained. They are not just ideals or concepts with no way to access or understand or relate to them.

Neeshee: That's right. It's another version of the dantian concept in this sense of there being a vital center. Earth, in many ways, functions as a vital center. That's a significant concept. It means that our treatments could be really informed by this fact.

I think you can treat Earth on anybody because of this fact that it is the very source and process of containment and cohesion. It also makes me think about the pathological side of the spectrum—symptoms and where things go out of balance.

I also think about the oral stage of our development.8 Eating. Our relationship to nourishment through eating, through consuming, through taking in. Our ability to take in and consolidate things is so critical then. And I think we see a lot of breakdown in that process. There are so many digestive disorders—people are struggling to process foods. There are more and more specialized diets. And, really, we need to be able to take in and digest. If we can do that, we can reap the harvest that we're here for in our lives. Our unique individual harvest, our purpose.

Paul: Yes, absolutely. That was what I was thinking of in treating the Stomach luo channels, the pathology and also the physiology in the system that I study is to be able to follow your gut, to be able to actualize your essential intention in a natural way.

Generally speaking, the pathology of Earth is that the Stomach gets hot, the Spleen gets cold and damp. So it's either too much materialization without enough function to animate it or excess of function which destroys the ability of form to develop and to house that function.

In both ways of looking at it, there has to be a harmony of form and function in the Earth element for it to allow us to exist in these bodies as alchemical vessels for transformation and healing.

Stomach Qi

Neeshee: Exactly what you just said reminds me of why I love the concept of Stomach qi, why I think that's such an important way of articulating something.

When we say Stomach qi and this idea that you can feel the state of the Stomach qi in the overall pulse quality of the patient and even their affect and the way that they are all together. It’s not only looking for the shen level—are their eyes bright? Are their eyes clear? Do they connect with you? It's this question of Stomach qi that I'm finding more and more fundamental these days. And I explored this idea in relationship to Possession because of the fact that Worsley’s Possession protocol is mostly on the Stomach meridian, aside from CV-15.

Why is that? This is a question worth asking because it directly suggests that there's a relationship between possession and Stomach qi—that our ability to consolidate, to process, to be embodied is, in fact, what keeps us grounded, what keeps us present, what keeps us home in a certain way, and gives an anchor for the spirit.

If you don't have an anchor for the spirit, you are liable for what we could call possession, which we can think about in the superstitious sense of invisible pathogenic influences. But in today's world, it's ADHD, it's all the autoimmunity, it's the whole gut-brain axis disturbance—which you could also discuss as being an Earth issue on some level, not to oversimplify.

Paul: I'm just digesting. I've been interested more in Wind lately and hearing teachings that one way to address wind is tonify Blood. If there is enough substance in the body to substantially fill the meridians and the vessels, the Wind can't stir. In the same way, Stomach fluids are so important to the body. Stomach is what is generating fluids, what is generative of that material basis of the body. Possession is not giving us that ability to perfuse our body with ourselves, basically to fill up our physical vessel with our own being.

Even the use of CV-15 in the Possession treatment being on the Ren channel is descending into the material, much as the consolidation of Late Summer. The intention is to bring everything back into the material and make sure that material is you and serving the postnatal mandate of your being.

Neeshee: Exactly. I don't know if this has been fully explored but I talked about it in my thesis, that the Possession treatment is called “Internal Dragons” or “External Dragons”.9 So we have this symbol of the dragon and, if I'm not mistaken, that is the animal corresponding to the Stomach.

So the whole Possession treatment, the way it is articulated, is telling us this is about Earth, this is about Stomach qi, this is about this inner dragon, this ability for you to alchemically transform. If we think about the dragon as also being a symbol of destiny, in the sense of ming, then it is your ability to actualize, to reach your postnatal mandate.

About Paul Arellano

Paul Arellano is an acupuncturist and herbalist working in Portland, OR. He studies the interplay of climate and human health through the Wuyun Liuqi system of ecological health science. In addition to studying and writing about seasonal dynamics in nature and health, Paul offers BaZi natal chart readings, which uses the 5-Element system to create a "landscape map" of personal constitution and character. In these readings, Paul explores how each individual can harmonize with their own inner nature and enter into resonant, healthy relationship with the living forces of our world.

Writings on Seasonal Resonance
Wuyun Liuqi Climate + Health Map for 2025

Preface

This essay is part of a larger collection titled MDMA Papers, which explores the pharmacology and therapeutics of MDMA. “Mandible Wheel” follows in Freud’s footsteps by linking psychopharmacology and psychoanalysis. In this essay, I argue that jaw clenching is a symptom of repression that is therapeutically amplified by MDMA. On this basis, I propose a psychoanalytic mechanism and framework for MDMA-assisted therapy.

“Mandible Wheel” explores the therapeutic phenomenology of MDMA within a psychoanalytic and Chinese medical framework. The first part of the essay presents jaw clenching as a psychosomatic phenomenon of repression and its abreaction. I argue that our symptoms are cathartic mechanisms rather than mere side effects.

The second part of the essay examines a physiological perspective of jaw clenching through the anatomy of the Stomach meridian. I discuss the location and significance of ST-6, and consider jaw clenching a phenomenon related to Stomach Qi and the “digestion” of repressed content.

The third part of the essay explores the psychosomatic importance of the jaw by analyzing its correspondence with Hexagram 27 of the Yijing, the phenomenology of nourishment, and the Chinese meridian clock.

The conclusion of the essay examines the jaw and mouth from a Yogic perspective as a vital region of conductivity where tension accumulates. I posit the jaw as the organ of the speaking body and, therefore, the mechanism of the talking cure.

In terms of style, this essay oscillates between expository prose and poetic verse.

I. The Psychosomatics of Repression

MDMA is a psychosomatic medicine—it operates on psyche and soma. The somatic effects of MDMA are thus equally psychic. What is psychosomatic is also psychedelic. That is to say, MDMA amplifies psychic content—material that is not only in the mind but held deeply within the body.

One notable effect of MDMA is jaw clenching. A biochemical explanation for the symptom of jaw clenching is that MDMA is a stimulant, which is another way of saying that clenching is a phenomenon of stimulus. However, this explanation provides us with no further insight. If we accept that MDMA is a psychosomatic medicine, then none of its effects can be reduced to a purely physical explanation. From a psychosomatic perspective, so-called “side effects” are revealed as therapeutic mechanisms, or what psychoanalysis calls abreactions. In their landmark publication, Studies in Hysteria, Breuer and Freud define abreaction as a cathartic release of repressed emotion:

The injured person's reaction to the trauma only exercises a completely ‘cathartic’ effect if it is an adequate reaction—as, for instance, revenge. But language serves as a substitute for action; by its help, an affect can be ‘abreacted’ almost as effectively. In other cases speaking is itself the adequate reflex, when, for instance, it is a lamentation or giving utterance to a tormenting secret, e.g. a confession. If there is no such reaction, whether in deeds or words, or in the mildest cases in tears, any recollection of the event retains its affective lone to begin with.1

If we understand the side-effect of jaw clenching as an abreaction, then we recognize catharsis as the primary therapeutic mechanism of MDMA (and of psychedelic therapy in general). When we abreact, we recover and retrace the shocks that keep our vital force. We speak our dreams, chew on our reflections, and metabolize our memories. Abreaction is the re-emergence of vital intelligence where it was made unconscious.

Jaw clenching is a psychopathology common to everyday life.2 Jaw clenching is one of the more obvious psychosomatic conditions—its etiology is stress, specifically the stress of repression. In The Ego and the Id, Freud elucidates the relationship between repression and the unconscious:

We recognize that the unconscious does not coincide with the repressed; it is still true that all that is repressed is unconscious, but not all that is unconscious is repressed.3

The relationship between the repressed unconscious and the unconscious proper is the relationship between constitution and condition, or the structure and the symptom. When we cleanse repressed phenomena from the surface of the psyche, its deep structure self-emerges. Thus, cure unfolds from the unconscious proper—from the depth to the periphery, from above to below, and from present to past—while repression moves from the surface to the center, from below to above, and from past to present.

Trauma is a blocked affect.
Affection is libido,
and libido is a vital force.
The blocked affect is where our élan
loses vital contact with reality.

We relive our trauma by coming alive again,
purging to purify in dramatic release.
Therefore, healing is rebirth,
a resurrection of the vital force.

The psyche is a vital impetus that drives
the enlightenment of the whole body.
“Sometimes the frustrated wishes are neither possessive nor libidinal drives,
but rather drives toward self-realization”.4

At night, we chew and attempt to digest psychic content.
What we fail to digest becomes the substance of nightmares,
haunting us from near and afar.

Repression is indigestion,
a psychic artifact
that never ripens but only rots,
its fermentation a poisonous heat
that cooks our vital essences.

II. An Anatomy and Physiology of Jaw Clenching

“Anatomy is destiny”.5 In acupuncture anatomy, the Stomach meridian begins its flow inferior to the eye, between the infraorbital ridge and the eyeball (ST-1 “Receive Tears”). From here, the meridian flows downward into a depression in the infraorbital foramen (ST-2 “Four Whites”), continues to descend into the cheek, level with the lower border of the ala nasi (ST-3 “Great Cheekbone”), and down to the level of the lips, in the continuation of the nasolabial groove (ST-4 “Earth Granary”). From here, the Stomach meridian descends to the jaw, at the anterior border of the masseter muscle (ST-5 “Great Welcome”), and then flows upward into the prominence of the masseter muscle (ST-6 “Mandible Wheel”).

ST-6 is aptly named “Mandible Wheel” (jiáchē), as it is directly located in the mandible, but we will see that this name also has esoteric connotations. In addition to being a point on the Stomach meridian, ST-6 is also classified by Sun Si-Miao as one of the thirteen ghost points—points used to treat possession syndromes.6 In the ghost-point schema, ST-6 is given the alternate name “Guichang”, meaning “Ghost Bed”.

“Mandible Wheel” is J.R. Worsley’s translation of the Chinese jiáchē.7 The term jia means “cheek; jaw, jawbone; side, to press together from both sides; to assist, to support”. The term che means “cart, chariot, vehicle; jawbone; to ride, to turn (oneself)”. A “mandible wheel” is where the spokes of the psyche turn, where we initiate a digestive cycle that nourishes us in turn. Therefore, MDMA is a circulatio of healing—it moves the wheels of repression and steers our life.

In Chinese medicine, the Heart is described as the spiritual throne of the vital force. The Heart corresponds to the fire element, the period of solar noon, and the zodiac animal of the horse. The horse is an ancient symbol of the libido. A horse roams free in the wild, independent and related. The horse chews the day away and is thus an image of the jaw. As we see, one of the meanings of jia is a chariot, a wheeled carriage traditionally driven by horses. When we chew, we press the teeth together and amalgamate the food of life. Therefore, the Mandible Wheel is an image of libidinal freedom, the recovery of a balanced vehicle, a fusion of sides that powers the whole.

Peter Deadman comments that ST-6 is “an important point in treatment of a wide range of local disorders affecting the jaw, including inability to chew, inability to open the mouth after windstroke,8 lockjaw, and tension, pain or paralysis of the jaw”.9 Deadman adds that he is unable to find a rationale for the classification of ST-6 as a ghost point because ghost points were used “to treat mania and epilepsy” and that “there are no indications of this kind listed for the point”.10 But points do not exist for symptoms. Points are the language of the speaking body. Points are signifiers that articulate a line of resonance between constitution and condition.

We need to understand windstroke, mania, and epilepsy as possession syndromes. Sun Si-Miao’s classification of ST-6 as a ghost point indicates its relevance for possession syndromes in general, not only for palliating symptoms from windstroke.

Possession syndromes are pathologies of Stomach Qi. The Chinese term for Stomach is wei (胃), a character “drawn as a container full of grains and flesh . . . [it] represents the vitality of nourishment that can penetrate where it is needed”.11 The Stomach is the cauldron of life, where we consume the edible, and gather strength to move in the carriages of our destiny.

III. The Phenomenology of Nourishment

Hexagram 27, Nourishing

ST-6 corresponds to Hexagram 27 of the Yijing—Yi (Nourishing). Wilhelm translates Yi as “The Corner of the Mouth (Providing Nourishment)” and Blofeld translates it as “Nourishment (literally Jaws)”. The jaw and mouth are ancient images of nourishment that occur throughout the Yijing. Commenting on Hexagram 27 (Yi), Huang writes:

When we eat, the upper jaw holds still; only the lower jaw moves up and down. The subject of the first three lines is to nourish oneself; that of the next three lines is to nourish others.12

This hexagram is composed of two solid lines (at the top and bottom) and all yielding lines in the center. Hexagram 27 thus gives the image of an open mouth. When we dissect the hexagram into two trigrams, the upper and lower three lines each form the upper and lower jaw. Huang interprets the lower three lines (and lower jaw) as an image of nourishing oneself and the upper three lines (and upper jaw) as an image of nourishing others. He comments that the nourishment of this hexagram has less to do with “the act of eating and drinking, and more with the wisdom of nourishing oneself as well as other people”.13 Thus, the mouth and jaw are seen as images of relationship.

To nourish oneself is to nurture inner “virtue”; to nourish others is to feed them with your presence. The Commentary on the Symbol states:

Thunder beneath Mountain
An image of Nourishing.
In correspondence with this,
The superior person is careful of his words
And moderate in eating and drinking.14

Huang writes that “the ancient sages proclaimed that nourishing and nurturing were not a matter reserved for the family but concerned society as a whole . . . Compared with nourishing one’s virtue, nourishing one’s body was secondary. Thus, the sages were cautious of words and moderate in diet and provided nourishment and nurturing to the people”.15

We can thus understand the action of MDMA within the archetypal phenomenology of “nourishment”. MDMA is a mandible wheel of nourishment—fostering an ecological connection to self and other, to body and world.

Timing Nourishment: Clock Opposites and Identical Qi

The connection between nourishment and relationship becomes evident when we consider that the Stomach and Pericardium are “clock opposites”. In the context of the Chinese meridian clock, the Stomach corresponds to the hours of 7-9 am, and the Pericardium corresponds to the hours of 7-9 pm. Thus, the Stomach and Pericardium exist in a Qi dynamic, on opposite sides of the daily rhythm. In the morning, we extract the essence of food and drink; in the evening, we make love.

During the MDMA experience, we can digest significant portions of psychic material in a short span of time. The locus of psychical causality lives in a prayer, as a “totally lived interiorization”16 that operates beyond and prior to time. Minkowski writes:

But this interiorization does not bring me face to face with myself. It is, as we have said already, neither reverie nor the free play of the imagination. Quite to the contrary, in springing up from the depths of my being, it goes beyond the universe. It is in this sense a totally lived extrospection. In a flash of the eye my glance now passes through the universe, takes it in completely and goes beyond it . . . we could say that prayer puts us in the presence of God; of a God, however, whose activity ought to be manifest in the world in which we live.17

“Ecstasy” literally means to “stand outside oneself”.18 But this “standing outside” is simultaneously a “touching within”, an enstasis.

MDMA gives us a digestive capacity that is not limited by time. We cook time in the navel of our living. We vitalize the psyche in the soma. We pray in the fire for the fulfillment of our wishes. Digestion begins in the mouth. By chewing, we re-metabolize what we repressed. MDMA is a prayer of changes, a sacrament of universal sacrifice, a sacramental communion with the vital principle of life.

Chronic jaw clenching is a psychopathology caused by repression. The location of ST-6 in the mandible reveals repression as an indigestion, and health as a phenomenon of Stomach Qi. In Chinese medicine, the Stomach is viewed as an alchemical cauldron, the “official in charge of the rotting and ripening of food and drink”. The Stomach is our digestive container, the vessel in which we cook the raw materials of life into vital essences, nourishing our body, mind, and spirit.

From this, we can conclude that MDMA amplifies the Stomach Qi. MDMA kindles an inner flame, a crucible in which we place our traumas and memories, our dreams and reflections, our betrayals and rejections, our hopes and expectations, our pasts and futures. We are the dragon and its treasure—a wish-fulfilling jewel guarded in our bodies, loathsome jaws made edible in a mandible wheel of time.

IV. Unlocking the Jaw: Wish-Fulfillment and the Talking Cure

The jaw and mouth are an erogenous region—zones where the vital force naturally flows, and also where it contracts. In describing an oral phase of development, Freud was emphasizing the mouth as an organ of relatedness—the place where we not only sense but receive nourishment from the Mother. Adi Da describes the functional blocks that arise in the mouth and jaw:

The region of the mouth and jaw is an area of chronic tension for many people. Tension anywhere in the body is a sign that the flow of life-force is obstructed there. The “locks” on the life-force that we feel in the body are signs of reaction, mental, emotional, and physical, to the dilemma that bodily existence itself represents to us.19

Jaw tension is an energetic lock of the life-force on a fundamental level. Jaw stress reflects the tension of conditionality and the feeling of mortality. When we react, we contract the life-force. And all contractions of the life-force are built on the root-contraction of the lower abdomen, which Adi Da calls “vital shock”.20 This is why “external therapeutic approaches to relieving tension are not sufficient”.21 The root of our stress is spiritual, and it creates libidinal tension in the jaw.

Adi Da comments on jaw stress as a physiological block that contracts the nervous system:

The unnatural tension in the jaw obstructs (1) the natural flow of Bio-Energy and cerebrospinal fluid between the brain and spinal cord, and (2) the flow of blood between the head and the rest of the body. Thus, the tension that begins at the jaw is extended to the entire nervous system.22

Chronic jaw clenching creates secondary tensions in the head and neck, and contracts the vitality of the throat. With blocks in the upper burner,23 we struggle to receive and transform the qi of Heaven, which descends into the head, face, throat, and neck, and roots in the lower abdomen. Where we are locked, we lose the integrity of our structure and function. We are no longer placed in space or time, and we lack a gravitational center for our vitality to locus in.

In the traditions of Yoga and Qigong, the posture and conductivity of the mouth are given significance. The breath is initiated through the nose with the mouth closed, and the tip of the tongue should rest naturally at the roof of the mouth, behind the front teeth. Adi Da explains:

In the natural posture of the area of the mouth, the lips are closed, the lower and upper teeth and relaxed and slightly separated, and the tip of the tongue lightly touches the roof of the mouth. When the mouth is thus relaxed and closed, you can breathe easily and naturally through the nose. You can relieve dental stress by reestablishing this natural alignment of the lower and upper jaws.24

The conductivity of the mouth and jaw is central to life. “The relaxed jaw is a natural indication of the regenerative yoga of the body, a sign that the individual is responsible for the processes of the body and awake and relaxed as the body”.25 We can consciously relax the jaw muscles through intentional yawning and through tensing/releasing the jaw muscles. The traditional practice of gagging opens the flow of energy between the spine, neck, and brain. In Ayurvedic practice, a metal tongue scraper (copper or silver) is used for this purpose. Adi Da comments that “gagging also stimulates the digestive processes. Practiced first thing in the morning, it awakens the nervous system from the dormant, drowsy condition that tends to persist after sleep”.26

The Sacrament of Universal Sacrifice

Food is a sacrament, and eating is alchemical. “The taking of food is very important, not just because it is necessary for survival from the mechanical, biological point of view, but because it is a form of meditation. It is a sacrament, literally, and the term ‘sacrament’ symbolically describes the taking of food. It is the taking of God’s Body; it is the taking of Energy, the Force of Reality . . . You must perform alchemy in the mouth and the stomach”.27

Food is an image of the prima materia. The alchemical act is a sacrificial act. When we chew, we transform solid into liquid. This is why the medical traditions have long emphasized that digestion begins in the mouth. In other words, “the mouth is the conscious point of ingestion, not the stomach”.28 Adi Da describes eating as a sacrificial act in which the natural posture of the mouth is temporarily broken:

There is an old principle that you should chew your food many times, breaking it down into a liquid state before swallowing. This practice of eating slowly and carefully is not only for the sake of the stomach and the digestive system. The principal reason for conscious chewing is that the tongue in the aperture of the mouth, is a very important point in the circuit of the Life-Current of our living being.

Ordinarily the tongue should quite naturally touch the roof of the mouth just behind the upper front teeth. When the mouth is open and the tongue is dropped down, you have broken the circuit that conducts the manifest Light or Life-Energy of the cosmos and that makes you intelligent. But when you take solid food, you must bring down the tongue from the roof of your mouth. In other words, when eating you necessarily permit the conversion of solid food temporarily to replace the direct ingestion, through the breath, of the universal Life-Energy and the conducting of that Energy to the whole body from the nose and eyes via the tongue, mouth, and throat.

. . . Even speaking requires lifting the tongue from the roof of the mouth. So, if you are gossiping and speaking craziness and indulging negativity in speech, you are not eating, you are not being sustained . . . Speech should sustain you”.29

Through the mouth, we open to receive food for the body, mind, and spirit.
Our lips articulate the subtle thoughts given voice in the throat.
To eat and to speak.
To consume and to manifest.
The wheel of speech
a spoken phenomenon—
to mouth our prayers
and speak our intentions
into existence.

The tongue is the fruit of the Heart;
the jaw is the mechanism of the talking cure.
We speak our repressed thoughts
and give sound to the images of our dreams.
We voice the unheard
and recognize the real.

In speech,
the jaw unlocks,
and the mandible wheel
moves in motion,
powering our vital contact
with the real.

We find our voice from a place of nourishment
when we are Mothered again by life itself.
Vital shock closes the jaws of life
and leaves the mouth gaping.
We are hungry ghosts
whose unfulfilled wishes
gnaw at the seat of life.

The oral phase of development
is not only constituted by breastfeeding—
it also leaves infancy
to grow in mind and spirit.
In our second birth,
the mouth and jaw are born again
from shock.
Our spirit is reigned and wheeling.
We no longer seek an edible deity,
in tongue or cheek,
but teethe on vital currents.

The lips are the fruit of the Spleen,
a cathexis of the jaw
at the breast of life.
When we breathe in
the food of life
with an open heart
and porous body,
we no longer seek
with pouting lips.
We live in relationship
without otherness,
speaking and loving
in a continuous kiss.

The speaking body becomes
the jouissance of the real,
as we awaken to our dreams
and follow our desires.
The secret of the speaking body
is the letter of love.

To speak of love
is ecstatic.
To speak of love
is speaking as love.
To speak
is to enunciate in ecstasy
the locus mysterium of the real.

Preface

Jacques Lacan (1901-1981) was a Parisian physician, psychiatrist, and psychoanalyst. Radical, rebellious, and heroic, Lacan revolutionized the theory, practice, and ethic of psychoanalysis in twentieth-century France. Described as “the most controversial psychoanalyst since Freud” and “the Picasso of psychoanalysis”, Lacan evoked a fresh interpretation of psychoanalysis inspired by the artistic milieu of French surrealism and its literary counterparts.1

Lacan described his project as a “return to Freud” and thus to the modern origin of the psychoanalytic tradition. However, Lacan also evolved psychoanalysis beyond the Freudian conception with his explorations of French phenomenology, linguistic structuralism, mathematical topology, and aspects of Eastern philosophy.

Present are, from left and standing: Jacques Lacan, Cécile Éluard, Pierre Reverdy, Louise Leiris, Pablo Picasso, Zanie de Campan, Valentine Hugo, Simone de Beauvoir and Brassaï (to whom this photo is credited). From left and sitting are: Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, Jean Aubier and Michel Leiris.

In what follows, I offer a Human Design analysis of Jacques Lacan, with the two-fold intention of illustrating the psychoanalytic application of Human Design and how “the style is the man himself”. The examination that follows is by no means exhaustive, but functions as a sketch of Lacan, told through the language of Human Design. For those unfamiliar with Lacan, I offer an introduction to the man and his teachings.

Birth Data and Bodygraph

Lacan was born on April 13, 1901, at 14:30 in Paris, France. His birth time is sourced from a birth record collected by the Swiss-French psychologist, Françoise Gauquelin. Based on this data, we observe the following in Lacan’s bodygraph:

• Lacan is a 3/5 Manifesting Generator, with an Emotional Authority, born on the Right Angle Cross of Maya.

• Seven centers are defined: (Ajna, Throat, G, Sacral, Spleen, Solar Plexus, Root), and two centers are undefined (Head, Heart). No centers are completely open.

• Six channels are defined:

  • Transformation (54-32)

  • Structuring (43-23)

  • Transitoriness (35-36)

  • Charisma (20-34)

  • Exploration (10-34)

  • Awakening (20-10).

• The 5^th line predominates with 9 activations, followed by the 4^th and 1^st lines with 4 activations each.

• The Knowing/Individual circuit predominates with 9 activations, followed by the Sensing and Understanding circuits with 5 activations each.

I. Lacan as Martyr/Heretic

As a system, Human Design synthesizes the sixty-four hexagrams with the twelve signs of the astrological zodiac. The zodiacal placements of the astrological birth chart are thus rendered in hexagrammic correspondence. The hexagrams constitute “gates” in centers that connect to other centers through the formation of a channel. Following the structure of the Yijing, each hexagrammic gate is read in six possible lines, shown in the decimal points after each gate. The profile is determined by reading the line numbers associated with the Sun placement in the design and personality placements. In Lacan’s design, the personality Sun is placed in gate 42 and operates on the 3rd line (42.3); the design Sun is placed in gate 61 and operates on the 5th line (61.5). Therefore, Lacan’s is a 3/5 profile.

The profile is the hexagrammic foundation of the design.2 The first number represents the conscious aspect (or “personality”) and the second number represents the unconscious aspect (or “design”). The six lines function as primary roles in the person’s design, giving each gate 6 possible roles and rendering twelve possible profiles. Each line functions as a signifier described with a single word. The 3^rd line is the “Martyr” and the 5^th line is the “Heretic”. Therefore, a 3/5 profile is described as the duality of the Martyr/Heretic.

Lacan is an archetypal example of the Martyr/Heretic. In 1953, Lacan was expelled from the Société Parisienne de Psychanalyse (SPP) due to disagreements regarding the length of analytic sessions. Lacan practiced and advocated for a “variable-length” session, which the psychoanalytic orthodoxy rejected in favor of the established “fifty-minute hour”.3 Later that year, Lacan co-founded the Société Française de Psychanalyse (SFP).

In 1963, the International Psychoanalytic Association (IPA) effectively expelled Lacan from its association by requiring the SFP to remove his name from its list of analysts. The SFP’s compliance with this request led to Lacan’s barring from yet another psychoanalytic association, while also stripping him of his authority to train analysts.

In order to continue his work, he founded the École Freudienne de Paris (EFP) in 1964, an association he dissolved a year before his death, with the famous statement, “It is up to you to be Lacanians if you wish. I am Freudian”.

In 1966, Lacan published a collection of his writings titled Écrits, which sold five thousand copies within two weeks of publication. Lacan’s work received significant acclaim and criticism. Roudinesco recounts a notable statement made by Lacan’s former analysand, Didier Anzieu, who called him “a heretic” and predicted “his downfall”.4

With this rather brief excursion into Lacan’s work, we are given a glimpse of Lacan’s style in the manner of the Martyr/Heretic. He was martyred by the psychoanalytic establishment of his time, excluded from the professional body of psychoanalysts, and proclaimed as a heretic. The process of the 3^rd line involves “making and breaking bonds”, a theme we see throughout Lacan’s professional and personal life. Lacan’s expulsion from the orthodoxy forced him to embrace his own context and elaboration, which he did with great success. By the late 1960s and throughout the 1970s, Lacan’s seminars were attracting nearly a thousand attendees, becoming an epicenter of French intellectual life. Therefore, by embracing his style, Lacan moved into the personal destiny laid bare before him.

Of the six lines, it is the 5^th line that appears to operate purely on the mechanism of unconscious processes. Ra describes the 5^th line as a seduction and projection field, where others project what they need and think a 5^th line person can provide them with.5 “If a practical solution is not provided, if what you have given them is a ‘house of cards’, your reputation suffers and the ‘heretic will be burned at the stake’”.6 It is not too adventurous to propose that Lacan’s experience of the 5^th line led to one of his most pivotal articulations: “Desire is desire of the Other”. The 5th line person functions as an object-cause of the Other’s desire via the mechanics of a transferential field.

Since the 5^th line is unconscious in Lacan’s design, it is a process he became aware of over time. As we saw, Lacan initially endeavored to work in the context of the psychoanalytic establishment of the time, even characterizing his thought in relation to its founder. However, Lacan’s teaching could not be farther from the notion of “traditional” or “orthodox”. We can see Lacan becoming conscious of this fact in various ways, but a notable example is given in his one and only televised discourse. In one part of the partly-improvised discourse, Lacan gives one of his best definitions of analytic discourse:

What I call the analytic discourse is the social bond determined by the practice of an analysis. It derives its value from its being placed amongst the most fundamental of the bonds which remain viable for us.7

What does Lacan mean by a “social bond”? “Social” comes from the Latin socialis, meaning “allied”, the root of which is socius, meaning “friend”. Lacan is thus invoking “social” in the sense of true friendship, a connection that encounters the real through a collective ethic of practice.

After hearing this remark, Lacan’s student and future heir, Jacques-Alain Miller, then asks, “But you yourself are excluded from that which makes for social bonds between analysts, aren’t you?”—to which Lacan responds:

The Association, so-called “International” (although that is a bit of a fiction) having been for so long limited to a family business—I still knew it in the hands of Freud’s direct and adopted descendants, if I dared. But I warn you that here I am both judge and plaintiff, hence partisan. I would say that, at present, it is a professional insurance plan against analytic discourse. The PIPAAD.8 Damned PIPAAD!

They want to know nothing of the discourse that determines them. But they are not thereby excluded from it; far from it, since they function as analysts, which means that there are people who analyze themselves by means of them.

So they satisfy this discourse, even if some of its effects go unrecognized by them. On the whole, they don’t lack prudence; and even if it isn’t the true kind, it might be the do-good kind. Besides, they are the ones at risk.

The transcript of the discourse was eventually published as Television: A Challenge to the Psychoanalytic Establishment, where the subtitle alone establishes Lacan’s now-conscious heresy.

In Seminar VIII, Lacan provides an exegesis of his notion of transference through a commentary on Socrates. In one such example, Lacan writes:

[Alcibiades] attempted to seduce Socrates, he wanted to make him, and in the most openly avowed way possible, into someone instrumental and subordinate to what? To the object of Alcibiades’ desire—ágalma, the good object.

I would go even further. How can we analysts fail to recognize what is involved? He says quite clearly: Socrates has the good object in his stomach. Here Socrates is nothing but the envelope in which the object of desire is found.

It is in order to clearly emphasize that he is nothing but this envelope that Alcibiades tries to show that Socrates is desire’s serf in his relations with Alcibiades, that Socrates is enslaved to Alcibiades by his desire. Although Alcibiades was aware that Socrates desired him, he wanted to see Socrates’ desire manifest itself in a sign, in order to know that the other—the object, ágalma—was at his mercy.

Now, it is precisely because he failed in this undertaking that Alcibiades disgraces himself, and makes of his confession something that is so affectively laden. The daemon of Αἰδώς (Aidós), Shame, about which I spoke to you before in this context, is what intervenes here. This is what is violated here. The most shocking secret is unveiled before everyone; the ultimate mainspring of desire, which in love relations must always be more or less dissimulated, is revealed—its aim is the fall of the Other, A, into the other, a.910

Socrates was proclaimed a heretic and sentenced to death. By drinking the poison that would kill him without hesitation, Socrates established himself as a martyr. In the person of Socrates, we are given an archetypal example of the martyr/heretic dyad. Why did Lacan speak of Socrates in order to illustrate transference? Because the 5^th line is the phenomenology of transference, which a martyr/heretic knows well.

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II. Lacan as Genius-Freak

Rather than analyzing all of Lacan’s defined channels, I wish to focus on the channel which, in my view, bears Lacan’s signature: the Channel of Structuring (43-23). The Channel of Structuring is formed by the connection between hexagram 43, “Breakthrough—The Gate of Insight”, and hexagram 23, “Splitting Apart—The Gate of Assimilation”.11 In the bodygraph, hexagram 43 is placed in the Ajna center, and hexagram 23 is placed in the Throat center.

The Ajna center conceptualizes original insights while the Throat center manifests them in speech. When the Ajna is connected to the Throat, an individual is given the ability to articulate and manifest their unique insights. Of the three channels that connect the Ajna to the Throat, the 43-23 is especially striking. It is named “the channel of structuring” because it gives the ability to structure one’s insights in speech, where “speech” encompasses spoken and written forms of expression.

The defining influence of this channel is exemplified in Lacan’s most fundamental dictum: “The unconscious is structured like a language”. Even a cursory reading of Lacan reveals the profound influence of structuralism on his interpretation of psychoanalysis.

The channel of structuring is described as “a design of individuality (from genius to freak)”. Lacan’s expulsion from the psychoanalytic establishment serves to highlight his individuality—from the founding of his own school to the articulation of an original pedagogy of psychoanalysis. Ra describes the trajectory of this channel as “genius to freak” to indicate that the articulations of an individual with this channel are either recognized (“genius”) or seen as preposterous (“freak”). We see this phenomenon so clearly in the history and process of Lacan’s work.

Lacan is commonly accused of being an obscurantist—intentionally concealing the meaning and implications of his words. To this point, I recently met a Jungian analyst and introduced myself as a Lacanian analyst, to which he responded, “Lacan! He’s so confusing!”.12

The channel of structuring is considered a “projected” channel, which means that it must be recognized in order for its energy to manifest.13 This means that the insights and expressions of the 43-23 must develop a sense of timing, knowing where and when to speak their distinctive discourse.

In Lacan’s design, the 43-23 is a conscious channel formed by astrological placements based on his birth date, rather than on the “design” date, which is calculated 88 degrees (or roughly 88 days) before the birth date.14 The idea is that the birth date forms the natal personality (which is conscious) and the design date forms the pre-natal design (which is unconscious). Since Lacan’s Channel of Structuring is conscious, it forms and functions in and as his personality. This channel can be formed by any planetary placements, but in Lacan’s case, it is formed by his north and south nodes, giving the 43-23 an evolutionary connotation. For Lacan, gates 43 and 23 are also associated with the 5^th line, which illustrates the heretical structure of his teaching.

The definition of the 43-23 as a movement between genius and freak explains why opinions are fervently divided on the value of Lacan’s teaching. Lacan does not have a universal value—his expression is for those who recognize the original contours of his speech. For the rest, his genius is a freakish semblance that splits apart all attempts at assimilation.

III. Lacan as Teacher: The Right Angle Cross of Maya

In Human Design, the concept of the Incarnation Cross signifies an individual's purpose. The cross is comprised of the four gates corresponding to the Sun and Earth positions in the personality and design. Each cross is augmented by its position within one of four possible “quarters” of the human design mandala (initiation, civilization, duality, or mutation) and is further defined by its “angle” (left or right).

Lacan was born on the Right Angle Cross of Maya (42/32 | 61/62) in the first quarter of initiation.15 The Right Angle Cross of Maya is categorized under Gate 42—Increase. Ra describes individuals born on the Right Angle Cross of Maya as “[t]rend setters grounded in properly evaluated detail who promote growth by bringing one cycle to completion, thus setting the stage for inspired new beginnings”.16 Lacan was one such pioneering spirit who brought psychoanalysis into new contexts of understanding while retaining its original essence. In this sense, Lacan was a true innovator.

And what of maya? The descriptor, māyā, is of Sanskrit origin and means “measure”, “unreal appearance”, “veil”, and “phantom”. In the context of Indian philosophy, māyā signifies the illusory nature of all conditional phenomena. Māyā is a deceptive appearance, or what Lacan calls the “grimace of the real”. Thus, to live in a conditional world is to traverse a fantasy, a virtualization of the real.

A related meaning of māyā is “fraud” or “deceit”. Perhaps Chomsky’s characterization of Lacan as “charlatan” was, in fact, an incomplete recognition of Lacan’s Incarnation Cross of Maya. It is intriguing that Lacan opens his televised discourse with the following confession:

I always speak the truth. Not the whole truth, because there’s no way to say it all. Saying it all is literally impossible—words fail. Yet, it’s through this very impossibility that the truth holds onto the real.17

A defining characteristic of Lacan’s teaching is his renunciation of ego psychology. In his formulation of the “mirror stage”, Lacan describes the infant’s recognition of its image in a mirror as an imaginary identification. In contrast to his predecessors and contemporaries, Lacan emphasizes the illusory nature of the ego and calls forth a confrontation with the real. Lacan’s use of the phrase “the real” points to a range of influences, from surrealism to modernism to Buddhism. Where psychoanalysis had previously endeavored to strengthen the ego-construct as essential to psychological well-being, Lacan unveils the real.

The body of Lacan’s spoken and written work constitutes a teaching, rather than a mere philosophy. The term “teaching” is derived from the Old English tæcan, meaning “show, present, point out”. The etymology is traced to an Indo-European root shared in Greek, deiknunai, meaning “show”, and deigma, meaning “sample”. Lacan uses language to point out the structure of the unconscious. The apparent difficulty of his communication is not due to intentional obscurity but reflects the cipher that is the unconscious itself.

In his final seminar, Encore, Lacan comments on the function of his Écrits:

It is rather well-known that those Écrits cannot be read easily. I can make a little autobiographical admission­­—that is exactly what I thought. I thought, perhaps it goes that far, I thought they were not meant to be read.

. . . This writing (écriture) stemmed from an initial reminder, namely, that analytic discourse is a new kind of relation based only on what functions as speech, in something one may define as a field.18

Lacan is situating his written work as “analytic discourse”, a textual mode of communication that is transparent to the field and function of the unconscious. As Grigg writes:

Lacan is a stylist, a baroque and defiant one to be sure, but one with, as Malcolm Bowie has pointed out, a capacity for formulating theses that are pithy and memorably simple . . . [T]hey indicate the presence of a didactic side in Lacan’s work, one that merits the term ‘teaching’.19

One reads Lacan as one reads a scriptural text whose letter speaks to the agency of the unconscious to make an instance of the real.

IV. Returning to Freud: Connection Themes

Lacan describes his project as a “return to Freud”, but he also speaks before and after Freud. We must ask, what exactly is the connection between Lacan and Freud? We venture an answer by examining the connection themes between their human designs.

Lacan and Freud were both Manifesting Generators, a variation on the Generator type. In Human Design, “types” describe modes of being.20 As the name implies, a “Generator” functions with an “open and enveloping aura” as a creative force in the world. The signature of the Generator type is the defined Sacral center, described as a fertile power of creativity and sexuality. A Manifesting Generator is further defined by a motor-to-Throat connection.21

In Lacan’s design, the Solar Plexus motor is connected to the Throat via the Channel of Transitoriness (35-36), and the Sacral motor is connected to the Throat via the Channel of Charisma (20-34). In Freud’s design, the Solar Plexus motor is connected to the Throat via the Channel of Openness (12-22).

When Lacan and Freud’s designs are layered upon each other, all nine centers are defined, forming a complete connection.22 This theme is further examined via four possible categories of connection between the nine centers: electromagnetic, compromise, companionship, and dominance channels.23

Electromagnetic Channels: Where Two Ends Meet

Lacan and Freud’s connection forms six electromagnetic channels:

• Beat (2-14)

• Initiation (51-25)

• Power (34-57)

• Perfected Form (10-57)

• The Brain Wave (57-20)

• Logic (63-4).

This is a significant number of connections that reveals the “spark” between them. Through these six channels, we can see the specific ways in which Lacan and Freud complement each other.

In addition, there are four compromise channels, five dominance channels, and no companionship channels.

Compromised Channels: A Conflictual Dynamic

Freud is compromised by three of Lacan’s channels:

• Transitoriness (35-36)

• Transformation (54-32)

• Structuring (43-23)

Lacan is only compromised by one of Freud’s channels:

• Openness (12-22).

Dominance Channels: Experiencing the Other

While compromised channels suggests potential conflict, dominance channels allow a person to be experienced as they are, outside of the connection. In the cloistered context of the 9-0 connection, dominance provides an outlet. Freud is dominated by three of Lacan’s channels:

• Charisma (20-34)

• Exploration (10-34)

• Awakening (20-10)

While Lacan is dominated by two of Freud’s channels:

• Inspiration (8-1)

• Preservation (27-50)

Freud and Jung: Connections and Splits

For context, we can note that Freud and Jung’s connection theme is a 7-2 (“work to do”) with four electromagnetic channels, four compromise channels, and three dominance channels. Their four electromagnetic channels are:

• Transitoriness (35-36)

• Initiation (51-25)

• The Prodigal (33-13)

• Emoting (39-55)

In terms of compromise, Jung compromises Freud with three channels:

• Maturation (34-52)

• The Alpha (31-7)

• Perfected Form (10-57)

Freud compromises Jung with:

• Preservation (27-50).

In terms of dominance, it is Freud who dominates Jung with two channels:

• Inspiration (8-1)

• Openness (12-22),

while Jung dominates Freud with one channel:

• Recognition (30-41).

Lastly, we can note that the Freud-Lacan and Freud-Jung connections share the electromagnetic Channel of Initiation (51-25). A full analysis of the channel connections between Lacan and Freud (and Freud and Jung) is a worthy exploration that I only note for now.

In addition to their type resonance, Lacan and Freud have compatible profiles. Human design views sequential profiles as being compatible. Lacan is a 3/5 profile and Freud is a 4/6 profile, placing them in a compatible sequence to each other. However, in this sequence, Lacan precedes Freud, signifying the nature of his “return” as a prophecy.

V. Lacan as Prophet: The Future of Psychoanalysis

The term “prophet” comes from the Greek prophētēs, meaning “interpreter, expounder”. Examined at its root, pro means “before” and phētēs means “speaker”. Therefore, a prophet is “one who speaks before”. In a discourse titled “Guru As Prophet”, Adi Da explores the prophetic function of the spiritual teacher:

In the world, generally, [the Guru] must serve the crisis of understanding, which confounds the search, all need for consolation, fascination, all need for cultural and cultic games. In the world he may function, if he appears at all, in the role of the prophet, which is essentially an aggravation, a criticism, an undermining of the usual life.24

Adi Da views the public function of a teacher as “prophet and critic”. Clarifying his usage, Adi Da notes that the true meaning of prophet is not a psychic function of foretelling the future, but a critical function that undermines the egoic mechanism:

When I speak of the function of the man of understanding as prophet, it is in that sense, as critic, not as someone who exercises secondary psychic powers to foretell the future.

. . . The true prophet doesn’t lead a person to align himself with karmic destiny. He leads him always toward a radical new position relative to the whole force of his ordinary life.25

In the opening remarks of Television, Lacan indirectly speaks to his role as prophet:

. . . There is no difference between television and the public before whom I’ve spoken for a long time now, a public known at my seminar. A single gaze in both cases: a gaze to which, in neither case, do I address myself, but in the name of which I speak.

Do not, however, get the idea that I address everyone at large. I am speaking to those who are savvy, to the nonidiots, to the supposed analysts.26

Lacan’s seminars were famously open to the public and became a center of Parisian intellectual life. In this sense, Lacan maintained the paradoxical gaze of the prophet: at once looking at the public while speaking in private. Therefore, the prophetic gaze also stands at the juncture of the public and the private, the exoteric and the esoteric, the universal and the personal.

Prophet as critic is prophet as heretic, and thus prophet as martyr. Lacan functions as a prophet because his return to Freud uncovers a prior truth that feeds the future of psychoanalysis. By undermining the egoic strictures that contain the unconscious, Lacan points to the structure that speaks behind thought, a sound waiting to be heard in the real.

I first met Paul in Portland. It was 2021, and we were both studying Worsley Five-Element Acupuncture at the Worsley Institute. In the last year or so, Paul and I started getting together for friendly chats on acupuncture, astrology, and related topics. Our conversations were mutually thought-provoking and created space for an ongoing dialogue. A few weeks ago, we finally decided to record one of our free-ranging conversations. The edited transcript of this talk became “Acupuncture, Ecology, Spirituality” (text and audio below).

In “Acupuncture, Ecology, Spirituality”, Paul and I share perspectives on the nature of health and disease through an exploratory dialogue that spans five-element acupuncture, astrology, alchemy, and psychedelics. The central thread of our conversation reflects an ecological orientation toward health and voices a concern for our relationship to the natural world.

In conversing with Paul, I was reminded of the value of dialogue amongst colleagues. In traditional contexts, practitioners engaged in lively debates and scholarly explorations that brought forth tremendous innovation over the centuries. Medical tradition thrives in dialogue, where conversation invokes an oral episteme and a collective ethic of practice.

About Paul Arellano

Paul Arellano is an acupuncturist and herbalist working in Portland, OR. He studies the interplay of climate and human health through the Wuyun Liuqi system of ecological health science. In addition to studying and writing about seasonal dynamics in nature and health, Paul offers BaZi natal chart readings, which uses the 5-Element system to create a "landscape map" of personal constitution and character. In these readings, Paul explores how each individual can harmonize with their own inner nature and enter into resonant, healthy relationship with the living forces of our world.

Read Paul's writings on seasonal resonance here
Wuyun Liuqi Climate + Health Map for 2025 can be found here

Acupuncture, Ecology, Spirituality

Paul: Good morning, Neeshee.

Neeshee: Good morning, Paul.

Paul: We are here today to talk about the nature of healing from our perspectives, and I would love to hear what your perception of health is. What is health to you, and what is healing?

Neeshee: That is a big question. If I were to approach that question universally, I would say that health is a very individual matter. “What is health” is something that you can consider in the context of a unique individual. What is health for me may not be what is health for you. I may be able to engage in activities in my life that might be imbalancing to you and other people. So I think health is all about discovering who you are, and then realizing what it means for you to be healthy, what it means for you to be a vital human being. Health is very relative. The traditional medical systems point out that health is very much determined by our environmental relationships.

For example, I am here in Colorado—it is relatively dry compared to Portland. I have to take into account different things because of that fact—the climate that I live in, the environment and the elevation are very different. There is also my own constitution in relationship to the environment. So I think of health as being relative, environmental, and personal in the sense of the uniqueness of the individual. You can think about that astrologically and with systems like human design. Who are you? What is your nature? What is your design? That is what health is relative to.

Paul: What I'm hearing you say is that healing is discovering who you are. There’s also the aspect you mentioned of change. I was just seeing the release of a new commentary on the Yijing and reflecting on how the Yijing is a foundational text for an entire culture. Also, the medical lens of Chinese medicine is based on how things are constantly changing and transforming.

I'm hearing that there's both an essential nature that we all have to discover in ourselves, and then how we relate in that essential nature to the changing world around us and the changing environment we find ourselves in.

Neeshee: Yes, exactly. I think of the relationship between ourselves and the environment as a bidirectional reality. On the one hand, there is this blueprint of who we are. For example, I look the way that I do, for the most part, but I've also changed. In this sense, my structure and personality will develop and emerge, but it has a foundation-pattern, you could say.

The Book of Changes is pointing out that everything is constantly in flux, including who we are. We just need to discover the resonance between our flux and the so-called outer flux, right? We need to come into relationship with the reality of nature, the reality of the cosmos and the cycles of things. And there are many levels of the cycle. We have our own life-cycles that we go through, as astrology points out with the Saturn returns and the midlife period being a nodal decade. There are all these periods that we go through that are developmental. And there is also everything that is cycling outside—the season and everything that is happening in nature. Depending on where you live, that cycle is different. So there is a lot of strata to it, I would say, in us and in reality.

Paul: You know, working with Bazi,1 a big part of what I'm looking at is also the changes and the nested cycles of yin-yang—how we have day and night, a yin-yang cycle. We have full moon, new moon, we have summer and winter—we have all of these cycles that are playing out with different aspects that become very, very complex as you see them all nested together and moving at different rates. In that sense, to move to “what is disease”: what I'm feeling (and I think we probably share this) is that we are constantly changing and the world is constantly changing around us in so many different layers. Disease is when we are either changing in a way that is not resonant with the world around us or when things are changing around us and we are not changing with them.

So either we are changing in a direction that isn't coherent with our environment or our environment is changing and we are not moving with it, which I think is two ways to say the same thing. Even in the early chapters of the Su wen,2 when it discusses how early on the cures for diseases were just instructions or shamanic incantations to realign that resonance.

We live in a world where more and more is managed—we have air conditioning, we have all of these conveniences that allow us to change, to make changes to our micro-environment, which means that our body is less in contact with the environment. Our consciousness is less in contact with the global, the cosmic consciousness of the changes happening on Earth. And that means we need more and more. And it says so in the Nan Jing that more and more invasive healing processes or procedures are needed because people's connection is becoming further and further estranged from that core resonance.

Neeshee: I agree with that. Building on the resonance idea: health is resonance and disease is disharmony. I think that brings us into the paradigm of circulation. When you are in resonance with reality––with the cycles of things in yourself and in nature—then the vital force circulates. (You can call this vital force, qi, or whatever you like. I like the phrase “vital force”—it is a European phrase that I think is accurate.)

There is a vital force, a vital impetus, an intelligence that circulates as a connecting factor between our bodies and what is happening in the natural world. These are not separate realities. We realize that they are not separate through the circulation of the vital force.

If the vital force is circulating, that is itself the harmony of life. Something would have to interrupt that in order for disease to arise. Disease is very much a superimposition on what is otherwise already the case—which is the circulating motion of the life force. This raises the issue of adaptability—our ability to adapt and meet the changes of life. For example, to consult the Yijing, because we are feeling like we don't know, that we need to inquire relative to what is happening. What should I do? There is this inquiry in the Book of Changes around divining health and what the correct course of action would be, so you can maintain your correctness with everything.

As you said, industrialization and modernity have created this kind of capsulization of our life. Our sense of the body is not related anymore. We are living in controlled environments and even increasingly virtual contexts of communication. Communication, in its essence, is the vital force itself. As soon as you establish a virtualization of communication, you lose the spirit of life.

Paul: Very, very literally too—it disrupts the bio-rhythms that sync us to the environment.

Neeshee: Yes, the blue light and whatnot. We have abstracted the human experience. I think it's interesting what J.R. Worsley said, that when he was growing up, there was less provision for protection from climatic factors. In Chinese medicine, Ayurveda, and Tibetan Medicine, there is so much focus on climatic factors. If it’s damp outside, you don't want to get rained on and cover your necks in the wind so you don't get wind invasions. There is this whole idea that disease is primarily an invasion by climatic factors. I think that is partly an old idea. It is still true, but at least where we live today, we are rather protected from those realities—and we even have the option of insulating ourselves from it in a useful way.

But, at the same time, Worsley points out that even though we have all these modern provisions and protections from climatic factors, we are more ill than we ever have been. And that illness is a spiritual illness. Spiritual illness is precisely this virtualization, this disconnection, this non-communication, and the fact that our bodies are not vital anymore.

Paul: Yes, and when you say spiritual illness, I think of “spiritual” as the vertical access of something above us looking down. It is like the metaphysic we bring to the world, how we perceive the world. I think a lot of our attitude towards that is the same attitude that Western colonialism has had for hundreds of years, which is that nature is inherently dangerous and bad and evil. Now, I don't think that is what is being said in the medical classics, that wind is bad or damp is bad. They have consequences, but they also have a beautiful balancing effect where the wind comes in the Spring and moves things that are stuck.

The alternating dry and wet of the Shaoyang season of Spring helps to break open the soil and aerate things. The wind dries damp, it comes along and it can impart health to us as well. But again, when these things are out of balance—as climate change and other phenomena that create extreme weather that we are seeing so often—those extreme weather patterns really accentuate whatever that dynamic is.

So there is that lack of communication. There is a lack of even communication between the weather patterns. We see that health is not just a personal process of humans being sick—the environment becomes sick, and the weather becomes disrupted and abnormal and unhealthy.

To bring it back to the Book of Changes, the advice it gives is a lot about behavior, as you were saying. So much of health is not necessarily taking a drug or a medicine, but it's the question of how we comport ourselves. How do we relate and behave in response to what's going on around us? I think that is a real challenge of our times, for all the reasons we've said. We have a lot of insulation when there is something we don't want to engage with—we have a lot of ways to disconnect, to remove ourselves. The muscle becomes a little weaker regarding how we face something challenging and discover how to relate and have the flexibility to respond to it.

Neeshee: Exactly. One of the things you're pointing at is this age-old axiom that the causative factors of disease are also the causative factors of health. They are the same thing. They are the exact same process or entity or force—whether that is a climatic factor or a dosha or qi or blood or body fluids, or however you want to think about it. These things maintain the body. They maintain the mind and the spirit. They maintain our vitality. They are expressions of the vital force. They are not problematic.

In past conversations, we have talked about the five elements and the emotions that correspond to the five elements. These are not necessarily pathological. They are just showing you the natural cycle of change and growth—the ripeness and the decomposition. It all creates this beautiful cycle of health and healing and therapy.

But the factors of health can also become the factors of disease. So there are two ideas in there. One is the idea of disease as an excess pathology, meaning something accumulates that naturally exists and that imbalances you, such as damp accumulation or wind invasion. Second is five-element thinking (which is homeopathic thinking), where health isn't an excess of a substantial process of any kind but a deficiency in the natural cycle of things. The idea of pathology as excess is more humoral—it has more to do with the idea of a physiological substance or an environmental substance accumulating in you.

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Ayurveda, for example, has a significant emphasis on this notion. Its primary modality is to advise patients on diet and lifestyle—behave in this way and eat in this way during this time of year. And that is largely the medicine, I would say. As you said earlier, given the times we've developed the need for more invasive procedures, and I think acupuncture is significantly more invasive, because now we are not just advising the patient, we are intervening in their physiology. And that is a different kind of event. It is a different kind of therapy. I think it is a lot closer to shamanism, which is the origin of medicine to begin with. That makes acupuncture a really interesting phenomenon that is resurrecting the past while bringing us into the present reality and the kind of therapies we need today.

I faced this frustration myself in the clinic, originally being an Ayurvedic practitioner, and realizing that just advising patients wasn't quite enough. Even more, their ability to make use of advice was also limited in many ways by the nature of their imbalance, which was a very real thing. I always thought that if I could just effect a change for them, a shift in their physiology, in a more immediate sense, they would have a greater capability. And not even a capability. I wouldn't even have to advise them. Their own bodily intelligence would emerge of its own accord. They would know what to do.

Paul: Absolutely. For me, that connects to what you were mentioning: the link between a process of disease and a process of health often being the same. So much of what interests me in the lens of Bazi and the Wuyun Liuqi is how we see our own body’s processes of health reflected in the environment. They are not actually separate, as you were saying. They are happening in tandem. The more we communicate between those two, the greater the impact on health for both ourselves and our community, our environment. For example, there is a big patch of Ivy outside of my house, and I’ve been cutting down the Ivy. I was talking to someone recently, and they were mentioning the health benefits of Ivy. We think of it as an invasive plant, but it binds soil to prevent erosion.

And how beautiful that is, that it can in some ways be seen as a disease process, as an invasive plant coming into an environment where it doesn't belong and creating an imbalance. But that process is trying to return to a homeodynamic state of health, where it is balancing out what is imbalanced. What I find, personally, and through applying acupuncture to patients, is that people come in to seek relief from a symptom, but in the process of engaging with their disease or their disharmony or imbalance, there is an important lesson to be learned, an important healing that is going on through the arising of disease. I don't know if that is true in every single case, but I think in many cases, that is a part of the healing—the person's engagement and learning, rather than just removing a symptom where the person does not get the opportunity to understand what is being taught or what is being presented as an opportunity to grow.

Neeshee: That reminds me of a quote by the famous Parisian psychoanalyst, Jacques Lacan, who said, “Love your symptom as yourself”.3 That also reminds me of one of the earliest Eastern medical definitions of health, which is in the Caraka Samhita, an Ayurvedic classic. It says, “Health is not the absence of disease”.4 The idea being that, when we're talking about health and healing, we're not necessarily saying that there are no symptoms.

This is a critical point: sickness is part of health, too. The experience of symptoms is, in many regards, positive and part of a process of transformation and healing. If you do not ever have symptoms, then you are very repressed. We can think of that psychologically. The homeopaths say that it's good to have symptoms, it means that the disease is being expressed, and that is better than having disease moving into the central areas of the body where it no longer has a capability to express itself, where it no longer gives you a distress signal, it no longer has a sign or any kind of significance associated with it. Thus, you can think of symptoms as signifiers, as a sign you can read and decipher and uncover in order to deliver a treatment. The symptom is a communication, and there is so much wisdom in it.

I think we're way too quick to just eradicate the symptom, to attack the symptom as problem. It is the idea that delivering a therapy that is opposed to the symptom is going to engender a cure. Whereas I think cure is the exact opposite of that phenomenon.

Paul: I really like the idea of listening—that there is a communication going on, and to respect that communication, to not shut it down. It is the same as if a child is expressing themselves and being open to what that is—maybe it's not clear at first, maybe it's a little chaotic, but encouraging that expression allows the child to grow. It allows the body to be able to communicate more clearly when there are issues going on or something to present—the body will have that pathway for clear communication.

Neeshee: Exactly. It also means that a patient's own relationship to their symptoms and their body and their process and their content and their psychology and their dreams and their overall experience of who they are can shift from becoming a problematic. As a practitioner, I do not want to enforce the sense of problem for someone. I want them to experience a shift in their relationship to that. For me, that is healing.

Paul: Yes, coming into right relationship. This segues into something that I'm interested in from the five-element perspective as well, that we touched on a little bit before—which is the nature of the five emotions and how the five emotions relate in a lot of ways to behavior, to affect, to how we relate to the world. These behaviors can bring us out of balance and they can also bring us into health—not just as a pathological expression of something we need to eliminate but as a process of relationship, of behavior, of expression that can connect us to health that can also become imbalanced from an overuse or an underuse, an over-communication or an under-communication of that particular emotion. Is that how you see the five emotions as well?

Neeshee: You can have a deficiency or an excess. But given the nature of the five elements as an interdependent cycle, the root-etiology is always going to be a deficiency that leads to excess somehow or another. Everything needs to maintain its natural order. As long as it's maintaining its natural order, there is an appropriateness to things.

I think Worsley's emphasis on appropriateness here is crucial because he says that the way you diagnose the issue in somebody is by sensing what is inappropriate in the sense of incongruent. This is not the root-diagnosis is color, sound, odor, and emotion. But as a practitioner, you are sensing where something is inappropriate.

Why is this person expressing this emotion? It doesn't quite match with the reality of what's happening for them, the reality of their experience. It is something that is out of place, or conversely, they are not expressing the emotion that would otherwise be indicated. Such as grief when discussing the passing of a family member. That is a very cliché example, but it works. There is a disharmony in their affect. This emotion either isn't showing up—there is a lack—or an emotion is manifesting that doesn't seem to have a relationship to reality, so to speak. Again, I think that just points out that there is a disharmony, or a failure of transformation in the five-element cycle, that is leading to the person being stuck in a certain emotional mode. Trauma or shock can leave us in a fight-or-flight mechanism where we are effectively experiencing an event constantly. We don't move on to the next element, to the next emotion, in the cycle of things. If we did, then everything keeps transforming itself endlessly.

Paul: The curiosity for me with everything you're saying is how these two processes come from, to use Leon Hammer's phrase, “like contact to stay intact”—ways to try and remain in contact or avoid some kind of negative experience they've had in the past keep their living process going, keep their vital force flowing. It can be an attempt to reach for something that they can't access.

There is the overreaching and then the avoidance of things. All of that is colored by the idea that (going back to what you were saying earlier) that health is so much about our behaviors being in contact with what we're feeling and what's really going on for us. How we are resonating with the world around us—whether we don't want to resonate and there's some process that's going on around us we don't really want to feel—but that inevitably we are, and to be able to sync up with that, or if there is some experience we really want to be having, some connection we really want to be making that's not as accessible in the world around us.

Coming into resonance with that, bringing it all back to how we can behave more appropriately. Not to say that we need to be censoring or chastising ourselves about inappropriate behavior, but just recognizing how that itself is a vector of health, as much as any intervention. As you were saying, a lot of the interventions we're using as holistic health practitioners are to help people achieve that state internally of this ongoing resonance where their body is maintaining a state of health, even when disease arises, even as processes of death are happening. To be in relationship to that, to be in rapport and dynamic connection.

That is something that I also think about a lot with my patients: how to not create that for them but how to see what's going on and try to witness a process going on for a patient from a lens of compassion and understanding that there is some learning going on here. The patient is seeking some kind of fulfillment, and it can't be pushed aside. We have to find a way to relate to it and find the fulfillment that is being sought after.

Neeshee: I would say an essential statement here: health is relationship. That relationship is also evidenced in the patient-practitioner relationship, which is a therapeutic relationship. Symptoms arise as indications of where relationship is being inquired of, where it might be avoided, where it may need to be reasserted or reestablished. Where it has been repressed. Therefore, when you have the event of healing (or the law of cure is initiated in that process), you will have symptoms. You will experience sickness as part of the process of healing because there is something within us that is not transformed, that is stagnant. You could think about disease in a very simple way as just a form of qi stagnation, which means that once it gets moving again, there will be purification, there will be a rebalancing process.

And that is such an exciting sign to see in the clinic because you know that the patient is healing, you know that they are being cured, so to speak. Here, cure is not a final event. It is an ongoing process. That is why when we talk about appropriateness, we have no sense of a Judeo-Christian value judgment. We have a Daoist sense of the harmony between things. The appropriate form of action. The Book of Changes says the superior man does this or the superior man does that, and it's another way of saying that when you're in harmony with yourself, you behave appropriately in respect to what is happening. You are in relationship—you are related fundamentally to your own body, and your body is existing in the relationship that it exists in to the world, to society. As you've also been hinting, there is a cultural and collective component of health and healing and, therefore, an environmental one.

Paul: Yes, and bringing it back to astrology, the cosmic: if you think of the universe as being a perfect encapsulation of dynamic health, it is always changing. There is no cure-state because new things are always happening, shifts are taking place. It is that process that allows health to move and balance. It is not always so smooth, but I think there is also the ability to see in the five-element model through these healing events or these symptoms or these emotions, exactly how they are relating. If somebody, for example, in the instance of somebody not grieving or not displaying grief for a family member, having the appropriate grief might be absolutely heartbreaking and a terribly intense emotion to feel. But we can understand that that is an appropriate response to help the person come into relationship with a process that is true. Whatever other supports might need to take place in that person's life, just support that.

The other instance I can think of is when we think of excess Earth element or the seeking of sympathy and care, and the excess seeking of support and affirmation. In the five-element cycle, Earth controls Water. When we take away that excess, we have the Earth trying to hold onto the Water, which is fear. In the absence of a kind of affirmation and sympathy, there could be a great deal of fear and loneliness that I'm not connected as I want to be. I don't have this big holding loving community in the same way that I'm really looking for. That could engender a lot of fear. But, at the same time, we can even see how somebody coming in, experiencing a great deal of fear after the previous session, maybe being lovey.

It isn’t always a bad thing, and it's not our place to ascribe who should be feeling what emotion—but we can understand, as they present themselves, where they might be coming from. I think that is a beautiful way of relating to emotions.

Neeshee: What you said is that the symptom is like a homeostatic process. The symptom is not a deviation, it is an attempt of the body to reassert a natural order. What we can do is look at that and say, Oh, this is what is trying to happen. There is a reason for it. It is very rational. We can assist that motive to complete itself, to fulfill itself. Therefore, the symptom is the key, but it is not the object of the treatment. The symptom is the message—so you can really listen to your patients and learn so much. Applying this more clinically, I will share some of my recent thinking on five-element practice and Worsley’s concept of the Causative Factor (C.F.), which is the one element that is constitutionally out of balance in someone.

I think about the C.F. as a relational imbalance, and the whole five-element cycle showing us the relational nature of health. You were just giving the example of Earth and Water, the control relationship. There are so many relationships in the elements. We have the generative relationships, the Mother-Child relationship, which is the most basic relationship in reality. We come from mothers. There is no other way that life exists. There is so much to be said about birth trauma and the early stages of infant care in setting up the psychological foundation of a child to be an adult. I think of the Mother-Child relationship between the elements in a metaphorical and alchemical sense, but also in a very literal sense.

I would propose augmenting Worsley’s idea, or sort of creatively playing with his idea of the C.F., by saying that you can offer five-element treatment that is not solely focused on the C.F. element (which would be his method), but that you can treat the C.F. in the context of its relational reality. You can treat the C.F. as a relational imbalance, not as an individual imbalance. Because there is no individual, really. It is all relationship. For example, say you diagnose a Wood C.F., you can do a Water-Wood treatment. This is very much like Japanese Meridian Therapy, although they arrive at their diagnosis through pulse and not through the color, sound, odor, and emotion. And they have a very specific way of doing the treatment.

I'm saying you can use any points on Water and Wood to transfer the relationship, to reinitiate the Mother-Child relationship, to bring in the context of the Wood element again, and give it an opportunity to rebirth itself, so to speak. You can also take this idea and look at the control cycle and be attentive to when that is needed, when that relationship needs emphasis. Because if everything is being controlled properly, it is being maintained in check. When would you need to assert control? When something is excessive or when it is being over-controlling, then you need to relax.

If we think about the C.F. as an element, then we're necessarily thinking about a dynamic of relationships. Korean Four-Needle Technique operates on this idea too. It is bringing in these relationships between the elements, again, in a very specific way. You use certain element points, the horary point, etc. I’m broadening that whole idea and saying we can use any points on any of these meridians to re-enact the relationship. So that is an idea I am playing around with.

Paul: The work that I do with Bazi is based in the same five elements, and a lot of it is diagnosing from a different perspective, a similar idea of the Causative Factor where we're looking at somebody's chart. And the way I perceive the chart, it creates a natural landscape. There are all the natural elements of Fire, Wood, Water, Earth Metal in different combinations in different organizations and structures. Thus, it elicits the image of a landscape. In that landscape, there might be something really excess, there might be something really deficient. It’s thinking about what elements we need to bring into that landscape to balance the system. It might be more than one, it might be a little bit of one, a lot of another. There are certain Bazi charts we look at where if somebody's born on the right day of the right month, they're born in the summertime, let's say, and their heart's full of fire—that is not necessarily a problem because the summer is the time of fire.

We have to understand what is appropriate for one person. Partial people might have a strong partiality to a certain emotion, a certain kind of display. That is also part of the human experience. Some people who are just more gregarious, more intense, more compassionate. And that can also be part of the human experience. There is a beauty to that. Even recognizing within each individual that there are still things we need, but at the same time, there are things we offer. We have gifts to return to the world.

That is such an important part of healing, and why relationality is part of healing. Because we do need the assistance of the world for our causative factor or for our deficient elements, something that we need to bring in to help support us. At the same time, we have something to offer back to those who seek it, who need it in the world around us. And the stronger that web of relationship is, the greater the exchange of health across the entire network.

Neeshee: Exactly. And I think that's why methods like Bazi and astrology are great—they show you where you are eccentric. We all need to discover our eccentricity because, when we do that, we also discover our genius. That means we are not only discovering our character, but we are realizing the calling that exists in us. That is what individuation is about, in the Jungian sense.

My colleague, Howard Chen, has thoroughly applied the Bazi methodology to five-element acupuncture. In his system, the Day Master is the C.F. So you center treatment around the Day Master element, and you look at the four pillars as a whole, and all the elemental relationships.

On that basis, you can derive the elements that are most indicated in treatment, to support the CF, so to speak. Now, my revision of that is to say that the Day Master is not the Causative Factor; it is the Constitutional Factor. The CF is an imbalance. In some cases, they are the same. In other cases, they are not the same. This is a very Ayurvedic idea, that there is a constitution and then there is an imbalance. I think the Day Master is a constitutional factor in the true sense of that phrase. Does it need treatment? That is a question. You can support it, for sure. But I also think the CF that Worsley is getting at is slightly different from that. It is arrived at through different means, and it has a dynamic relationship to the constitutional factor. That is the whole prakriti-vikriti5 idea in Ayurveda, which I think is the original constitutional medicine. Ayurveda has a strong theoretical explanation of constitution and its relationship to imbalance.

Paul: I think that also, and I wonder if this is what you're saying as well, because it makes me think about plants again:

A big fascination of mine is how the herbs we ingest, whether Ayurvedic, Chinese, or Western, the way that they function in the body is a mirror of their function in the natural environment. There is a resonance between what we are ingesting the herb to do for us and what they do naturally in their community. We are ingesting that relationship to take that relationship in. Similarly, we have constitutions that are partially what we give. But those can't exist on their own. We need to have a healthy community where we are getting what we need. Again, that whole relationship dynamic where our constitution isn't necessarily what we need more of, there could be something different we need that supports our ability to express our constitution.

The emotion that has always made me most curious in the five-element system is the emotion of joy. Because I think that is such a sought-after emotion in Western culture—the experience of joy. So much of our consumer landscape is centered around what will impart joy, what will give you an experience of joy, of levity, of ecstasy. Maybe ecstasy is wrong because I think that it is not always a joyful experience. We mentioned this before as well, thinking about the idea of health being held in relationship and held in a whole network of community relationships. I've been fascinated lately by the idea that the root system of any ecology is like the brain of that ecology.

The behaviors of an ecology, how things grow and relate, are based on the interconnection between all the roots that are going on unseen, and mediated mostly by mycelium. So all the roots are down in the earth, and then filaments of mycelium, almost like a neural web, are connecting all these, and they're all sending chemical signals the same way our brains send chemical signals, and they're being passed to one another, communicating, sharing information, sharing resources. That is creating, on a macro-level, behaviors and responses. My interest in this is the fact that serotonin, before it was ever in an animal brain, was in the root systems of plants. Serotonin is being synthesized by plants and shared among them.

A lot of attention in our culture is paid to SSRIs, to depression being a function of a serotonin imbalance. These chemicals are also present in the environment. Therefore, we can think of the environment also having joy, having that same emotion. We can understand more about ourselves by looking at the natural environment. What we see is that a lot of psychedelic chemicals are derivatives of serotonin. So there is some kind of modulation of this experience of joy or openness. What these chemicals do is they encourage diversity of root growth—and, if we're imagining roots like the neural network, that is encouraging neuroplasticity, encouraging a new response to an existing situation.

When the stressor comes on to an ecology, there is an uptake, an increase in the production of these chemicals that allows the root system to grow in new ways, to synthesize new chemicals, to respond to a trauma or an unexpected event. I think that's a really interesting way of conceiving of joy as well. That joy isn't always a response to something happy or a joyous experience. Joy can be an opening to something that otherwise is very painful. That through grief, through fear, through anger, there can be an experience of joy, which literally in our brain allows a new relationship to an existing situation to open up to possibilities other than being stuck in this one loop, and that literally can create new connections, new structures in our brain. That is a beautiful part of the whole system, that we do have these more challenging emotions that we tend to think of as fear, anger, or grief. Joy is a much more pleasant one, but it's a really necessary part of our growth, our adaptation, and that relationship to what's going on, to take a new stance, develop a new way of relating, and the environment reflects that back to us.

Neeshee: It's another way of recognizing the mechanism through which psychedelics can help us grow. That is how I think about psychedelics: they offer tremendous growth potential for the right person in the right context (obviously set and setting, etc.). But I also think that you're pointing to the fact that health is an ecological phenomenon. And that takes us into the realm of possession.

When we lose relationship (or health as relationship), we become unrelated and dissociated. That is possession. Possession isn't some other entity coming into us. That is an old idea. It is a symbolic way of saying it. Most fundamentally, possession is the experience of the “I”. The experience of oneself as separate is possession because now you are possessed of yourself.6

You are not related. That is why the Tibetans talk about possession as an ecological issue. If you start cutting trees down, you disturb the spirits that live in the land, and they will possess you. You invoke the wrath of nature. The Tibetan medical texts say that epidemics arise from environmental destruction. By devastating the natural environment, we create epidemic diseases. We provoke the wrath of nature. We become possessed by viruses. Our whole gut-brain axis becomes a form of dysbiosis rather than an ecological intelligence. So this whole thing about healing as relationship is healing as ecology.

I'll give you an example. What you just said reminds me of something my spiritual teacher, Adi Da, talked about, which is that the tree is the most fundamental natural structure in existence, and that the human being is the mobile realization of the tree structure.7 This means our verticality, but also the relationship between Heaven and Earth. The tree is rooted in Earth, and it's open to receiving Heaven through the crown. Adi Da specifies the metaphor by saying that the brain is like a root ball, and that the body is underground. Spiritual awakening is growth above ground, overhead, into the domain of the sunlight, so to speak. I think that metaphor is also quite literal. He is pointing to the structure of the human being and saying that we haven't merely co-evolved with the plant world, we are an evolution of the plant world. We are plants in a mobile consciousness.

We are plants. So it makes sense that we would use them for healing. As you were saying, there are derivatives of serotonin, and I think these are all things science has discovered as a language for this relationship. But it is just the language of ecology and, really, the language of our medicine.

Paul: Yes, what I hear you saying is that cows are vegetables, so it's okay for vegetarians to eat a burger.

Neeshee: <Laughter>. That's right. You have gotten my point.

Paul: I love extending that a little bit, that we are plants, but we're also not just a tree getting up and walking around, but we bring our entire ecology with us. We are talking about the gut-brain connection. We have a whole flora, we call it the gut flora. We have a whole ecology within us. I love the idea that when we lose healthy relationship with the external environment, that reflects in dysbiosis, that reflects in psychosis, that reflects in a loss of healthy relationship on the internal level, which is also in ecology. We take for granted the idea of possession, that there's one “I”, but it is a collective of all sorts of beings that need to be kept in harmony and in relationship.

And if they're not, we see the immediate effects. The more we are in healthy relationships with the external world, that will reflect in our own internal state. For example, brain chemicals are released when we're in healthier relationships, such as oxytocin, serotonin, etc. When we are in a good relationship with the seasonality, the appropriate dynamics are immediately reflected in our internal world. Of course, there are always storms, there is always sickness. These things happen on the inside and out, but those aren't signs of illness. Those aren't signs of a lack of harmony. Those are events that we then need to respond to.

Neeshee: I think that this allows us to look at the phenomenon of neurosis. We can appreciate the neurological component of that. We can also appreciate the psychological component of it and the ecological component of it. Freud used the word “neurosis” to indicate a psychological imbalance. Jung’s definition of neurosis is “one-sidedness”, a partiality of consciousness. So I think neurosis is an interesting word because it targets the zone that you're talking about—the brain, the nervous system, and the way that is a reflection of the plant world—but also the psychological, ecological, and the reality of relationship. If we are one-sided in any way, we are missing the picture of our wholeness in relationship. We're capsulized again.

Paul: One-sidedness was always a curiosity for me as well. What does it mean when there is an excess of joy? We can see mania in the world, but joy seems like such a good thing. Why should we be worried about an excess of joy? It’s helpful to understand that through the lens of brain chemicals and psychedelics.

Psychedelics in the plant world help to promote a diversity of new neural connections through the root structure and the death of old structures that are no longer in service. So it helps to cleanse old patterns, it helps to promote new, healthy patterns of relationship.

However, to ingest psychedelics to continue to be in a state of constant joy would not support long-term harmony. That will become too partial. It will become too one-sided without the other side of really drawing those roots down. Whatever these new connections are, we have to establish them. If we discover some new insight, making sure we can bring that out into the world and bring that into relationships and enact that in a way that becomes more visible, more solid.

A lot of the fear I hear people talking about with psychedelics is psychosis, neurosis. The relationship between internal and external is a really important aspect of health. We need to be connected to our internal world, but we also need to be connected to our external world. When we favor only one, we create partiality that can lead to disharmony.

Neeshee: I think that this points to the age-old exploration of the relationship between schizophrenia and mystical states of consciousness. The original idea of schizophrenia is a loss of vital contact with reality. That is the original psychiatric definition. I think that is accurate, but at the same time, it has been observed that the schizophrenic experience shares features with religious experience, with mystical experience. Yet, the schizophrenic is not relating to those experiences in a way that could produce realization, but they're having transpersonal experiences, even though they're actually in a pre-personal condition. Psychosis shares features with mystical phenomena, such as Kundalini.8 You can exploit the nervous system in the higher centers of esoteric physiology and have these experiences.

That is the question of integration. Psychosis is the inability to integrate these experiences, to bring them back into the ego structure. Now I'm using ego in a psychological sense, not as the “I”, but as the medium of relational connectedness. You take psychedelics and you have this ego dissolution, but it's not from doing Spiritual practice. It has no context. You are given access to something real, but it's not necessarily usable.

That is why I think psychedelics need a context. Like anything, they need a therapeutic context. This is one reason I'm in favor of MDMA, because it doesn't dissolve the ego structure. It actually brings ego integrity in the sense of bringing you into a somatic relationship with yourself, and it has a strong relational element.

I think that is more the zone of healing than having strong visionary experiences or ascended experiences. Maybe we don't need to go to Heaven. We need to have an alchemical flow between Heaven and Earth. If we look at the illness of our day, we are really not in our bodies. How powerful would it be to really be able to feel like you're in your lower dantian,9 that it is the center of gravity, that the hara is the centrifugal area of the vital force, somatically? To be able to relate to the world and other people from that place of centeredness and embodiment. Not as a self, but as a functional unit.

MDMA, because of what it engenders, is anti-possession. It is pro-relationship and pro-ecological. LSD and psilocybin, obviously, they're useful, but they're also very unpredictable, and they are really taking you into the transpersonal. If we are going to go to the transpersonal, we need to make sure we've really established the interpersonal. You can't just blip into the transpersonal when you haven't even come into relationship to your body, to your environment.

Paul: That reminds me of what Carl Jung said in his introduction to The Secret of the Golden Flower10. He says that the greatest mistake that any Western practitioner can make is to forsake their own epistemological underpinnings to pursue some mystical other experience. And related to that, he says that the goal is not to have visions of light, but to enter into the darkness and illuminate it, which is what you're talking about—going into our body, this place that we don't have a relationship with, it seems dark and scary and unknown. If we can bring illumination to that, that is more valuable than its pre-personal envisioning of these beings of light and whatever else might be that can't do anything if we can't bring that then into our body. That is like reestablishing the connection with our true epistemological underpinning, so to speak. Where are we? Who are we really in the world? If we can illuminate and inhabit that, then I think that gives access to the ability to potentially access these higher states of visionary experience. But there's nothing to do with them if you can't bring them back down.

Neeshee: It's a search to escape the body. Spirituality has been built around that in certain traditions. For example, the Kundalini tradition is about that. That is the goal—to raise the life-force to the point that you merge into a higher realm of subtlety. It’s a visionary realm. It also has a formless component when you reach the highest of the high. The idea is very much to subordinate the body to that. My bias is more towards the Daoist sense of yoga, in which you appreciate that everything needs to come down first. If you're going to practice the microcosmic orbit, first, the vital force comes into the dantian. First, everything flows down into the body. You are anchored in the dantian.

Only when the dantian is full can you circulate up the spine. Even then, the idea isn't entirely to leave the body and to establish yourself in a higher consciousness. It is to circulate. That is the secret of the golden flower. It becomes a complete flow in the circuit of the body. Honestly, that is what I experience when I do Qigong. That is what I experience when I'm with patients. And that is what I try to be. That is what I mean by the vital force and the flow of it being health. I want to feel that I'm in the microcosmic orbit. That is what is keeping me alive. It’s also an alchemical and Spiritual process. For me, MDMA amplifies that very mechanism and process. It's a tonification of the microcosmic orbit, rather than a shooting up of the Kundalini. We need somatic therapies—acupuncture has an advantage here.

Paul: When you said the “ego structure”, I had misheard you as saying “eco structure”.

Neeshee: That's a good mishearing.

Paul: Either one works!

Thinking about this web of relationship and also bringing things back into the transpersonal and psychedelics: when there is an environmental stressor on grasslands, grasslands are mostly held together in part by psilocybin mycelium, and they release psilocybin into grasslands when there's an environmental stressor, which promotes diversity of root growth. It even promotes the synthesis of novel chemicals to respond to environmental stressors. So it promotes a whole new way of relating that some plants might experience while others don't. When that experience happens, that is like the individuation process. That is creating a new kind of being who is capable of new things. Whether psychedelics are involved or not, that is potentially how all diversity of life occurs, through different responses to environmental stressors, different creative solutions that all life (including plants, human beings, bugs, and minerals) brings new responses, new adaptations to the environment.

That creates this beautiful diversity. If we're keeping that to ourselves or are not able to share that, then it dies with us, it goes away. But if we're able to put that back into the environment, whatever experience, whatever adaptation we have synthesized, to send that back into the root structure, to send that back into our community, to share that promotes the diversification, which we know is health in so many ways. It also promotes the ability to heal others.

I think that's a really necessary component of finding our own calling—both what we have to offer, but also how what we offer to the world is so much determined by the illnesses, by the stresses, by the ways that we encounter the world. That is something that we can only impart if we're willing to have access to a community, to a place to share that back with one another. We're existing in a world where homogenization is becoming so much the norm, where things are dying off, everything's becoming you know—

Neeshee: Mono.

Paul: Sterile. Mono and sterile. This diversification that needs to happen again can even start on the individual level, recognizing the value in our own challenges and struggles and illnesses. What we've learned from that being something that is more than just a personal process. It's something that we can and should be sharing with each other.

Neeshee: What you're saying points to the fact that the human process is one in which we have a responsibility for everything that we're related to, especially the natural world, and that we should be stewards of the world. We have this alchemical ability within us, as you said, to synthesize something novel, to increase diversity, and in a certain way refine it in our own bodies and put it back out in a way that serves its generation.

I'm reminded of an exchange between Terence McKenna and Sasha Shulgin, where Terence was going on about how the plant psychedelics are where it's at because they're natural, and things that aren't natural don't have a history of intelligence. They don't exist in a morphogenetic field that these plants have accumulated through generations of use. He says these synthesized chemicals are soulless. Sasha Shulgin was in the audience when Terrence McKenna said that, and he responded, “Terrence, I'm as natural as they come”. Which I think is such a great remark for somebody who synthesized so many novel compounds that were, in many regards, plant derivatives. Just that idea that “I'm as natural as they come” is so true. The human being is as natural as it comes—what we can synthesize in our relationship to nature, is the most natural thing that there is.

Paul: The last thing to tag onto that is, in doing some research, I saw that there were studies where people would introduce to a mycelium colony a novel chemical that didn't exist anywhere in nature. And by introducing it, the mushroom would begin to synthesize a parallel chemical. So, again, as natural as it comes. Things come from everywhere, and the more diversity there is, the more that gives us the opportunity to have a natural response, to develop that ability to create our own natural reflection and resonance with that.

Neeshee: I think that's beautiful.

Paul: Well, this has been so much fun. I've learned a lot, and I just really appreciate talking to you. Thanks for taking the time, Neeshee, to share this conversation.

Neeshee: Likewise, Paul. I really enjoy our conversations and I always learn a lot. I think it's a good dialogue to be engaged in, as a kind of invocation of health and healing and of our purpose.

Paul: I feel really enlivened and called to my own purpose through these conversations, and I hope people who listen or read feel the same, that it resonates with their own purpose to go out and heal themselves in the world and to do so in a way that's full of joy and community.

Introduction: Psychedelic-Assisted Therapy and the Consciousness Revolution

My writings thus far have been focused on the intersection between medicine, psychology, and astrology. With “LSD and the Alchemical Opus of Humanity”, I am initiating a series of essays that examine the medicinal value and mysterious nature of psychedelic substances. These writings represent the fruition of a long gestation period, fulfilling a motive that began twenty years ago when I first read Aldous Huxley’s essay, “The Doors of Perception”.

As always, the central concern of my writing remains therapeutic. I have chosen to write about LSD in particular, rather than the traditional and culturally-accepted plant medicines such as psilocybin mushrooms, ayahuasca, mescaline, etc. because LSD has a uniquely Western and human heritage. While traditional plant medicines have an established history of ceremonial use in indigenous cultures, LSD was born in the West in the twentieth century in the hands of a chemist. Twenty years later, LSD brought the mysticism of the East to the West and brought Westerners to the East.1

LSD straddles the divide between tradition and innovation, East and West, nature and synthesis. Plant medicines are given to us whole from the plant kingdom, but LSD is the consequence of chemistry and, as I propose, of alchemy. The alchemical attitude positions the human being in a unique relationship with nature—not only in reverence of nature but also as its steward. Perhaps the great endowment of the human being is neither an improvement upon nature nor a search for its molecular replication. Rather, the human being is handed the gift of craft, held in sanctity, and honed in consciousness.

This essay should not be misconstrued as a universal recommendation to ingest LSD. In addition to being a deeply individual matter, the use of psychedelics requires profound consideration, education, and preparation. The appropriate use of any medicine depends on a complex arrangement of individual and environmental factors (or “set and setting”). Hofmann himself lamented the use of LSD as an inebriant, advocating instead for its therapeutic use. As a natural chemist, Hofmann’s original intention was to synthesize an analeptic medicine from ergot alkaloids (which have a history of medical use). In modern medical language, an “analeptic” drug is a “restorative” drug that stimulates the central nervous system. In traditional terms, analeptic medicines are classified as “rejuvenatives” or “tonics”. The discovery of LSD’s psychoactive properties were an “accidental” revelation of a new spectrum of therapeutic effects.

Given its powerful psychic effects, Hofmann believed that LSD should only be used by psychologically stable adults in a therapeutic setting. The original monograph for LSD from Sandoz Laboratories recommends its use in “analytical psychology” and psychiatry. LSD-assisted psychotherapy has been further explored in the clinical work of Stanislav Grof and its process is also detailed in Blewett’s Handbook for the Therapeutic Use of Lysergic Acid Diethylamide-25: Individual and Group Procedures. Published in 1959, Blewett’s text details the clinical use of LSD and gives structured guidance for the therapist administering it to individuals or groups. In the first chapter, Blewett describes the value of LSD and gives a hopeful portrait of its use in LSD-assisted psychotherapy:

The great value of LSD-25 lies in the fact that when the therapeutic situation is properly structured the patient can, and often does, within a period of hours, develop a level of self-understanding and self-acceptance which may surpass that of the average normal person. On the basis of this self-knowledge he can, with the therapist’s help, clearly see the inadequacies in the value system which has underlain his previous behavior and can learn how to alter this in accordance with his altered understanding.

So sweeping a claim must, upon first reading, seem like nonsense but a growing number of people have come to accept it as undeniable fact. These are the people who have tried the drug on themselves and on their patients. They are convinced that within the next two or three decades LSD-25, will be by far the most common adjunct to psychotherapy. They feel too that since the psychedelic experience can lead to a very high level of self-understanding, and since self-understanding is the key without which the doors to interpersonal, intergroup or international understanding can not be opened, its use as a catalyst in the development of better human relations will become almost universal. To reject the views of this group as being too extreme without investigating the matter seems a remarkably unscientific attitude. The fact that those who have tried it feel that it offers astonishing possibilities would, in itself, seem to be sufficient reason for a thorough testing of the claims made.2

Yet, the aftermath of American counterculture and the resultant stigma around “drugs” left LSD to the winds of history, where its therapeutic potential in medicine and psychology remains shrouded and untapped. However, plant-based entheogens are now gaining acceptance in the current renaissance of psychedelic therapy. Healthcare professionals with a naturalistic orientation find it easier to advocate for their use. But the naturalistic bias misses the mark of an alchemical purpose.

As a substance that stands between binaries, LSD beckons an alchemical perspective, a synthesis of opposites. What stands between the poles holds the possibility for their transformation. LSD catalyzed the consciousness revolution that fused East and West, natural and synthetic, biosphere and noosphere, medicine and spirituality. This consciousness revolution is not polarized—it is Realized. The fire to be forged is in our hands.

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I. Hofmann, Paracelsus, and the Alchemical Tradition

Albert Hofmann was born in Basel, Switzerland in 1906, where he pursued a career in natural chemistry. In 1938, Hofmann was researching the medicinal use of ergot alkaloids at Sandoz Laboratories when he discovered and synthesized LSD. Hofmann’s revelation initiated a revolution in human consciousness, the fruits of which are still burgeoning today. While a scientist by profession, Hofmann’s orientation to his craft is best understood in the context of the alchemical tradition, which is the ancient predecessor of modern chemistry.

Visionary artist, Alex Grey, places Hofmann within the alchemical tradition of the sixteenth-century Swiss alchemist, Paracelsus, and posits LSD as the coveted “philosopher’s stone”:

On St. Albert’s shoulder blade is a portrait of Paracelsus, the Alchemist of Basel, 500 years ago, who is credited with founding modern Chemistry, yet his alchemical goal was to discover the Philosopher’s Stone. Alchemy was the art and science of the transmutation of the elements, like turning lead into gold and the identification of the soul of the alchemist with the chemical transformations as a metaphor of their journey to enlightenment. Modern Chemistry took the psyche and mystery out of the material weighed and measured world, reducing the world to a heap of atoms. LSD brought psyche back, front and center to the chemical material world. That is partly why I believe that LSD is the Philosopher’s Stone, the discovery of which, also in the town of Basel, is the result of an alchemical process put in motion by the great Paracelsus.3

Grey has a substantial basis for pointing to Paracelsus—not only are Hofmann and Paracelsus both Swiss, but Hofmann mentions Paracelsus several times in his book, LSD: My Problem Child. Separated by a few hundred years in history, Hofmann and Paracelsus share much more in common than region and profession—they were both mystics in their own right. Hofmann makes the first mention of Paracelsus in the opening pages of his book, recounting the famous Paracelsian adage, “the dose makes the poison”:

With such a highly potent substance as LSD, the correct dosage is of paramount importance. Here the tenet of Paracelsus holds true: the dose determines whether a substance acts as a remedy or as a poison.4

In “LSD Experience and Reality”, Hofmann discusses the value of meditation practice and quotes a phrase from Paracelsus that describes the Divine nature of Creation:

It could become of fundamental importance, and be not merely a transient fashion of the hour, if more and more people today would make a daily habit of devoting an hour to meditation, or at least a few minutes. In consequence of a meditative penetration and broadening of our natural-scientific worldview, a new, deepened reality-consciousness would certainly evolve, which increasingly would become the common heritage of all humankind. This could form the basis for a new spirituality, which would not be based on belief in the dogmas of various religions, but rather on perception through the "spirit of truth." What is meant here is a perception, a reading and understanding of the text at first hand, "from the book that god's finger has written" (Paracelsus), from the Creation.5

What does Paracelsus mean by “the book that god’s finger has written”? The full passage appears in Paracelsus’s Liber Azoth Sive De Ligno Et Linea Vitae. Written in 1590, the text is a mystical exploration of Kabbalism and its relationship to alchemy. In the opening verse, Paracelsus writes:

Whoever desires to know the secrets of all occult things should seek them nowhere else but in the Lord God, for the reason that no one can better reveal all secrets to the seeker than He who is the originator of all secrets and arts, both heavenly and mundane.

One must first draw attention to the book in which the letters of the secrets are clearly written for all to see and understand, and one can discover everything one may wish to know written by the finger of God in this very book . . . All other books are but dead letters in comparison with this book if it be read properly. Man alone is this book in which all secrets are written; but the interpreter of this book is God.6

Paracelsus asserts the Divine as the revelatory source of esotericism and art. The book of secrets, written by the finger of God, is a metaphor for Creation itself. Hofmann was enamored of this phrase from Paracelsus, as he features the quotation again in two more essays. In a passage from “The Transmitter-Receiver Model of Reality”, Hofmann comments:

Paracelsus, the great physician, natural scientist, and philosopher of the Renaissance—to whom radio and television were completely unknown—employed another metaphor to illustrate this fact. He called the Creation a book, written by the finger of god, from which we must learn to read.7

Following in the footsteps of Paracelsus, Hofmann is placing chemistry as an alchemical and natural art, endowed with the sanctity of Divine Order. This illustrates the influence of Paracelsus on Hofmann, not only in the context of alchemy but also in the realms of philosophy and mysticism.

The most curious connection between Paracelsus and Hofmann raises several intriguing questions: What is the relationship between alchemy and chemistry? What is the philosopher’s stone? Is the alchemical art purely natural or does it also include synthesis?

II. Alchemy, Amrita, and the Philosopher's Stone

Materiality, Spirituality, and the Alchemical Attitude

Alchemy appears to be a lost art in the modern day. As Grey noted, the esotericism of the alchemical art has been lost to merely materialistic chemistry. In “Security in the Natural-Scientific Worldview”, Hofmann criticizes the materialistic view of reality as being incomplete:

It is essential to realize that the one-sided belief in the natural scientific worldview rest on a monumental mistake. Everything that it contains is quite true, nevertheless it constitutes but half of reality, only that part which is material and quantifiable. Lacking are all the spiritual dimensions of reality, which are neither physically nor chemically tangible, and to which belong the essential features of all living beings. These must be integrated into a complementary half of the natural-scientific worldview, such that our worldview embraces the complete, living reality to which humankind and its spirituality quite clearly belongs.8

It is clear from this passage that Hofmann viewed chemistry as a natural science that describes only the material aspect of reality. Hofmann’s worldview transcends and includes the material-chemical view by also accepting the spiritual “half” of reality. This outlook is entirely per the Paracelsian view of alchemy as a simultaneously material and spiritual art. It is a mysterious paradox that the LSD chemical would function as a profound revealer of the spiritual half of reality. But as Hofmann illustrates, the material and the spiritual are not diametrically opposed to each other but are complementary aspects of a total reality. As the alchemical adage warns: “Beware of the physical in the material”.

Alchemy is, on the one hand, a natural art, but it is also an opus contra naturum. This paradox brings us to the essence of the alchemical attitude. Paracelsus summarizes this apparent contradiction in his description of alchemy as a sacred art:

The generation of all natural things is twofold: one which takes place by Nature without Art, the other which is brought about by Art, that is to say, by Alchemy….9

Paracelsus viewed alchemy as the divine endowment of humankind, a necessary and gifted unfolding of nature itself that nature cannot itself develop. The human being thus has a sacred purpose, a “great work” to accomplish. Paracelsus elaborates on this point in his definition of an alchemist:

Nature is so careful and exact in her creations that they cannot be used without great skill; for she does not produce anything that is perfect in itself. Man must bring everything to perfection. This work of bringing things to their perfection is called "alchemy." And he is an alchemist who carries what nature grows for the use of man to its destined end.10

Alchemy is thus a work against nature that also fulfills natural laws, bringing “everything to perfection”. Paracelsus posits that what nature provides is even purposed for this opus, this “destined end”.

In his writings on alchemy, James Hillman spoke directly to this alchemical attitude:

Although the work is always stated as an opus contra naturum (a work against nature), it was of course a following of nature, guided by nature, instructed by the book of nature . . . Thus the best statement for summarizing the alchemical attitude is from Ostanes, whom Jung cites frequently: “Nature rejoices in nature: nature subdues nature: nature rules over nature”.11

By referencing the “book of nature”, Hillman draws our attention once more to Hofmann’s beloved phrase—Creation as the “book written by the finger of God”. It is Creation itself that holds the secrets of transformation, that instructs the alchemist’s work. Therefore, alchemy is necessarily a work based on natural laws but which nature cannot bring to completion via its own agency—the instrumentality of the human being is required. This makes alchemy a natural art that transcends what Hillman terms the naturalistic fallacy.

The Nature of Synthesis and the Naturalistic Fallacy

The naturalistic fallacy harkens back to the Romantics and Transcendentalists, who saw in nature itself the unspoiled aura of creation. Their reverence for nature contraindicated any form of human intervention in the natural process. This controversy continues today in the debate over natural vs. synthetic medicines. In the context of entheogenic substances, arguments are made for natural plant-based entheogens (psilocybin mushrooms, mescaline, DMT, etc.) and against plant-derivatives (LSD) or synthetic chemicals (MDMA, Shulgin’s chemicals).

Herbal medicines are also subjected to alchemical processing before being administered for therapeutic use. Asian medical traditions feature numerous poisonous substances in their pharmacopeia—from aconite to mercury—all of which are purified before being considered medically usable. The medical tradition itself has an alchemical premise—the human hand holds the harvest and makes it medicine. Asian medical systems practiced medicine as a natural art, assigning cure to nature’s province but its administration to human hands. Medicine is thus alchemical because it intervenes in nature on the basis of natural laws and for the sake of a natural cure.

With the advent of scientific materialism, medicine (like chemistry) has been confined to nothing more than matter itself. In the last two hundred years, Western medicine has dispensed with the book of nature and, thus, with the art of medicine. When medicine ceases to be an art, then its laws are no longer natural, and its instructions are no longer embedded in Creation itself. Nature is no longer the revered source but the exploitable opportunity, no longer a development but a mockery by man. Pharmaceutical medicines seek to manipulate nature and, thereby, propose a strictly human agency for cure. Therefore, not all synthesis is equal, and not all practice is artful.

The term synthesis comes from the Greek sunthesis, derived from suntithenai, “place together”. In chemistry, synthesis refers to “the production of chemical compounds by reaction from simpler materials”.12 These chemical compounds are thus regarded as “synthetic” materials. In alchemy, synthesis refers to the progressive refinement of a material substance, as in the Ayurvedic, Tibetan, and Siddha medical traditions of metallurgy. This refinement can also be seen in homeopathic preparations, where a material substance is progressively purified via dilution until only an energetic imprint remains. Synthesis is purification, a substantial catharsis, a cleansing of outer sheaths that reveal an inner essence. Synthesis is the fundamental law of alchemy and is described by Paracelsus as a course of seven stages, known as the Magnum Opus (or “Great Work”). He considered the ultimate goal of alchemical synthesis—its magnum opus—to be the philosopher’s stone.

LSD is a product of synthesis, but it is also naturally derived. As a “semi-synthetic” substance, LSD stands at the threshold between nature and humanity—a chemical key of plantar essence, opening the doors of a new medical perception.

The Spirit of the Stone: Elixir as Entheogen

Jung, the Swiss founder of Analytical Psychology, was deeply influenced by the alchemical tradition of Paracelsus. In Psychology and Alchemy, he interprets the stages of alchemy as an image of the individuation process:

The alchemical opus deals in the main not just with chemical experiments as such, but with something resembling psychic processes expressed in pseudochemical language.13

Jung described the psychic process of individuation in alchemical terms as the “four in one, the philosophical gold, the lapis angularis, the aqua divina”.14 On this basis, Jung posits a four-fold Self, or quaternity, in correspondence with the four elements of alchemy (earth, fire, water, and air). The four-fold Self is an ontology of being-in-wholeness that Jung likens to the “god within”, a phrase that echoes the ancient concept of ātman and the modern neologism, entheogen. Individuation can thus be interpreted as an entheogenic process.

Following in Jung’s footsteps, James Hillman explores the psychological connotations of the philosopher’s stone:

The alchemical lapis was considered a ripened metal, a seed that had been brought to maturity by the opus; it was the made soul. But, before it could be ripened, it had already been in nature for a long, long time, the Stone Age (not the Golden Age of Hesiod). The stone has time in it, filled with time, it must of course be a lapis philosophorum, a philosophical stone, stone as philosopher, stone of wisdom. Because its body condenses in one solid object the history of time, it can overcome the conditions of history and serve as elixir to give longevity.

The philosopher’s stone is regarded as an elixir of immortality. Paracelsus describes it as the alkahest, or “universal solvent”. The philosopher’s stone is also described in Hindu and Buddhist texts as cintāmaṇi, the “wish-fulfilling jewel”. The concept of an elixir of immortality is known in Indian Yoga as amrita, literally “nectar of immortality”.15 Indian myths describe amrita as a spiritual substance created by Vishnu’s churning of the ocean of milk and subsequently bestowed by him as a gift to the gods. Amrita is thus the “food of the gods”, but this essence is not merely edible—it circulates in the spiritually-awakened body. The twentieth-century Spiritual Realizers, Ramana Maharshi and Adi Da, describe amrita as the spiritual substance of Reality and posit its location in a channel known as amrita nadi, which connects the heart to the crown of the head.

However, Adi Da cautions against projecting the elixir of immortality into an “edible deity”, describing the “native alchemy” of the body instead:

Just as today certain rejuvenating herbs are fairly commonly known, herbs were also used in the ancient cultures in conjunction with symbols and archetypes and religious observances. Modern researchers are trying to discover what the ancient herbs might have been. One of the famous herbs, or "Edible Deities," of ancient times was called "soma." There are a number of plants and mushrooms that have tentatively been identified as this soma. But the true soma is not anything external to the body-mind, not a plant or a mushroom or an elixir or one's own urine.16 The true soma is like the true practice—it is native to the body-mind. It is a substance secreted in the brain core by the glandular centers associated with the pituitary gland when the body is in a purified, harmonious condition, and its energies are rightly polarized.

. . . We are healthy not only because we take the right dietary substances into the body, including rejuvenating herbs and the like, but primarily because we are enlivened by direct Communion with the All-Pervading Life, and that direct Communion, associated with right psycho-physical disciplines, enables the body to secrete chemical substances as well as distribute bio-energetic force to every area of the body, from head to toe, toe to crown. This alchemy, native to the body itself, rejuvenates us, keeps us in good health, keeps us capable of growing, and keeps every area, every aspect, every dimension of the body-mind alive . . . This nectar pervades the entire body and enlivens it. . . .17

If the elixir of life is native to the body-mind, then substances and practices only serve as catalysts and amplifiers of this higher chemistry. This truth points to an entheogenic basis for rejuvenation—whether catalyzed by psychedelics, yoga, meditation, breathwork, etc. The word “catalyst” comes from the Greek kataleuin, which means “dissolve”. Thus, a catalyst is also a solvent, an alkahest for the spirit. The philosopher’s stone is thus a universal solvent, a solve et coagula that dissolves the ego and reveals Reality.

Ergot Fungus and the Forbidden Fruit

LSD is derived from ergot, a fungus that naturally grows on grasses and cereals. Ergot has been found in anthropic sites in the Middle East dating back 18,000 years, in Europe dating back 5,400 years, and in sclerotic fragments in a Spanish temple dating to the fourth-second century BCE. Textual evidence also proves its historical use: Chinese texts dating to 1100 BCE describe the use of ergot in gynecology;18 in 350 BCE, the Parsees described ergot as “noxious grasses that cause pregnant women to drop the womb and die in childbed”;19 in 600 BCE an Assyrian tablet described ergot as a “noxious pustule in the ear of grain”.20 Ergot has been with us since time immemorial, but can it bestow the gift of longevity?

Hofmann was sensitive to the alchemical nature of LSD as an opus contra naturum and raised this question in a letter to Ernst Jünger. In the following excerpt, Hofmann ponders the role of LSD and the “transgression of limits”:

On the other hand, I must admit that a fundamental question very much preoccupies me, whether the use of these types of drugs, namely of substances that so deeply affect our minds, might not in fact represent a forbidden transgression of limits.21

Hofmann then quotes Goethe:

Were the eye not sunny,
It could not behold the sun;
If the power of the mind were not in matter,
How could matter perturb the mind?22

Following this quotation, Hofmann concludes:

This would correspond to the cracks which the radioactive substances constitute in the periodic table of the elements, where the transition of matter into energy becomes manifest. Indeed, one must ask whether the production of atomic energy likewise constitutes a forbidden transgression of limits.

A further disquieting thought concerns free will, and follows from the possibility of influencing the highest intellectual functions by traces of a substance.

The highly active psychotropic substances like LSD and psilocybin possess in their chemical structures a very close relationship to substances intrinsic to the body, which are found in the central nervous system and play an important role in the regulation of its functions. It is therefore conceivable that through some disturbance in the metabolism of the normal neurotransmitters, a compound like LSD or psilocybine be formed, which can determine and alter the character of the individual, his worldview and his behavior. A trace of a substance, whose production or nonproduction we cannot control by our will, would then have the power to shape our destiny.23

Hofmann echoes Adi Da’s understanding when he notes the nature of LSD as a similimum—a substance whose structure is in likeness to “substances intrinsic to the body”. Therefore, a similimum is also in resonance with the anatomy and physiology of the human being. This understanding forms the principal axiom of homeopathy— similia similibus curantur—“like cures like”. The fact that LSD is active at trace dosages invokes another homeopathic maxim: the more dilute the substance, the more potent its therapeutic action. Dilution is dissolution, and what remains is a final kernel of purity and potency.

Hofmann was destined to synthesize LSD and to thereby present us with the alchemical quandary once more, of forbidden fruits and transgressed limits,24 of an opus contra naturum that evolves and revolves upon natural laws nonetheless. Therefore, synthesis is not merely artificial but an artificium—hand-crafted from the wild. Synthesis requires a mixing of contra, just as the human being is a fusion of Heaven and Earth, an opus of nature whose opposable thumbs enact an awakening, anew and again.

III. The Astrology of LSD Synthesis and Bicycle Day

Paracelsus correlates the seven stages of alchemical work with the seven planetary bodies, and astrological observations permeate his medical, philosophical, and alchemical writings. Since we know the dates of Hofmann’s first synthesis of LSD (and re-synthesis five years later), we can examine the astrological “birth” of LSD, its “father”, and what these patterns reveal about the mysterious medicine.

The First Synthesis: November 16, 1938

Hofmann was born on January 11, 1906, in Basel, Switzerland. He first synthesized LSD on November 16, 1938, in the city of his birthplace at the age of thirty-two. In Vedic astrology, specific ages are associated with the maturation of planetary energies—the notion being that it takes time for different planetary energies to ripen in our consciousness. Thirty-two is the age of Mercury’s maturation, and as Hofmann is a Gemini Ascendant,25 Mercury is his Ascendant Lord. The Ascendant corresponds to the physical body and its life-path. The Ascendant is the inner basis of vocation, the first house of the unique individual. The timing of Hofmann’s discovery reveals his synthesis of LSD as a key that unlocks the door of his destiny. Hofmann’s natal Mercury is placed in Sagittarius, giving him a philosophical and mystical nature. Hofmann is someone who desires to articulate the Truth, to give it voice, to be a messenger.

On November 16, 1938, we see several remarkable transits and conjunctions:

• Chiron conjunct natal Neptune in Cancer (within 1°)

• Pluto conjunct natal Moon in Leo (exact degree)

• Jupiter conjunct natal Ketu in Aquarius (within 2°), Jupiter conjunct Midheaven in Aquarius (within 2°)

• Rahu conjunct Sun and Venus in Scorpio (within 12°)

• Ketu conjunct Uranus in Taurus (within 2°)

The close conjunction of Chiron and Neptune on the day of Hofmann’s first synthesis of LSD reveals a therapeutic discovery. The placement of this conjunction in Cancer illustrates the healing nature of the synthesis and its value for the inner emotional landscape. The Moon rules Cancer—and the Moon is known as soma because it governs the essences that ripen plant medicines and the vital essences that rejuvenate the human body. Cancer is also the sign of Jupiter’s exaltation,26 revealing that Hofmann’s synthesis has a spiritual import for the growth and expansion of human consciousness.

Another consequential dynamic in Hofmann’s natal chart is the Uranus-Neptune opposition. Richard Tarnas notes that “many crucial figures who subsequently mediated the spiritual, philosophical, and imaginative awakenings of the twentieth century” were born under this opposition.27 In particular, Tarnas describes Hofmann’s birth, the discovery of LSD, and the cosmic epiphanies of psychedelic culture as a consequence of the Uranus-Neptune dynamic:

Recalling that the discoverer of LSD, Albert Hofmann, was born during the preceding Uranus-Neptune opposition, we can also recognize the characteristic themes of the Uranus-Neptune complex during this period in the introduction of psychedelic experimentation as a path of psychological change and spiritual epiphany, as reflected in Aldous Huxley’s The Doors of Perception of 1954, Humphrey Osmond’s coining the word psychedelic (“mind-manifesting”) in a letter to Huxley in 1956, Gordon Wasson’s meeting the Mexican curandera Maria Sabina and publishing his influential Life magazine article on the sacred psilocybin mushroom in 1957, and the beginning of Stanislav Grof’s research on LSD in Prague in the same years through which he developed an approach to psychotherapy that integrated psychoanalysis with an openness to transformative mystical experience.2829

Tarnas’s observation of the macro-cycle of Uranus-Neptune accurately describes the revelatory and revolutionary import of Hofmann’s LSD synthesis. He also notes the influence of this transit a century prior in the Romantic period, an artistic and intellectual movement characterized by an ecological awakening.

Pluto’s conjunction with Hofmann’s natal Moon is notable as an exact conjunction and, therefore, as the strongest transit. Pluto is a Dionysian and Shiva-like energy—it wrathfully destroys the vestiges of egoic life. In conjunction with the Moon, Pluto initiates a rapid deconstruction of one’s inner life on emotional and psychological levels. The Pluto-Moon conjunction takes place in the sign of Leo, where Hofmann’s natal Rahu is also placed. While the conjunction is 19° apart from Rahu, this is still a significant placement. As the north node of the Moon, Rahu represents the evolutionary urge of the native’s consciousness. In Leo, this urge is uniquely individual, highly creative, and designed for leadership.

Jupiter is in close conjunction with Hofmann’s natal Ketu and Midheaven in Aquarius. The natal placement of Ketu in proximity to the Midheaven shows that Hofmann’s career has a karmic and past-life basis and that, over time, his energies will shift from vocation to a focus on inner cultivation. However, Ketu and the Midheaven are both in Aquarius, showing Hofmann’s purpose in the world as a water-bearer. Indeed, the Aquarian image is interpreted in Vedic astrology as the image of Vishnu offering amrita to the gods. Thus, Hofmann’s synthesis has tremendous value for uplifting the collective consciousness in outer cultural forms and its inner unconscious forms. Jupiter’s transit in Aquarius empowers Hofmann’s karmic hermitage and vocational destiny, enabling him to make a discovery that changes the future of human culture.

Transiting Rahu is conjunct transiting Sun and Venus. I mention this transiting conjunction not only because of Rahu’s evolutionary nature but also because the conjunction takes place in Scorpio. It only makes sense that Hofmann would first synthesize LSD while the lunar nodes are abiding in the Scorpio / Taurus axis. Scorpio is the sign of inner transformation and has the strongest alchemical connotations of all the twelve signs. The scorpion gives us the image of poison and the importance of its transformation into nectar. Scorpio is a solve-et-coagula, the place of the putrefactio that ultimately renders the elixir of life. Taurus gives us the image of stability, an anchor for the spirit, and a place where the doors of perception are fully opened. Taurus is the most sensual sign of the zodiac, Venus-ruled and uniquely engaged with the perceptual world. Taurus also points to the aesthetic nature of the LSD experience.

Transiting Ketu is in a tight conjunction with transiting Uranus. This conjunction suggests a profound karmic revolution, a deeply fated breakthrough. Hofmann was meant to synthesize LSD on this day, and in doing so, he fulfilled a soul-motive that would catalyze a counterculture revolution.

Although Hofmann first synthesized LSD on November 16, 1938, he would not understand the full import of his discovery until he re-synthesized it five years later. On the mysterious intuition that led him to pursue a re-synthesis in 1943, Hofmann writes:

The solution of the ergotoxine problem had brought fruitful results, here described only briefly, and had opened up further avenues of research. And yet I could not forget the relatively “uninteresting” LSD-25. A peculiar presentiment—the feeling that this substance might possess properties beyond those established in the first pharmacological studies—induced me, five years after that first synthesis, again to produce LSD-25, so that a sample could be given to the pharmacological department for further tests.30

Hofmann says that he repeated the synthesis of LSD on April 16, 1943, when his “work was interrupted by unusual sensations”. In a report written to Professor Stoll, Hofmann reports an “intoxicated-like condition, characterized by an extremely stimulated imagination”, in which he “perceived an uninterrupted stream of fantastic pictures, extraordinary shapes with an intense, kaleidoscopic play of colors”.31 This was the first time a human being had ever ingested LSD, though Hofmann had done so unintentionally and sought to understand how it had even happened. Seeking to understand whether his experience had been caused by LSD, Hofmann intentionally ingested the substance three days later, on April 19, 1943. This day is now commemorated as “Bicycle Day”, named for Hofmann’s legendary bicycle ride home from the laboratory while experiencing the effects of LSD. Hofmann wrote extensively about his experience that day, summarizing his findings in the following paragraph:

This self-experiment showed that LSD-2532 behaved as a psychoactive substance with extraordinary properties and potency. There was to my knowledge no other substance known that evoked such profound psychic effects in such extremely low doses, that caused such dramatic changes in human consciousness and in our experience of the inner and outer worlds.33

Re-synthesis and First Trip: April 19, 1943

On Bicycle Day, April 19, 1943, we see more interesting transits:

• Nodal Return: Rahu and Ketu are transiting their natal placements in the Leo/Aquarius axis

• Ketu conjunct Midheaven in Aquarius (within 1°)

• Rahu conjunct Chiron in Leo (exact degree)

• Sun Exalted in Aries and conjunct 12th house (exact degree)

• Mars return in Pisces and conjunct Saturn (within 1°)

• Jupiter Exalted in Cancer and conjunct Neptune (within 9°)

• Neptune on the cusp of Virgo/Libra

• Uranus conjunct Venus and Saturn in Gemini (within 7°)

Hofmann is now thirty-six years old, the age of Saturn’s maturation. As it takes the lunar nodes eighteen years to move through the zodiac, age thirty-six also represents the second nodal return of one’s life. The lunar nodes represent the karmic and evolutionary trajectory of the psyche. When they return to their natal placements, the native experiences a “re-tracing” in consciousness that is potentially a rebirth. Hofmann’s second nodal return coincided with his initial ingestion of LSD and, thereby, his discovery of its unique psychic effects.

Yet, the nodal return is only the beginning of the story. Since Hofmann’s natal Ketu is placed near the Midheaven, Ketu’s return re-empowers this conjunction in real-time, allowing this natal characteristic to fully manifest and emerge in consciousness. Hofmann’s description of LSD as his “problem child” is noteworthy for this reason, as his discovery became a karmic burden in light of its use as an intoxicant in the counterculture movement and resultant status as an illegal substance.

The wound of Hofmann’s problem child is evident in the exceptionally exact conjunction of Rahu with Chiron in Leo. Chiron plays an important role in Hofmann’s life, in both the synthesis and re-synthesis of LSD. On the day of his first synthesis, Chiron was conjunct Hofmann’s natal Neptune in Cancer within 1°. Now, on the day of his first conscious ingestion of LSD, Chiron is exactly conjunct with transiting Rahu and conjunct within 1° of Hofmann’s natal Rahu. Thus, Chiron’s conjunction with Rahu has two levels, owing to the simultaneous reality of Hofmann’s nodal return. In Hofmann’s natal chart, Chiron is placed alongside Ketu in Aquarius and, therefore, is on the natal nodal axis. On Bicycle Day, Chiron is placed along the nodal axis during the nodal return, where it conjuncts Rahu on two levels and forms a very dynamic opposition to Hofmann’s natal Chiron in Aquarius (where it is also being influenced by natal and transiting Ketu).

The significant influence of Chiron, both natally and in transit, reveals the therapeutic and healing nature of Hofmann’s discovery. It also shows that LSD would have a deeply healing impact on Hofmann’s own life and, by virtue of the Aquarian placement, on humanity as a whole.

The Sun is Exalted in Aries and exactly conjunct with the 12th house cusp. The Exaltation of the Sun shows the peak of creative energy and the quality of initiation. This is in dynamic relationship to the 12th house, which is seen in Vedic astrology as a moksha house. In an inscription to Hofmann, Aldous Huxley described LSD as the “moksha medicine”.34 This transit illustrates Hofmann’s ingestion of LSD as an initiatory event and his subsequent discovery of its effects as a spiritually liberating discovery. However, the 12th house also connotes imprisonment, a fate that would fall upon Timothy Leary, the prophet of LSD, and ultimately upon LSD itself when it was made illegal and classified as a “Schedule I” drug.35

Mars, the ruler of Aries, is placed in Pisces, where it transits Hofmann’s natal Mars. This is a Mars return, and while not as uncommon as a nodal return, it remains significant. The natal placement of Mars in Pisces indicates a drive for spirituality and a highly intuitive personality. The return of Mars in Pisces re-awakens Hofmann’s natal placement, bringing it to consciousness. Hofmann’s motivation to re-synthesize LSD was based on a “peculiar presentiment”, and his ingestion of it led to a spiritual experience, the likes of which he had once known in childhood.36 Mars is also in close conjunction with Hofmann’s natal Saturn (within 1°). Mars and Saturn have an interesting dynamic: Mars exalts in the Saturn-ruled sign of Capricorn, but Saturn debilitates in the Mars-ruled sign of Aries. This paradoxical dynamic creates a mutual tension between Mars and Saturn. For this reason, Mars-Saturn conjunctions are often interpreted as causing accidents. As Hofmann recounted, his first ingestion of LSD on April 16 was accidental.

Jupiter is Exalted in Cancer, bringing more energetic focus in the Water signs (as we just saw with Mars in Pisces). In Vedic astrology, the three Water-element signs—Cancer, Scorpio, and Pisces—are associated with the priestly state of consciousness and the aim of moksha. Thus, we see a concentration of energy in Water and Fire elements, the interaction of which is archetypally alchemical.

We will remember that Chiron was placed in Cancer during Hofmann’s first synthesis of LSD, and now Jupiter has reached its climax there. Jupiter moves through the zodiac in twelve years, and therefore, it moves into a new sign of the zodiac every year. Hofmann’s re-synthesis and first psychedelic experience is thus synchronous with the exaltation of Jupiter in Cancer. As Jupiter governs the growth and expansion of consciousness, its quality is most characteristic of the psychedelic experience. Jupiter is also conjunct Neptune, and Chiron was conjunct Neptune during Hofmann’s first synthesis. The conjunction of Jupiter and Neptune is spiritually empowering and points again to the mystical basis of Hofmann’s experimentation.

The movements of Neptune have a curious relationship to Hofmann’s synthesis and re-synthesis. On November 16, 1938, Neptune was transiting Virgo. On October 3, 1942, Neptune entered Libra before beginning a retrograde cycle back into Virgo on April 17, 1943—one day after Hofmann’s accidental dosing of LSD. On April 19, when Hofmann intentionally took LSD for the first time, Neptune was in Virgo again, the same sign it was in when he first synthesized it five years prior. Indeed, retrograde cycles lead to a “re-tracing” of events and, in this case, complete a “magic circle” for Hofmann.

We must note that the Sun and Jupiter are exalted, and Mars is influentially present. According to Chinese five-element theory, Jupiter corresponds to the Wood element, Mars corresponds to the Fire element, and the Sun represents the quality of yang. Hofmann’s experience takes place in the springtime when the Wood element is naturally predominant. Wood corresponds to the Liver/Gallbladder network, and its aperture is in the eyes. Therefore, the Wood element is the source of visionary experience and perspective. The Fire element is closely associated with the spirit because it corresponds to the Heart, the organ regarded as the “seat of the spirit”. The influence of the Fire element is evident in the spiritual quality of Hofmann’s LSD experience.

Uranus is conjunct Venus and Saturn, and all three are transiting Hofmann’s Ascendant and natal Pluto. The natal conjunction of Pluto with the Ascendant is a notable quality of Hofmann’s chart and confers upon him a markedly Dionysian character and purpose. The transit of Uranus in Gemini is critical in Hofmann’s first house, a house most intimately connected with his physical body, constitution, and life path. Outer planet transits are particularly notable when they cross the first, fourth, seventh, or tenth houses—the most personal houses of self, home, marriage, and vocation. Uranus transmits a Promethean impulse, a revolutionary breakthrough in consciousness, a stealing of fire that is a transgression of limit and an opus contra naturum. Fire and flower in hand, we craft a new essence and elixir. Hofmann’s re-synthesis and first ingestion of LSD occurring under this transit signify the most significant personal breakthrough of his life.

Uranus is also in a dynamic relationship with Pluto on two levels—it is transiting Hofmann’s natal Pluto and is squaring the transit of Pluto in Leo. Tarnas discusses this Uranus-Pluto cycle at length, crediting it with catalyzing the counterculture era of the 1960s. On the transit of Uranus in the first house, Robert Hand writes:

The transit of Uranus through the first house is predominantly a drive for freedom. To others it may seem to be a period of pointless rebellion. And indeed, in terms of your old life, you may be acting quite irresponsibly, but if you feel very strongly the need to break free, it is a sign that the change is overdue.

As you change your way of handling the world, you will become open to experiences that you would never have allowed before, and your life may take on a whole new outlook. Certainly this is a good time to explore new kinds of awareness or to encounter astrology, yoga, human potential studies and other consciousness-expanding techniques. The avenues to new perception are open, and if you allow yourself to receive it, you will gain new tools for your future life.37

Hand’s analysis rings true for this period in Hofmann’s life, characterized as it was by experimentation with LSD and openness to the psychedelic experience it engenders.

IV. Eleusis and Eleutherios

What, then, do we make of this odorless, tasteless, porous, and potent chemical? Is it a drop of immortal nectar or a decanting of godless games? What exactly is this mysterion?

Hofmann’s research into ergot alkaloids led him to the Eleusinian mysteries of ancient Greece. The Eleusinian mysteries were secret religious rites associated with the cult of Demeter and Persephone and held in the city of Eleusis. Hofmann writes:

The Mysteries of Eleusis, which were celebrated annually in the fall, over an interval of approximately 2000 years, from about 1500 BC until the fourth century of our era, were intimately connected with ceremonies and festivals in honor of the god Dionysus. These Mysteries had been founded by Demeter, the goddess of agriculture, in appreciation of the recovery of her daughter, Persephone, who had been abducted by Hades, god of the underworld.

. . . The climax of the yearly ceremonies, which began with a procession from Athens to Eleusis lasting several days, was the concluding ceremony, the initiation, which took place by night. The initiates were forbidden under penalty of death to divulge what they had learned or beheld in the innermost, holiest sanctum of the temple, the telestrion (goal).

. . . In accordance with traditional knowledge, during the climactic ceremony, the initiates imbibed a potion, the kykeon. It is also known that the ingredients of the kykeon were barley extract and mint. Religious and mythological scholars like Karl Kerényi . . . with whom I have collaborated on research into this mysterious potion, are of the opinion that the kykeon constituted an “hallucinogenic” drug. That would make understandable an ecstatic and visionary experience of the Demeter/Persephone myth, in both a comprehensive and timeless reality, as a symbol of the cycle of life and death.38

Jonathan Ott notes that Hofmann’s publication The Road to Eleusis: Unveiling the Secret of the Mysteries (1978), co-authored with Gordon Wasson, “conjectured that the kykeon might have acted through an LSD-like aqueous extract of ergot of barley, containing the psychoactive, water-soluble alkaloids”.39 Fielding notes that Hofmann’s thesis has since been corroborated by archaeological findings:

Decades after Wasson, Ruck, and Albert presented their thesis in The Road to Eleusis, archaeologists found ergot in a Greek ceremonial cup and the dental cavities of an initiate to the Mysteries at Mas Castellar, Spain, in a Temple devoted to Demeter and Persephone.40

This understanding is further confirmed by Carod-Artal in the journal article “Psychoactive plants in ancient Greece”, where the author writes:

There is evidence supporting the hypothesis that ergot could have caused the Eleusinian visions. The purple colour of the fungus is associated with Demeter. Furthermore, the ear of grain was the symbol of the Eleusinian Mysteries. An example of Greek pottery from the 5th century BCE shows Demeter and Triptolemus holding a sheaf of grain infected with ergot. Traces of C. purpurea have also been found on the interior of a vessel in a sacred shrine dedicated to Persephone.41

Earlier, Hofmann noted that the Eleusinian Mysteries were associated with Dionysus and the recovery of Persephone from the underworld. Both Dionysus and Hades lend a Plutonian quality to the rites. Indeed, Pluto is archetypally responsible for the experience of “ego-death” on all levels. This observation leads me to characterize LSD as a liberator, or in the Greek language, Eleutherios. The name Eleutherios is an epithet of Dionysus, Eros, and Zeus. In the twentieth century, this name was invoked again by Adi Da, who adopted it as one of many appellations. One of the principal texts in Adi Da’s vast corpus is tilted Eleutherios: The Only Truth That Sets the Heart Free. The text is structured aphoristically and opens with the following verses:

Truth Is the Ultimate Form (or the Inherently Perfect State) of “Knowledge” (if mere knowledge becomes Truth-Realization).

Truth Is That Which, when fully Realized (and, Thus, “Known”, even via the transcending of all conditional knowledge and all conditional experience), Sets you Free from all bondage and all seeking.

Truth Is Eleutherios, the Divine Liberator.42

If LSD serves the function of revealing Truth through perception of the Real, then the entheogenic experience sets the Heart free. Perhaps the opus of humanity is not only alchemic but equally entheogenic—a god within a drink or a drop, our birthright a watery palindrome reflected in a looking-glass, beholding our conscious destiny in the peaks and vales of spirit and soul. Then, with open eyes of infinitude in the Heart’s heaven-born gaze, our lips confess the nectarous gospel, the liberating opus of humanity: Reality Itself Is Truth Itself Is the Beautiful Itself.

The essay is structured in four parts. Below, I give an overview of each part, followed by the table of contents. I hope this aids the reader in navigating the length and structure of the argument.

As always, thank you for reading!

—Neeshee Pandit

Overview

My thesis examines the meaning of “possession” in Chinese medicine, Freudian and Jungian psychology, and the Worsley school of five-element acupuncture. I examine the meaning of “psyche” in psychology and acupuncture and ultimately posit acupuncture treatment as a form of psychotherapy.

In Part One, “Demons Dragons, and Ghosts”, I trace the history of demonology in Chinese medicine, the philosophical transition from early shamanism to Han-dynasty naturalism, and the origins of acupuncture in exorcism.

In Part Two, “Acupuncture and Psychoanalysis”, I explore the relationship between acupuncture and psychoanalysis, Freudian and Jungian interpretations of possession, and the nature of acupuncture as a psychological therapy.

Part Three, “Possession in Five-Element Acupuncture”, represents the core of the thesis. Here, I outline my theory of acupuncture as psychotherapy, meridians as the somatic unconscious, and treatment as an alchemical event. I then proceed to give a clinical portrait of possession—its etiology, diagnosis, pathogenesis, and treatment. I explore treatment as exorcism, the practitioner as shaman, and the meaning of resurrection. This section closely examines the revival of possession treatment by J.R. Worsley and its clinical applications.

Part Four concludes with a reflection on demon vs. daemon, the nature of character and calling, and the role of acupuncture in the vale of soul-making.

Table of Contents

I. Demons, Dragons, and Ghosts: A Brief History of Demonology in Chinese Medicine

1. Demonology and Systematic Correspondences

2. From Demons to Nature

3. Possession as Parasitism

II. Acupuncture and Psychoanalysis

1. Possession, Superego, and Western Psychiatric Disorders

2. Spirit and Psyche

   1. Anima/Animus

3. Possession as Complex

III. Possession in Five-Element Acupuncture

1. Possession and the Somatic Unconscious

2. Definition and Etiology

3. Diagnosis and Pathogenesis

4. Treatment: Seven Devils, Seven Dragons

   1. Treatment as Exorcism

      1. Possession as Obsession

      2. Instrumentality: Practitioner as Medium

   2. Internal Dragons

   3. External Dragons

   4. Soul-Loss and Resurrection

IV. Demon or Daemon: The Vale of Soul-Making

NOTE: J.R. Worsley’s influence on my views is obvious. My intention has been to honor and positively explore his teachings (alongside those of Freud, Jung, Hillman, and others) while adding creative insights of my own. Thus, the views presented here are entirely my own and do not—necessarily or officially—reflect the views of J.R. Worsley, the Worsley Institute, or the Worsley lineage.

I. Demons, Dragons, and Ghosts:
A Brief History of Demonology in Chinese Medicine

The belief in spirits stems from the indigenous worldview of an animated world, where the boundaries between dreams and waking reality are fluidly perceived. Spirit-possession and soul-loss are perhaps the original pathologies imagined by human beings for which a healing intervention was needed. Shamanism was the original form of therapeutic concern, expressed as a need for protection (or “immunity”) from invasive influences.

In Chinese medicine, invasive pathogenic factors are examined with a multidimensional phenomenology. The human being is composed of physical, mental, and spiritual levels of existence. Thus, invasive pathogenic factors are seen on a spiritual level as spirit-possession and soul-loss; on a mental level as astrological factors; and on a physical level as climatic factors, parasites, and communicable diseases.

Interest in the treatment of possession pathologies has been rekindled throughout the history of Chinese medicine, both at home and abroad. In the seventh century, Sun Simiao (ca. 581 – 682  CE) resurrected Zhou dynasty notions of demonological disease with herbal prescriptions and acupuncture protocols. By the twentieth century, Chinese medical notions of possession had mingled with European thinking, especially the tradition of psychoanalysis. Possession was notably re-imagined by J.R. Worsley (1972 – 2003 CE), who interpreted the illness in psychological terms as a loss of agency and taught two acupuncture protocols for its treatment.

As a concept, possession represents the nexus of culture and medicine, where a cultural notion is sublimated into a medical concept. A medical understanding of possession must attend to its cultural context while viewing possession with the pathologized eye of the profession. In order to understand possession, we have to examine multiple disciplines—animism, shamanism, demonology, anthropology, and psychology.

Possession has been a central concern of medicine since antiquity. The Chinese term for medicine, yi, has etymological links to possession. This linguistic link reveals that possession has been a central concern of medical practice since antiquity. Through analyzing the characters in yi, Jarrett (2005) concludes that it “contains the notion of piercing the skin with arrows similar to piercing the air with lances to chase away the demons.” (p. 39). This interpretation is shared by Unschuld (2010), who also traces the origins of acupuncture to the spears used to drive away demons. The etymological and conceptual link between medicine (yi), possession, and acupuncture is thus well-established in the history of Chinese medicine.

From a medical view, the existence or non-existence of spirits is a peripheral concern because the phenomenon of belief in spirits is consequential in itself. In medicine, we look to interpret the nature of an object based on its subjective value—does it promote health or not? Therefore, while possession may conjure sentiments of antiquated superstition, we will see how these ancient ideas are resurrected in modern acupuncture therapeutics.

Demonology and Systematic Correspondences

Belief in spirits as causative agents of disease dates to the earliest periods of Chinese history. According to Harper (1998), “The idea that demons and the spirits of the dead sicken the living is in evidence in the earliest Chinese written records, the Shang inscriptions on bone and turtle shell (ca. thirteenth to eleventh century B.C.)”. (p. 69). Naturalistic notions of health and disease from the Han dynasty classics eventually replaced the etiology of demons. However, the idea that health is dependent on exogenous entities (whether spirits or climatic factors) persists throughout Chinese medical history. If demons are the cause of illness, then the nature of illness is a form of a spirit-possession, and the method of treatment is exorcism. Such demonological notions of health existed long before the advent of systematized medicine and meridian theory.

The Shang dynasty was conquered by the Zhou in 1046 BCE. With its nearly eight-hundred-year reign, the Zhou period remains the longest historical epoch of Chinese history. Unschuld characterizes the transition from the Shang to Zhou dynasty as a shift in attitudes toward shamanism—a movement away from ancestor worship and toward demonic spirits. Unschuld (2010) writes that the “belief that demons could cause illness is widely documented in the literature of the later [Zhou] period”. (p. 37). The healers who healed possession were known as wu, a character that depicts two female shamans dancing. Wu were magical healers who used ritual chants, herbal medicines, talismans, and ritual fumigations to exorcise demons. By the first millennium, demonology was evidenced as distinct illnesses attributed to malevolent spirits:

Demonic medicine is based on the beliefs that illness is caused by the actions of evil spirits. Typical views of demonic medicine, present in the literature of the first millennium A.D., are expressed in the following conditions defined as illness: “struck by evil” (chung-o), “assaulted by demons” (kuei-chi), “possessed by the hostile influence of demonic guests (kuei-k’o wu-chi), and “possessed by the hostile” (chu-wu). (Unschuld, 2010, p. 36)

From Demons to Nature

Demonic possession is often misconceived as a pre-medical concept. However, demonic possession has long been part of the systematized nosology of Chinese medicine into the seventeenth century. Harper argues that demonic concepts of illness were re-translated (but not truly replaced) by naturalistic concepts of illness in the Han Dynasty classics. He groups demonic and naturalistic concepts within the broader nosology of “ontological pathology”: an illness that exists in the form of an entity—whether demon, season, element, wind, vapor, heat, cold, etc. (Harper, 1998, p. 69). The pathogen changes, but the concept perseveres through all its guises. Therefore, the root of demonology is not merely a belief in the existence of spirits, but the paradigm of external pathogenic factors.

By the time of the Han Dynasty (206 BCE – 220 CE), Chinese medical philosophy began to embrace a rational and empirical theory of health and illness that left demonology behind. Unschuld refers to this philosophy as “the theory of systematic correspondences”, which views the human being as a microcosm of the natural world governed by natural laws. Health was no longer freedom from spirit-possession, but a rhythmic synchronization with the cycles of nature, seasonally and astrologically. Calendrical notions of health arose in tandem with agrarianism—health became a matter of “cultivating” the inner landscape of the body, now “irrigated” by a network of channels. Thus, calendrical patterns became circulatory perceptions—health is circulation, disease is blockage.

In the Tang Dynasty (618 – 907 CE), the concept of spirit-possession was revived by the Chinese scholar-physician, Sun Simiao. One of the earliest prescriptions for the fumigation of demons is found in Sun Simiao’s treatise on alchemy, Dan Jin Yao Jue (“Great Secrets of Alchemy”). In a later compendium, the Qian Jin Yi Fang (“Supplement to the Prescriptions Worth a Thousand Gold”), Sun Simiao listed thirty-two herbs regarded as being effective against demons. Unschuld (2010) quotes a passage from Sun Simiao that illustrates his view of illness as a “central thesis of demonic medicine”, in which Sun Simiao expresses the “conviction that illness and suffering are natural and unavoidable”, clearly illustrating the influence of Daoism and Buddhism in Sun Simiao’s worldview. (p. 43). Unschuld argues that Sun Simiao’s view runs counter to the predominating medical theory of the time—the theory of systematic correspondences—which placed the agency of health in individual behavior following natural laws. Unschuld (2010) states that this theory is based on “the belief that illness could be avoided by means of an appropriate way of life”, a point of view that he sees as an extension of Confucianism. (p. 43).

By the Ming Dynasty (1368 – 1644), ritual shamanism conflicted with the dominant philosophy of Confucianism and was thus regionally contained. Despite this tension, we see an overlap of values between shamanism and Confucianism in ancestor worship and filial piety. However, the shamanic focus on the individual remained a critical divergence between Confucian ideals of the collective. During this time, the Ming dynasty physician, Zhang Jiebin, “enumerated demonology as the thirteenth medical specialty in his 1624 work, the Classic of Categories”. (Eckman, 2007, p. 215). Eckman (2007) also notes the tripartite etiological model of Chen Yan (1121 – 1190 CE), a Song dynasty physician who placed demonic possession in a “miscellaneous” category, “meaning it was neither an exogenous nor endogenous cause of disease”. [1] (p. 215).

Possession as Parasitism

The concept of possession has also mingled with the concept of parasitic pathogens.[2] For the Chinese, parasitism is conceived in demonological terms as a “worm spirit” (ku). Fruehauf translates the concept of ku into a syndrome (“Gu syndrome”) encompassing a range of autoimmune pathologies. He approaches Gu syndrome as a “forgotten clinical approach for chronic parasitism.” Fruehauf remarks that Gu syndrome has been “dismissed” and “submerged” in modern clinical practice where it is largely regarded as “superstitious.” However, Fruehauf translates the demonology of Gu syndrome into a modern “clinical approach that may provide an answer to the many invisible ‘demons’ that plague patients in the modern age, namely systemic funguses, parasites, viruses, and other hidden pathogens.” (Fruehauf, 1998).

A “hidden pathogen” is an invisible etiological factor. Earlier, we grouped demonic and naturalistic ideas of illness as “ontological pathologies”—etiological factors as entities. Within this, we can now identify a subcategory—“invisible pathologies”. Demons, wind, and parasites are all invisible pathogens. What is hidden is invisible, and what is invisible is unconscious, a point we will examine later. For now, we can situate the pathology of possession in three forms: (a) an ontological pathology, (b) an invisible pathology, and (3) an unconscious pathology.

Fruehauf re-interprets Gu syndrome in modern terms via a range of physical, neuromuscular, and psychological symptoms: chronic diarrhea, alternating diarrhea and constipation, explosive bowel movements, abdominal bloating, muscle soreness, wandering body pains, cold night sweats, depression, frequent suicidal thoughts, fits of rage, confusion, visual and/or auditory hallucinations, epileptic seizures, and the sensation of “feeling possessed”. Elaborating on the nature of Gu syndrome as a “possession syndrome,” Fruehauf (2008) writes:

I found chronic parasitism reflected in a huge area of classical Chinese medicine that was called Gu zheng, or Gu syndrome, which essentially means “Possession Syndrome”. Gu is a character that is very old, perhaps one of the oldest characters in the Chinese textual record altogether, since it is a hexagram in the Yijing. It is literally the image of three worms in a vessel. This to me is one of those strokes of brilliance that you find in the symbolism of the ancient Chinese—that they recognized 3000 years ago that chronic parasitism can cause psychotic or psychological symptoms. Because of the psychological, emotional, and perhaps spiritual implications of this term, Gu, when the Chinese standardized the classical record for the much simplified barefoot doctor approach of the TCM system in the 1950’s, they threw out lots of complicated and ideologically problematic topics, and obviously this “Possession Syndrome” was one of the first ones to go.

While he associates Gu syndrome with chronic parasitism, Fruehauf notes that the Chinese concept of Gu is not analogous or reducible to the Western understanding of acute parasitic infection. In the following passage, Fruehauf (2008) elaborates on the nature of Gu syndrome as a shamanic category of illness, a recalcitrant form of disease, and gives some modern examples:

Not all cases, that, from a classical perspective, would be diagnosed as Gu syndrome, would be patients with parasites, and vice-versa, not all people with a positive parasitic test from the Western perspective would be accurately diagnosed as Gu. Gu syndrome actually means that your system is hollowed out from the inside out by dark yin forces that you cannot see. This not seeing often includes Western medical tests that come back negative for parasites. So from a certain perspective, AIDS falls into this category, with body and mind being hollowed out from the inside out, without knowing what is happening. Gu syndrome originally meant “black magic.” To the patient it felt as though someone had put a hex on them, without anybody—whether it’s the Western medicine community or, in ancient times, the regular Chinese medicine approach—being able to see what was really going on.

Gu syndrome is caused by a dark yin pathogen. As we noted earlier, the idea of a “hidden” pathogen already has psychological resonances. As examples of dark yin pathogens and the pathologies they cause, Fruehauf cites the spirochetal pathogen of Lyme disease along with conditions of chronic fatigue syndrome, fibromyalgia, dysentery, and viral infections such as herpes. Fruehauf (2008) ultimately differentiates between two subcategories of Gu syndrome—brain Gu and digestive Gu:

Brain Gu is “caused by chronic viruses that target the nervous system (such as coxsackie, herpes, and in some cases HIV), or spirochetes (especially Lyme disease and its coinfections), or other exotic pathogens causing chronic forms of meningitis, malaria, leptospirosis, etc. A lot of patients in this category are diagnosed with fibromyalgia these days. There may be symptoms of body pain, anxiety, depression, headaches, eye aches, visual hallucinations, strange sensations that there is something stuck in their head, etc. Very often these people have been put on Prozac or some other kind of anti-depressant, which often doesn’t work . . . Digestive bloating, pain, and altered bowel movements are the primary signs of Digestive Gu. But both of them will have a certain degree of mental symptoms, therefore the “demonic possession” label—the Digestive Gu less, and the Brain Gu more.

Drawing a parallel between the neurological pathogenesis of brain Gu and demonic possession, Fruehauf classifies possession (with its mental-emotional symptomology) as a nervous system disorder, recalling the ancient observation of epileptic seizures as “possession”.

The treatment of Gu syndrome consists of herbal prescriptions, acupuncture/moxibustion, dietary advice, and qigong exercise. Fruehauf compiles the recommended acupuncture treatment from “Master Ranxi’s Treatise on Expelling Gu” from 1893. The recommendations include several points, including Sun Simiao’s thirteen ghost points:

• vigorous garlic moxibustion on BL-43

• moxibustion on BL-13, ST-36, and Guikuxie (Demon Wailing Points)

• acupressure with menthol preparations on the thirteen ghost points

• selective needling of the thirteen ghost points

The thirteen ghost points are GV-26 (Demon Palace), GV-16 (Demon Pillow), GV-23 (Demon Hall), CV-24 (Demon Market), LU-11 (Demon Evidence), LI-11 (Demon Leg), ST-6 (Demon Bed), SP-1 (Demon Pile), P-7 (Demon Centre), P-8 (Demon Hole), BL-62 (Demon Path), CV-1 (Demon Hideout) for males / extra point (Yumen) on the head of the clitoris for females, M-HN-20 (Demon Envelope) under the tongue. These points are given “demon” names in the ghost point schema but are given other names in classical sources, as documented by Deadman (2016) and Worsley (2004).[3] (See Appendix B). Unschuld elaborates on the origins of the thirteen ghost points and the roots of acupuncture in shamanism:

In his Ch’ien-chin i-fang, Sun Ssu-Miao cited the physician Pien Ch’io, purportedly active in the fifth century B.C., and indicated the exact location of thirteen puncture points for the needle treatment of demon-related illnesses. The . . . puncture points bear such revealing names as “demon camp,” “demon hearts,” “demon path,” “demon bed,” or also “demon hall”. The needles used to penetrate a “demon heart” in the treatment of an individual were analogous to the spears used by exorcists at the time of Confucius . . . . (Unschuld, 2010, p. 45)

Unschuld comments that it is possible that early uses of acupuncture “originally had purely demonic medicine functions” (Unschuld, 2010, p. 45). The thirteen ghost points are used to treat possession, but we have to examine what possession meant to Sun Simiao. As Jarrett (2005) points out, “definitions of all illness are culturally determined”. (p. 45). In Sun Simiao’s time, possession was associated with symptoms we now understand as mental illness and epilepsy, as Jarrett (2005) remarks, the thirteen ghost points are used “in modern times for the treatment of manic disorders and epilepsy”. (p. 45).

Thus, the demonology of early Chinese medicine has been translated into a psychological paradigm of illness and treatment which Fruehauf asserts is clinically evident and efficacious in pathologies of the gut-brain axis. Modern understandings of the microbiome shed more light on the matter, especially when we consider that neurotransmitters are synthesized and regulated in the gut by intestinal microbiota. Therefore, psychological pathologies manifest in a bi-directional relationship to the gut: microbiome imbalances are reflected in mental-emotional pathologies and psychological disorders are reflected in digestive pathologies. While parasitism can be understood in relationship to the gut-brain axis, it can also be interpreted purely in psychological terms, as Ellenberger (1970) does when he refers to possession as “intrapsychic parasitism” (see Appendix D) and as Worsley does when he links possession with mental and spiritual vulnerability.

II. Acupuncture and Psychoanalysis

In “The Psychologizing of Chinese Healing Practices,” Barnes describes how Western practitioners of Chinese medicine began incorporating psychotherapeutic ideas and explanations into medical theory, where “blocked” emotions and suppressed memories became part of the explanatory model of illness. Barnes (1998) explores how practitioners have cross-pollinated psychotherapy and acupuncture, with some practitioners blending the two and others maintaining strict distinctions:

For [some] practitioners, acupuncture is a plausible alternative to psychotherapy. Indeed, they feel it is possible to perform interventions for psychological problems that would eliminate the need for psychotherapy altogether. Still other practitioners, who distinguish between what one does as an acupuncturist and as a psychotherapist, choose not to blend the two.

The relationship between acupuncture and psychotherapy became a subject of consideration when Chinese medicine entered the European imagination, where acupuncture mingled with psychoanalysis, homeopathy, and naturopathy. The five-element tradition transmitted by J.R. Worsley brought acupuncture into the realm of psychological concern in the 1970s in the UK and America. The American psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Leon Hammer was another significant figure who consciously sought to bridge the two disciplines, regarding Chinese medicine and acupuncture as “congenial therapeutic partners”. (Hammer, 2010).

Worsley and Hammer were influenced by the available literature of the time, including Lawson-Wood’s Five Elements of Acupuncture and Chinese Medicine (1965), regarded by Eckman as the “first coherent book about acupuncture in English” (Eckman, 2007).[4][5] The text presents the basics of Chinese medical theory, emphasizing five-element theory. In a chapter titled “Psychological Considerations,” the authors mention Hahnemann’s Organon and the possibilities of a marriage between acupuncture and homeopathy. They also mention Georg Groddeck, a contemporary of Freud who explored the nature of psychosomatic illness.[6] The authors advocate for acupuncture treatment as an alternative to psychoanalysis:

When we talk about treatment of the psyche we are not thinking in terms of modern Western psychiatry, with use of shock and drugs, but rather in terms of psycho-analysis and systems derived therefrom. (Lawson-Wood, 1965).

Speaking only four years after Jung’s passing, the authors refer to the psychoanalytic tradition as a whole before presenting two key points:

(a)  Psycho-analysis, from the patient’s point of view, can be an expensive way of having the psyche treated; especially as a beneficial outcome is by no means certain.

(b)  Whether it is in the end successful or not, psychoanalysis seems inevitably to be accompanied by a great deal of emotional torment and distress. (Lawson-Wood, 1965).

With these practical concerns (expense and torment), the authors make a case for the capability of acupuncture to treat the psyche more effectively, more reliably, and with significantly less expense:

It is desirable, therefore, that there should be some alternative and far speedier method of resolving analytical problems. But this does not mean to say that we regard Chinese acupuncture by itself as an alternative to psycho-analysis in all cases; but rather do we intend to convey that a judicious use of Chinese acupuncture points can serve as an extremely useful technique for bringing about more rapid results, without torment, and with greater predictability. (Lawson-Wood, 1965).

We may be inclined to presume that such notions are entirely European in origin. However, the authors continue their thesis by providing classical justifications:

If one wants classical justification for lining psycho-analysis with acupuncture, we draw attention to the passages in the Nei Ching dealing with interpretation of dreams. Several thousand years before Freud the Chinese recognized that dreams represent a mechanism for symbolic wish-fulfillment.[7]

There should be no difficulty in appreciating that any disturbances in the flow and balance of Life-Force, with its two poles YANG and YIN, manifests itself as a disturbance of some degree in both psyche and soma. (Lawson-Wood, 1965).

The authors are referring to several passages from the Nei Jing that discuss pathological dreams. The first mention of dreams is found in chapter seventeen, “Discourse of Vessels and the Subtleties of the Essence,” verses 102-3:

When the yin [qi] abounds,
then one dreams of wading through a big water and is in fear.

When the yang [qi] abounds,
then one dreams of big fires burning.

When both yin and yang [qi] abound,
then one dreams of mutual killings
and harmings.

When [the qi] abounds above,
then one dreams of flying.

When [the qi] abounds below,
then one dreams of falling.

When one has eaten to extreme repletion,
then one dreams of giving.

When one is extremely hungry,
then one dreams of taking.

When the liver qi abounds,
then one dreams of anger.

When the lung qi abounds,
then one dreams of weeping.

When there are many short worms,
then one dreams of crowds assembling.[8]

The passage mentions several types of dreams. The dreams associated with organs reflect elemental and emotional correspondences in the five-element schema. Thus, “when the liver qi abounds, then one dreams of anger”. In the case of the Lung, the corresponding sound (weeping) is given instead of the emotion (grief), “when the lung qi abounds, then one dreams of weeping”. The Kidney is not mentioned by name but is associated with “yin qi” and “dreams of wading through a big water . . . “and fear.” The Heart is also not mentioned by name but subsumed in the category of “yang qi” that “abounds,” causing dreams of “big fires burning.”

“Dreams of crowds assembling” as a result of “many short worms” is a reference to parasitic infection. Dreams “of taking” when “one is extremely hungry” is the classic example of a wish-fulfilling dream. Some dreams simply reflect the pathological condition itself: “when the qi abounds above, then one dreams of flying”, “when the qi abounds below, then one dreams of falling”. Another type of dream reflects the opposite nature of the pathology: “When one has eaten to extreme repletion, then one dreams of giving,” a reference to food retention and the Earth element.

In chapter eighty, “Discourse on Comparing Abundance and Weakness,” dreams are mentioned again. Verse 568-5 states:

It is therefore that
a recession of [the type] being short of qi
lets one have absurd dreams.

In extreme cases, this leads to hallucinations.
(Unschuld, 2016).

Being “short of qi” is defined as qi stagnation in the yang meridians and qi deficiency in the yin meridians. In the following verse, five-element correspondences are referenced again in a dream associated with the Lung:

Therefore,
when the lung qi is depleted,
then this causes man in his dreams to see white items,
to see people executed, with [their] blood flowing in all directions.

When it is its time,
then he dreams of weapons and combat.
(Unschuld, 2016).

In this verse, the corresponding color of the Metal element is represented as the “white items” in the dream. We need only reflect on the potentially sharp and destructive quality of the Metal element to see the significance of the “vision of execution.”[9] “When it is its time” refers to the three months of Autumn in which the Metal element predominates. The chapter discusses dreams resulting from the depletion of liver qi, kidney qi, heart qi, and spleen qi. A concluding verse states:

In all these [cases],
the qi of [one of] the five depots is depleted.

The yang qi has a surplus, while
the yin qi is insufficient.
(Unschuld, 2016).

In other words, these dreams arise when the yin organs become deficient, resulting in overall yin deficiency and yang excess. This is why “dream-disturbed sleep” is generally regarded as a symptom of yin deficiency and/or pathogenic fire. Daoists view the having of dreams as an inherently pathological state, and the ceasing of dreams is symbolic of having transcended the psyche and thus become “immortal”—as Hammer recounts, “some authorities on Chinese medicine believe that a contented spirit does not dream.” (Hammer, 2005).

The dreams referenced in the Nei Jing illustrate a psychosomatic paradigm, with dreams functioning as a link between them. We can only retrospectively consider this to be “psychological” since the systematized discipline we call “psychology” is a nineteenth-century phenomenon, but its subject—the psyche—is universal. The psyche itself precedes nomenclature and tradition. Therefore, the so-called “psychologizing” of Chinese medicine may be a twentieth-century phenomenon of an indigenous medicine in exile, but this is only true in the superficial context of semantics. With its understanding of the pathogenesis of dreams, emotions, and organic imbalances, Chinese medical theory contains a psychotherapeutic paradigm.

Worsley gives diagnostic value to dreams, but cautions against overemphasizing their importance. He writes that a “dream can signify a message from a particular official” and that “such a dream, oft-repeated, may point specifically towards the element in distress which is causing element-related images to disturb the unconscious mind”.  (Worsley, 2012, p. 110)

Possession, Superego, and Western Psychiatric Disorders

Ellenberger (1970) distinguishes between two types of possession: somnambulic and lucid. He notes that in Catholic theology, “possession” refers to the “somnambulic” form, while “obsession” refers to the lucid form, a word he notes “has been adopted by psychiatry”. (Ellenberger, 1970). Worsley thus indicates a psychiatric pathology when he links spiritual deficiency with becoming “possessed by obsessions.” The theme of “obsession” gives us an immediate link to obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). OCD was initially known as “scrupulosity,” a reference to the term “scruples” in religious literature, meaning “obsessive concern with one’s own sins and compulsive performance of religious devotion.” The etymology of “scruples” traces to the Latin scupulum, meaning a “sharp stone” and implying a “stabbing pain on the conscience.” The eighteenth-century French psychiatrist Jean Esquirol described OCD as “monomania” and “partial insanity.” In the early nineteenth century, the French psychiatrist Henri Dagonet described OCD as “the more one tries to discard an idea, the more it becomes imposed upon the mind, the more on tries to get rid of an emotion or tendency, the more energetic it becomes.” In other words, repression is obsession is possession. Dagonet’s description thus conjures the Freudian concept of repression, that what one denies becomes repressed in the unconscious, where it gains strength through compensatory neuroses and defense mechanisms.[10]

In the late nineteenth century, Freud characterized obsessive-compulsive illness as an “obsessive neurosis” (zwangsneurose) arising from a deep inner conflict in the unconscious mind. His phrase is the origin of the modern terminology of “obsessive-compulsive disorder.” Freud viewed obsessive neurosis as a maladaptive pathology fueled by an egoic conflict between the id and superego. As Freud described, the superego is an “ego ideal,” the realm of the conscience, an internalization of parental and societal images, and the repressive force of conditioning.[11] The conflict between the ego and the “ideal” (superego) “reflect the contrast between what is real and what is psychical, between the external world and the internal world.” (Freud, 1960). This confusion between internal and external reality may be a hallmark of possession: the patient cannot access his own mental and spiritual resources (ego) and, in extreme cases, does not know how to function in society (superego). As a result, the patient’s libido (id, psychic energy)[12] remains deeply repressed.

Jung described the superego as an internal moral voice that arises from the anima/animus. He argued that this aspect of the psyche is both “consciously acquired” and “an equally conscious possession”:

The Freudian superego is not, however, a natural and inherited part of the psyche’s structure; it is rather the consciously acquired stock of traditional customs, the ‘moral code’ as incorporated, for instance, in the Ten Commandments. The superego is a patriarchal legacy which, as such, is a conscious acquisition and an equally conscious possession. (Jung, 1970).[13]

We have to note yet another shadow quality of the superego: perfectionism. The perfectionistic drive so often accompanies obsessions that they are practically inextricable. Perfectionism arises from the superego’s internalization of parental and cultural values and the conscience-driven need to fulfill them perfectly. Freud notes that the superego pursues perfection over and against the pleasure and reality principles (which belong to the id and ego, respectively). However, we have to apply this knowledge carefully: not every patient with perfectionistic tendencies is possessed, and not all perfectionistic drives are pathological.

Freud and Jung concluded that obsessive neuroses are a pathology in the unconscious egoic structure caused by a range of repressive reactions to moral, ethical, childish, emotional-sexual, and.or cultural conflicts. Thus, it can be argued that possession (as an obsessive pathology) is necessarily possession by the unconscious superego.

OCD is now woven into the modern colloquial lexicon, where “being OCD” is casually mentioned as a behavioral synonym for “anality.” Of course, the anality of OCD can only serve to bring us back to Freud, who traced many adult neuroses to arrested psychosexual development in the “oral,” “anal,” and “genital” stages of early life.[14] The anal stage spans from ages one to three and concerns the erogenous zone of bowel and bladder elimination. Psychological fixation in the anal stage results in “anal retentive” and “anal expulsive” pathologies. In five-element theory, eliminative pathologies belong to the Metal and Water elements. Whether patients diagnosed with possession also exhibit eliminative symptoms (constipation, diarrhea, nocturia, dysuria, enuresis, etc.) is worthy of further clinical exploration.[15]

From the perspective of psychoanalytic psychology, the treatment of OCD is the classic “talking cure,” whether in the form of Freud’s original “psychoanalysis” or Jung’s “analytical psychology.” Today, cognitive-behavioral models of psychology have become dominant, with treatments consisting of cognitive behavioral therapy and SSRI medications: fluoxetine (Prozac) for seven years and older, fluvoxamine (Luvox) for eight years and older, paroxetine (Paxil) for adults only, sertraline (Zoloft) for six years and older, and clomipramine (Anafril) for ten years and older. (Mayo Clinic, 2023). Other treatments include outpatient and residential treatment programs, deep brain stimulation,[16] and transcranial magnetic stimulation.[17] 

Spirit and Psyche

We must remember that a psychic substance does not and cannot mean one thing
—James Hillman, Alchemical Psychology, 2009.

What the Chinese call shen, the Greeks call psyche. While the term “spirit” has been adopted as a standard English translation for shen, the Chinese concept includes “spirit” and “soul.” The three treasures are expanded into five shen that reside in each of the yin organs:

• The Heart is the seat of shen—consciousness, memory, thinking, and sleep.

• The Lungs are the seat of po—the corporeal soul that animates the body while alive.

• The Liver is the seat of hun—the ethereal soul that wanders outside of the body and survives death.

• The Spleen is the seat of yi­­—intentionality and intellect.

• The Kidneys are the seat of zhi—willpower and wisdom.

The five shen describe the psychological qualities of the organs, illustrating the Chinese vision of organic physiology as a network of communication that integrates the body, mind, and spirit. The five shen are the spirits that naturally possess us.[18] They are the most profound aspect of organ function, the spirit of the physiology, the ghost in the machine.

Anima and Animus

Jung correlates the anima and animus with the hun and p’o, respectively. He writes:

According to our text, among the figures of the unconscious there are not only gods but also the animus and anima. The word hun is translated by Wilhelm as animus. Indeed, the concept ‘animus’ seems appropriate for hun, the character for which is made up of the character for ‘clouds’ and that for ‘demon’. Thus hun means ‘cloud-demon’, a higher ‘breath-soul’ belonging to the yang principle and therefore masculine. After death, hun rises upward and becomes shen, the ‘expanding and self-revealing’ spirit or god. ‘Anima’ called p’o, and written with the characters for ‘white’ and for ‘demon’, that is, ‘white ghost’, belongs to the lower, earth-bound, bodily soul, the yin principle, and is therefore feminine. After death, it sinks downward and becomes kuei (demon), often explained as the ‘one who returns’ (i.e. to earth), a revenant, a ghost.[19]

Jung’s articulation of the anima/animus extends from his notion of the unconscious as a structure of polarities. Every man has a feminine shadow known as the anima, and every woman has a masculine shadow known as the animus. The failure to integrate with these polarized unconscious elements is the source of all neurosis. Jung is drawing on Latin as he often does, where anima means “mind, soul” and animus means “spirit, mind.” Anima is yin, animus is yang; anima is the p’o soul, animus is the hun soul.

Jung discussed anima- and animus-possession as pathological states in which the unconscious shadow engulfs the psyche. One is possessed by the anima or animus, by the p’o or the hun. In this sense, we can interpret the broad category of yin or yang syndromes in terms of anima/animus possession: anima possession is a yin complex, animus possession is a yang complex. Severe possession by the anima or animus may result in the form of possession discussed by Worsley. However, anima/animus possession may also be evident as a Husband-Wife imbalance, Liver-Lung block, or a split within an element.

The Husband-Wife imbalance is a severe block that Worsley considered life-threatening. The basic premise of the block is that the right-hand pulses are stronger in quantity and quality than the left-hand pulses. This pulse picture is interpreted by Worsley as a separation of yin and yang, which is how Chinese medicine describes death. Given the feminine/masculine polarities of the anima/animus, we can surmise a severe conflict between these aspects as a relational crisis (either internal or external).

The Liver-Lung is one of several possible “exit-entry” blocks. This particular block is diagnosed when the Liver pulse (left middle position, deep) is excess relative to the Lung pulse (right first position, deep). Since the Lung follows the Liver in the circulatory flow of the meridian clock, this pulse picture is interpreted as a failure to transfer energy from the Liver to the Lung in the natural circulation cycle (per the meridian clock).[20] We can interpret the Liver-Lung block as a form of animus possession—the deficient Lung pulse shows that the p’o (or anima) is repressed and dominated by the animus (or hun). This would lead us to theorize that the Liver-Lung block is more common in women, but this premise needs further clinical evaluation.

The failure of the integration between the anima/animus can also manifest as a “split within an element”. This split within an element refers to an unequal amount of energy in the paired organs of a single element. When this block is evident, the superficial and deep pulses of the same position will differ in quantity. For example, if the Liver pulse is noticeably deficient in relationship to the Gallbladder pulse, then the paired organs of the Wood element are not sharing energy equally. Since the paired organs of an element are necessarily a yin-yang polarity, the split within an element indicates a defense mechanism destabilizing an element’s polarity. Jung’s definition of neurosis as “one-sidedness” comes to mind, as does Freud’s consideration of “splitting” as a defense mechanism. In the example of deficient Liver / excess Gallbladder, the anima represses the anima. (The association between anima-animus and yin-yang can be made for the remaining organ pairs within each element).

Possession as Complex

A psychoanalytical view of spirits views their existence and perception as a projection from the unconscious. Spirit phenomena are interpreted as a psychological phenomenon, rather than an ontological reality. Thus, possession is re-interpreted as a complex rather than an entity.

In “The Psychological Foundations of Belief in Spirits,” Jung (1969) argues that belief in spirits is itself the result of mental illnesses such as hysteria, schizophrenia, and nervous disorders. In anthropological fashion, he argues that what possesses us is the notion of possession itself. However, Jung’s intention is not to discount the phenomenon of spirit-possession; rather, it is to enfold possession within a psychological phenomenology. Thus, Jung asserts that the belief in and experience of possession results from an animistic consciousness, a participation mystique[21] in which the dream world and physical reality are fluidly merged. Jung (1969) identifies three phenomena in particular as the origin of belief in spirits: (1) “the seeing of apparitions, (2) dreams, (3) pathological disturbances of psychic life”. He describes these three phenomena as “psychic fragments” and places them in the “autonomous complexes” category.

In Jungian psychology, a complex represents an unconscious and thus disconnected aspect of the psyche: “Although the separate parts are connected with one another, they are relatively independent.” (Jung, 1969). What is separated from the whole becomes pathological, and its incomplete view of reality possesses our psyche. Therefore, all that we fail to integrate with becomes a complex of psychic possession.

Through our experiences in dreams, apparitions, and visions, we associate with an aspect of the psyche independent of the waking-state ego. Where do dreams, apparitions, and visions come from? Jung describes all three as an “irruption from the unconscious” in different contexts: dream is a “psychic product originating in the sleeping state without conscious motivation”; visions are “like dreams, only they occur in the waking state”; and apparitions are hallucinations from mental illness where “quite out of the blue . . . the ear, excited from within, hears psychic contents that have nothing to do with the immediate concerns of the conscious mind”. (Jung, 1969).

If dreams, apparitions, and visions are all irruptions from the unconscious, then belief in spirit-possession—and, by extension, the phenomenon of possession itself—is caused by a repression of unconscious material. Jung distinguishes between spirit-possession and soul-loss, correlating spirit-possession with the collective unconscious and soul-loss to the personal unconscious. Indeed, we see this idea in Worsley’s interpretation of possession as a psychic “block,” not as possession by a demonic entity but as possession by the shadow.

III. Possession in Five-Element Acupuncture

In the twentieth century, possession was re-examined by European thinkers. Freud, Jung, Ellenberger, and Worsley each brought forth a new cultural interpretation of spirit-possession as a psychological phenomenon rooted in the unconscious. In particular, Worsley’s presentation of possession represents a critical intersection between nineteenth-century psychoanalysis and classical acupuncture. (See Appendix C). As we encounter Worsley’s concept of possession, we will see how he articulates a theory of possession that leaves behind its demonological past and places it more firmly in a psychological category of illness.

Possession and the Somatic Unconscious

The part of the unconscious which is designated as the subtle body becomes more and more identical with the functioning of the body, and therefore it grows darker and darker and ends in the utter darkness of matter. . . . Somewhere our unconscious becomes material, because the body is the living unit, and our conscious and our unconscious are embedded in it: they contact the body. Somewhere there is a place where the two ends meet and become interlocked. And that is the [subtle body] where one cannot say whether it is matter, or what one calls “psyche.”
—C.G. Jung, Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, 1939.

If possession is a psychological pathology, then its treatment by acupuncture implies the existence of a somatic unconscious. The unconscious offers the meaning-values of interior, hidden, and yin. Therefore, the unconscious is the yin aspect of the psyche, the shadow of the spirit.

The unconscious can be posited as an interior and hidden structure analogous to the meridian system. The meridians function as invisible pathways that link the body's organs, emotions, and spirits, serving as unconscious structures within human physiology. The psyche is thus understood not only as the mind but as a substance in circulation. Meridians are thus the pathways of psychic circulation, a structure of the unconscious, the invisible domain of archetypes, images, and ancestries residing in our bodies. Meridians are interior, invisible, and hidden, but they are also palpable structures capable of being assessed and treated. We once drove demons out of bodies with spears, and now we adjust the psyche with the intention of fine needles.

The vessels of acupuncture are not reducible to arteries, veins, nerves, or pathways of fascial conduction. The vessels of acupuncture are invisible lines that circulate the vital essence known as qi. This is the image of an alchemical vessel—a container, cauldron, rotundum. A vessel is a method of containment. As a jug carries water, the vessels carry the life-force throughout the body, providing a container for qi. We heat the vessels with fire and puncture the vessels with metal to engender an alchemical transformation that is at once physical, mental, and spiritual. Thus, the alchemical vessels of the body are shapes of soul—pathways within which the spirits of libido circulate, containers within which the unconscious is made conscious.

Jung found that his psychological discoveries were best represented in the language of alchemy. In his commentary on The Secret of the Golden Flower, Jung (1962) remarks that “in content it is a living parallel to the psychic development of my patients.” (pp. 86-87). Jung discusses the nature of circulation as a symbol of psychic development, drawing parallels to the image of mandalas. Jung (1962) writes, “This symbolism refers to a sort of alchemical process of refining and ennobling; darkness gives birth to light; out of the ‘lead of the water-region’ grows the noble gold; what is unconscious becomes conscious in the form of a process of life and growth.” (p. 102). Circular movement is the nature of qi—and qi moves in vessels. The meridian structure thus becomes a circumambulatio of psychic circulation. Therefore, it is not so far-fetched to imagine that by puncturing the meridians, we are restoring psychic circulation where it has become stagnant, perverse, rebellious, invasive, or blocked.

Definition and Etiology

Worsley placed possession within the clinical schema of “blocks to treatment”, which he defines as secondary imbalances that prevent treatment efficacy and which therefore must be addressed before the root-treatment of the “causative factor” (C.F.).[22] Worsley describes seven different blocks to treatment. One or more may be present in any given treatment. (See Appendix C.)

If we accept the psyche as a circulatory process, then blocks represent an inhibition, even repression, of this natural flow. If health is circulation, then disease is a block. Stated differently—if health is sufficiency, then disease is insufficiency (or deficiency).

In Worsley’s system, possession is regarded as one of the more severe blocks to treatment. The idea of a possessed patient returns us to the magical context of shamanism and “spiritual” cure, but Worsley’s presentation of possession is less magical and more psychoanalytical. At the outset, Worsley (2012) disavows the demonic and other-worldly connotations of possession, defining it instead as a loss of psychological agency:

To many people, including students of acupuncture, the terms 'possession' and 'being possessed' may sound rather melodramatic and archaic. They are usually associated, in the psychological sense, with stories from the Bible and those modern horror films depicting the way people used to explain madness years ago. However, we only need to consider 'possession' in the basic and simple sense of 'taking over' to appreciate how appropriate it can be as the description of what we may find happening to some patients. It is as if some external agency or force has taken over a part of that person's control of energy. In a very real way, that person is no longer in control of his whole self. Someone who has lost control of a part of his energy system is not going to be able to respond properly to treatment. (p. 170)

Here, Worsley references the literal meaning of “possession” as “taking over”. Possession comes from the Latin possess-, meaning “occupied, held”. In Worsley’s interpretation, possession is a loss of autonomy and subsequent loss of access to vital resources. In other words, a possessed patient has lost connection to themselves—there is a vacancy in their spirit. A psychoanalytic interpretation indicates that the patient is not possessed by an external spirit or demon, but by the shadow of the unconscious.

Worsley (2012) places the etiology of possession internally, where a weakness of “spirit” leaves the person vulnerable to negative influences from within and without:

. . . A person who is strong in spirit, no matter how weak or defective his body, will not be as affected by internal or external destructive forces as someone whose spirit is weak. People whose mental and spiritual resources are deficient are vulnerable. They can more easily become possessed by obsessions of one kind or another. Sadly, this vulnerability is becoming more rather than less common and its incidence owes a great deal to the priorities which our present society sets for itself. (p. 170)

Mental and spiritual weakness leads to vulnerability, and vulnerability leads to obsessions—these are the keywords we will see repeated in five-element discussions of possession.[23] Worsley (2012) elaborates on the nature of obsessive behavior, giving the example of anal-retentive compulsions:

There are the sad cases of people who have become so worried about dirt and obsessed with hygiene that all through the day they have to wash themselves over and over . . . There are other people who become obsessed with the idea that they are failing to do something perfectly. They will continue to repeat the same sequence of actions over and over again because they are never satisfied. If we come across anything in the patient’s behaviour or case history that suggests obsessions of any kind, we become alerted to the possibility of possession. (p. 173)

Worsley’s description of obsessive behavior is similar to the Western psychiatric diagnosis of OCD and related disorders. Western psychiatry has explored the relationship between obsessive neuroses and possession since the early nineteenth century. More importantly, obsession implies a loss of control, and loss of control is Worsley’s fundamental definition of possession.   

Worsley refers to mental and spiritual weakness as a cause of possession. What does he mean by this? Worsley’s usage of “spirit” is an approximation of the Chinese shen, a term which is closer in meaning to the Greek “psyche” than it is to the common understanding of something “spiritual.” From a psychological perspective, a depletion of mental and spiritual resources describes a psychic deficiency, a loss of access to the psyche, a vacancy in the soul. Loss of access is another way of saying “unconsciousness”. When we lose access to the psyche, its resources and truths become invisible to us. Engulfed in the shadow of the unconscious, we become vulnerable to impositions of all kinds.

Worsley discusses the etiology of possession in broad terms, as there is no singular cause of the condition. In classical fashion, he organizes the etiology into internal and external causes:

Causes of possession can be internal or external, and they are not necessarily confined to mental and spiritual levels only. A physical shock, such as exposure to a sudden and extreme change of climate or temperate, can lock a person’s energy system into an abnormal pattern which he cannot unlock and restore to normal. At the mental level, possession can be caused by an external influence, as in the case of people who succumb to the hypnotic power exercised over them by others . . . In the majority of possession cases, however, the causes are internal. Such possession can take place either suddenly or insidiously over a period. The former can happen as the result of some terrible and shocking experience which literally terrifies the person out of his mind. The latter can happen, for example, in the case of drug-taking where the person is taken over by so-called ‘mind-expanding’ drugs; or in the case of meditation techniques intended to induce ‘out of body’ experiences. (Worsley, 2012, p. 173)

Worsley lists climatic shocks, psychological shocks, mind control, psychedelic drugs, and out-of-body experiences as potential causes of possession. Shock unseats the spirit, making us vulnerable to possession. Worsley’s mention of psychedelic drug use and meditation-induced experiences is primarily a criticism of escapism and disembodiment via a stimulus of some kind (whether drugs or meditation). However, these critiques cannot be taken as blanket statements. Worsley is pointing out possibilities, and we should not jump to conclusions simply because a patient discloses drug use or meditation practice. What makes health and disease in each person is unique to that person, their motivations, and the larger context of their life.

Worsley also suggests that possession has a cultural etiology, noting that spiritual vulnerability is becoming more common due to the “priorities which our present society sets for itself”. The idea that cultural conditioning is a cause of illness was one of Freud’s most influential observations.[24] Echoing his view, Hillman writes:

Our neurosis and our culture are inseparable . . . [it was] Confucius who insisted that the therapy of culture begins with the rectification of language. Alchemy offers this rectification. (Hillman, 2009)

Referencing Confucius and alchemy, Hillman brings the consideration of culture and illness into the history of Chinese medicine. The “rectification” of culture or patient also leads us to the Chinese medical concept of zheng qi—the “upright” or “righteous” qi.

The concept of zheng qi describes the body’s ability to maintain health in the face of external pathogenic factors. While it has some resonances with the Western medical concept of “immunity”, zheng qi is more than physical immunity—it is the integrity of the body, mind, and spirit that keeps us vulnerable and susceptible to possessions of all kinds. We can thus trace Worsley’s observations of “vulnerability” and “susceptibility” to a deficiency of zheng qi.  The function of zheng qi can be further elaborated as a conflict between zheng qi and xie qi where xie qi is translated as “perverse”, “evil”, or “pathogenic” qi. The upright qi prevents susceptibility to and eliminates pathogenic (or xie) qi. Thus, a deficiency in zheng qi results in an accumulation of xie qi. The relationship between zheng qi and xie qi may also help us understand why Worsley advised draining aggressive energy after clearing possession.[25]

Returning to Worsley’s assertion of a cultural etiology in possession, we understand xie qi to include any external pathogenic factor—including community, culture, society, and civilization. This focus reflects the Confucian understanding of the import of society and the “rectification” of virtues that enable harmony between the individual and society. Rectifications include the cultivation of five virtues—ren (compassion), yi (selflessness), li (recognition of the sacred), zhi (wisdom), and xin (integrity).[26][27]

Diagnosis and Pathogenesis

According to Worsley, possession can only be diagnosed by looking into the patient’s eyes. The practitioner knows the patient is “possessed” when there is a vacancy in the eyes, described by Worsley as the feeling that no one is looking back at you. This is distinguished from a sense of dullness or resignation in the eyes, signs that constitute a “spirit-level block” and lead to a different treatment protocol (which we will discuss shortly). Possession is diagnosed via the eyes because Chinese medicine regards the eyes as the “seat of shen”, confirming the adage that the eyes are the “windows to the soul”. Hammer elaborates on the Chinese concept of shen and its relationship to the Heart, Liver, and eyes:

The combined shen qi is the ‘spirit’ of the individual, which is said to live in the Heart by day, and in the Liver by night. During the day it may be accessed through the pupils of the eyes. In health it will be expressed as a shining light. In disease it may be dull, withdrawn, or out of control (wild). At night, it rests in the Liver and may be assessed by a person’s dreams. (Hammer, 2010, p. 6)

If we look at possession in terms of shen, then it appears to be more than a shen deficiency—it is an obscuration of shen, an eclipsing of the Sun within. According to Worsley, a possessed patient is fundamentally “unreachable.” Worsley (2012) continues to describe the possessed patient as someone drowning in the mask of persona:

How do we recognise that somebody is possessed? If his energy state is partially or seriously beyond his own control, we will soon sense that we are failing to reach him, that we are not really communicating with him. We will find that we are not getting honest responses, that we are continually talking to a mask or shell. (p. 170)

“Persona” literally means “mask”. Jung describes the persona as a compensatory personality that represses the unconscious. Persona is the “social face,” the constructed presentation in diametric opposition to the “Self.”[28] Therefore, the possessed patient may have a powerful persona, a mask that the practitioner needs to see behind for a proper diagnosis. While everyone exhibits a persona to one degree or another, those who are lost in their persona become vulnerable to possession. Thus, a practitioner may encounter various types of personalities with diverse levels of coherence. A possessed patient is not necessarily a psychiatric case, but Worsley (2012) gives possession psychiatric connotations when he describes the “worst cases”:

The worst cases are those where the person has lost control of mind and spirit to such an extent that he ought to be in a mental home under external care and control. In such cases, where the person is totally possessed, he simply cannot be reached, nor can he make any sense of what is happening around him. (p. 170)

Worsley indicates that the most severe forms of possession are akin to psychosis or “total insanity” (Worsley, 2012). He acknowledged that acupuncturists are not likely to see “many extreme cases of possession”. We can correlate such cases with “psychotic disorders”, a category in the DSM-5 that includes schizophrenia, schizophreniform disorder, schizoaffective disorder, delusional disorder, brief psychotic disorder, psychotic disorder due to a general medical condition, substance-induced psychotic disorder, and unspecified psychotic disorders. Key symptoms across this class of disorders include delusions, hallucinations, disorganized speech, and manic or major depressive episodes.[29] (Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, 2016)

Traditional accounts of demonic possession have been translated into the clinical language of psychiatry as “schizophrenia”, due to the overlapping nature of the symptoms (hallucinations, hearing voices, etc.). Irmak (2012) holds that demonic possession may be a viable explanation for the hallucinations of schizophrenia:

We thought that many so-called hallucinations in schizophrenia are really illusions related to a real environmental stimulus. One approach to this hallucination problem is to consider the possibility of a demonic world. Demons are unseen creatures that are believed to exist in all major religions and have the power to possess humans and control their body. Demonic possession can manifest with a range of bizarre behaviors which could be interpreted as a number of different psychotic disorders with delusions and hallucinations. The hallucination in schizophrenia may therefore be an illusion—a false interpretation of a real sensory image formed by demons.

Irmak (2012) notes that the treatment of schizophrenia by a local faith healer has proved successful, with patients becoming “symptom-free after 3 months”. Irmak concludes that medical professionals should work in tandem with traditional healers to improve treatment outcomes for schizophrenia. While five-element acupuncture is not a form of “faith healing”, it does accommodate and operate within indigenous views of the world and illness. Therefore, I expand upon Irmak’s suggestion and propose that medical professionals consider the role of five-element acupuncture in treating possession syndromes.

In terms of diagnosis, Worsley cautions against developing any conceptual protocol around diagnosing possession and differentiates it from personality limitations of introversion or stylistic limitations in communication. Worsley (2012) calls practitioners to see with the eye of spirit to diagnose possession:

If diagnosis of possession were simply a matter of recognizing a particular look in the eye or a particular kind of introverted behaviour, then we would simply be able to look it up in a textbook and diagnose it in five minutes. Possession, however, is far too subtle for that. It is not simply a temporary failure to communicate. It is a failing of the spirit of the person, and in order to see it clearly, we have to be able to see with our own spirit. (p. 171)

While we can notice many similarities between the symptomology of possession and Western psychiatric disorders, the two do not necessarily overlap. A patient with a Western medical diagnosis of OCD or schizophrenia may not necessarily be possessed per Worsley’s criteria. It is best if we view these conditions as possibly overlapping but not directly correlative. For one, the diagnosis of possession relies on a subtler form of perception than symptomatic analysis. Therefore, in the context of acupuncture, possession remains a spirit-level pathology diagnosed by the practitioner’s spiritual eye.[30]

Treatment: Seven Devils, Seven Dragons

The quality of an acupuncture point is metaphorically embedded in its name—this principle can be applied to all of the point names and the functions they represent.[31]
—Sun Simiao

Worsley taught two acupuncture protocols for clearing possession: “internal and external dragons.” While the protocol is clearly described in the mythical language of the Chinese imagination, it is not referenced in any texts. Worsley attributes the protocol to the oral tradition of his teachers.

Worsley (2012) describes possession as “being taken over by” seven devils. In the broader context of Chinese medicine, the seven “devils” refer to the seven emotions (qi qing): joy, anger, worry, grief, fear, fright, and pensiveness. By needling a sequence of seven points with a specific needle technique, the practitioner could release the “seven dragons” to consume these seven devils:

The ancient Chinese used picturesque language to describe possession and its removal. They spoke of people being taken over by external or internal devils, and needling the special points as releasing the seven external or internal dragons which could drive the devils away. (Worsley, 2012, p. 174)  

On the nature of the protocol, Worsley (2012) indicates that possession treatment is not technically part of the five-element tradition but is utilized as a preliminary procedure:

Such treatment follows set formulae and hence belongs to what we call a different ‘patron’ of acupuncture . . . However, Worsley Acupuncture will not work if possession is present, we must ‘borrow’ this method of removing it. (p. 173)

The seven-needle protocol for “releasing the seven internal dragons” is mostly located on the Stomach meridian: CV-15, master point[32] (Dove Tail), ST-25 (Heavenly Pivot), ST-32 (Prostrate Hare), ST-41 (Released Stream). When needled bi-laterally, a total number of seven needles are employed. The points are needled top to bottom with what Worsley calls “sedation technique”—right to left and retained with a 180°counter-clockwise action on the needle.[33] A perpendicular insertion to the appropriate fen[34] depth is favored for all points. The needles are retained for up to twenty minutes. The practitioner only knows that possession has cleared by looking into the patient’s eyes again.[35] If, after twenty minutes, there is no change in the patient’s eyes, then the practitioner should tonify the needles (left to right, 180° clockwise action).[36] Once the needles are removed, the hole should be left open, to “vent”.

A variant protocol first published in Worsley’s Acupuncturists’ Therapeutic Pocket Book (1975) substitutes a “master point below ST-36” for ST-32 in cases of “possession with depression”.[37] This protocol was subsequently maintained in the first, second, and third editions of Worsley’s Meridian and Points textbook.[38] According to Judy Worsley, when the fourth edition was being revised in 2003,  J.R. Worsley suggested its removal:

When we were revising the fourth edition of Meridians and Points, J.R. felt that it would be best to remove the possession with depression protocol. J.R. remarked that it was not something he really found useful in practice and that it added unnecessary complication to the possession treatment protocol. He said that in his experience, the internal dragons protocol without depression works in all cases of possession. The other thing that was concerning to him was that whether or not someone has depression is too subjective of a factor. If you say to somebody, “Do you feel depressed?” it becomes too focused on a symptomatic orientation. Ultimately, J.R. felt that the possession with depression protocol introduces a level of complication that is not needed or clinically useful. (Judy Worsley, personal communication, June 19, 2024)

If possession has not successfully cleared with the internal seven dragons protocol, then the practitioner should re-check their point location before moving on to the seven external dragons protocol. The external dragons are invoked with the same technique but with the patient seated upright:[39] GV-20 (One Hundred Meetings), BL-11 (Great Shuttle), BL-23 (Kidneys Correspondence), BL-61 (Servant’s Aide).[40]

The seven internal dragons correspond to pathological emotions; the seven external dragons correspond with climatic factors: cold, wind, heat, fire, dampness, dryness, and trauma. Despite this theoretical link, Worsley does not consider emotional symptoms or climatic invasions as a basis for diagnosing possession, owing to his emphasis on direct perception rather than symptomatic analysis. As with several of Worsley’s treatment protocols, clearing possession is a potentially multi-step protocol. It should be noted that internal and external dragons are not chosen based on the perceived nature of the etiology (internal or external) or the patient’s symptoms. If possession is diagnosed, one first proceeds to the internal dragons treatment.

Worsley’s blocks to treatment are all employed in a specific sequence. In an initial treatment, if a patient is diagnosed with possession, it should be treated before draining Aggressive Energy[41] or clearing a Husband-Wife block (if present). After clearing possession, Worsley advises the practitioner to treat the patient on their “level” and use command points[42] to anchor the treatment and prevent recurrence.[43] Source points on the patient’s C.F. are recommended to conclude a possession treatment. Worsley (2012) writes:

Just as sickness does not occur on one level alone, so there are no acupuncture points that affect one level alone. The least to the most experienced practitioners will most frequently use the command points which beneficially affect body, mind and spirit in a variety of ways. Simply using a source point also helps to restore balance at all levels simultaneously. It is thus possible to treat the spirit with command, source, and simple element points. There are, however, certain points that reach the spirit even more directly. If a person’s illness is primarily at this level, we may select these points in order to bring help directly to his spirit. [44] (pp. 184-185)

Worsley is referring to points on the upper Kidney meridian and outer Bladder meridian. These points (along with points on the Conception and Governor Vessels) are used in the context of treating any C.F.[45] A majority of these points have “spirit” or “soul” in their names. [46] (See Appendix D). Worsley’s emphasis on possession, point names, and the spirit of the patient makes his approach a revival of Tang dynasty values, especially as seen in Sun Simiao.

According to Judy Worsley, "A person becomes possessed at a point when they are vulnerable. If they do not move beyond that vulnerability through treatment and lifestyle, then possession could recur”. (Judy Worsley, personal communication, 2022). To prevent recurrence, we have to consider the treatment as a whole. After clearing possession, Worsley recommends draining Aggressive Energy as a standard procedure, even if Aggressive Energy has been drained in previous treatments. Any of the points referred to above can be considered following a possession treatment to further support the patient’s spirit level and to prevent recurrence. However, the “less is more” maxim applies here, and our point selection is carefully considered to support the patient post-possession without overtreating.

Treatment as Exorcism

Although Worsley interprets possession as a psychological imbalance, a shamanic perspective still pervades his perception, especially in his discussion of patient reactions to the possession treatment:

This reaction can be so mild as to be scarcely perceptible, but in some cases, it can be dramatic, and we should be prepared for it. In the clearing process, many patients will experience a degree of shivering or uncontrollable movement. (Worsley, 2012, p. 173)

Worsley’s description reads identical to what one envisions in an exorcism. We can also understand shaking movements as a natural response to the re-introduction of the life-force where it was previously stagnant, deficient, or blocked. Such movements are similar to the purifying movements (kriyas) that yogis experience when the Kundalini awakens and courses through the body. The “serpent power” of the Kundalini shares symbolism with the East Asian dragon—both are alchemical archetypes of inner transformation and spiritual awakening.[47]

In “Depression and demonic possession: the analyst as an exorcist”, Asch (1985) compares the process of psychoanalysis to exorcism:

Psychoanalysis has evolved a concept of depression that deals with ideas about introjects,[48] rather than conceiving of them as concrete toxins or demons. Psychoanalytic treatment is a cognitive technique for "exorcising" certain identifications by delineating them and then neutralizing them through understanding. 

Where psychoanalysts view demons as introjects, acupuncturists view demons as energetic vacancies. Where psychoanalysts exorcise through understanding, acupuncturists incise with needles.

From Possession to Obsession: Blocked Affect as Block to Treatment

In The Discovery of the Unconscious, Ellenberger (1970) asserts the origins of psychotherapy in exorcism:

Exorcism has been one of the foremost healing procedures in the Mediterranean area and is still in use in several countries; it is of particular interest to us because it is one of the roots from which, historically speaking, modern dynamic psychotherapy has evolved.

Ellenberger’s supposition is confirmed by Jung in a memoriam written two weeks after Freud’s passing on September 23, 1939:

Freud owed his initial impetus to Charcot, his great teacher at the Salpetriere. The first fundamental lesson he learnt there was the teaching about hypnotism and suggestion, and in 1888 he translated Bernheim`s book on the latter subject. The other was Charcot’s discovery that hysterical symptoms were the consequence of certain ideas that had taken possession of the patient’s “brain.” Charcot’s pupil, Pierre Janet, elaborated this theory in his comprehensive work “Nevroses et idees fixes” and provided it with the necessary foundations. Freud’s older colleague in Vienna, Joseph Breuer, furnished an illustrative case in support of this exceedingly important discovery (which, incidentally, had been made long before by many a family doctor), building upon it a theory of which Freud said that it “coincides with the medieval view once we substitute a psychological formula for the `demon` of priestly fantasy.” The medieval theory of possession (toned down by Janet to “obsession”) was thus taken over by Breuer and Freud in a more positive form, the evil spirit—to reverse the Faustian miracle-being transmogrified into a harmless “psychological formula.” It is greatly to the credit of both investigators that they did not, like the rationalistic Janet, gloss over the significant analogy with possession, but rather, following the medieval theory, hunted up the factor causing the possession in order, as it were, to exorcize the evil spirit. Breuer was the first to discover that the pathogenic “ideas” were memories of certain events which he called “traumatic.” This discovery carried forward the preliminary work done at the Salpetriere, and it laid the foundation of all Freud`s theories. As early as 1893 both men recognized the far-reaching practical importance of their findings. They realized that the symptom-producing “ideas” were rooted in an affect. This affect had the peculiarity of never really coming to the surface, so that it was never really conscious. The task of the therapist was therefore to “abreact” the “blocked” affect. (Jung, 1939).

It appears that both Freud and Worsley propose an interpretation of “possession” as a “block”—for Freud, it is a “blocked affect”, for Worsley a “block to treatment”.

Instrumentality: Practitioner as Medium

            Here, it is worth recalling Kaptchuk’s remark about Worsley as a shamanic healer. Eckman (2007) recounts:

Ted Kaptchuk mentioned to me, after watching Worsley at work, that he thought Worsley was the greatest shamanistic healer he had ever seen. I think this is an aspect of our profession that needs to be brought out into the open, and Worsley has constantly stressed that developing the deepest possible rapport with patients and then allowing yourself to become an instrument for forces beyond your own personal power, is what we should all be striving for. That’s a good definition, as far as I’m concerned, of a shaman.

Worsley emphasized the function of the practitioner as an “instrument of nature”, an emphasis that invokes the shaman as a medium. However, in Worsley’s tradition of acupuncture, the practitioner is not an instrument for spirits, guardians, or entities of any kind. Rather, nature is the force that moves through the practitioner. Thus, nature itself is the agency of treatment, and the practitioner is nature’s instrumentality. Eckman (2007) later confirms our earlier premise when he writes, “Acupuncture itself likely originated from the exorcistic practices of the early shamans or wu”. (p. 215)

Internal Dragons

Returning to the seven dragons, the origins of Worsley’s treatment protocol remain somewhat mysterious. Worsley states that he learned the protocol from his Master Hsuie. (Eckman, 2007).[49] Eckman’s research suggests the origins of the internal dragons treatment as a Tang dynasty protocol:

The Internal Dragons treatment, including the Master Point on the conception Vessel, was identified as a Tang dynasty prescription for hysteria by an aged acupuncturist interviewed by Allegra Wint at the Yunnan College of TCM in Kunming in 1982. (Eckman, 2007, pp. 227-228).

However, the reason for choosing either seven-point combination remains open to interpretation. To my knowledge, Worsley did not discuss why any of the points chosen are used to treat possession; he simply passed on the protocols he was taught. However, if we reflect on these points, possible interpretations surface. Six of the seven points are located on the Stomach meridian, one of two meridians constituting the Earth element. The Earth is regarded as yin and is therefore receptive. Spending time in nature and walking barefoot on the ground are considered a means for releasing negative psychic tensions. The Earth receives our tensions and transforms them. Thus, Worsley’s possession protocol may very well be a form of “Earthing” the psyche to release and transform its devils. Worsley writes on the function of the Stomach, “It is like having an anchor, a point which grounds us to the Earth and guarantees us the same sense of connection which we had when were babes in arms and depended entirely on our physical mothers.”[50] (Worsley, 1998, p. 144).

The reliance upon the Stomach meridian to treat possession also points us to the role of “Stomach Qi” in maintaining health. In the Nan Jing, “Stomach Qi” is regarded as the basis of health. When Stomach Qi is sufficient, the zang-fu are healthy, and the body is protected from external invasions. Therefore, attending to Stomach Qi remains the basis for preventing “possessions” of any kind, whether climatic or demonic. Master Nagano is famous for remarking, “Always attend to Stomach Qi.”[51]

As the “official in charge of rotting and ripening,” the Stomach returns us to the alchemical image of the rotundum, the cauldron in which poisons are transformed into nectar, where pathogens and parasites are “cooked” in the fire of health, where possession is cleared through invigoration of Stomach Qi.

Looking at the points more closely, we see that ST-25 (Heavenly Pivot) is located on the same level as the umbilicus)[52], a region regarded as the “Celestial Pivot” in the body. The Essential Questions states:

The area above the celestial pivot is ruled by the celestial qi; [the area] below the celestial pivot is ruled by the earthly qi. The place where these qi intersect is the origin of man’s qi and the ten thousand things. (Deadman, 2016, p. 148)

This passage describes the umbilicus as the transitional pivot between heavenly and earthly sources of qi. As a transitional zone, the umbilicus is an alchemical locus where heavenly and earthly qi mix in the middle. The umbilicus (CV-8) is also seen as the central confluence of all the vessels in the body, making this an important area for achieving a global effect.[53] ST-25 is classified as the front-mu point of the Large Intestine, where connotations of “elimination” and “release” seem relevant. One notable indication for this point is “severe heat with manic raving”. (Deadman, 2016, p. 148)

ST-32 (Prostrate Hare), the next point in the protocol, is listed in Deadman (2016) with indications for “mania” and “ghost talk”. (p. 155) ST-32 is located on the thigh and is rarely used in TCM applications. The name of the point, “Prostrate Hare”, invokes the image of the Rabbit, a prominent lunar symbol in East Asian cultures.[54] The Rabbit is said to hold the essence of the Moon, and thus the Rabbit embodies yin. The Moon is both a symbol for the psyche and an image of benevolence, epitomized in the peaceful Rabbit, burrowed underground where nothing can possess it. Rabbits are also notoriously difficult to catch (or “possess”), owing to their clever minds and agile movements.

ST-41 (Released Stream) is the fire point of the Stomach meridian. Since Fire is the Mother of Earth, ST-41 is the tonification point for the Stomach meridian. We can interpret this point as igniting the fire of transformation, in tandem with the symbol of the fire-breathing dragon. The name of the point, “Released Stream”, suggests a liberation of blocked energy, a free and coursing movement previously obstructed. Deadman (2016) lists “mania”, “epilepsy”, “agitation”, “sadness and weeping”, “fright palpitations”, and “seeing ghosts” among the indications of ST-41. (p. 168) As a distal point located in the center of the ankle, ST-41 is the most yang of the seven points in the protocol, and thus one of the most powerful points invoked in the treatment. 

The last point to consider is CV-15 (Dove Tail), the luo point of the Conception Vessel. Worsley’s precise instruction is that the “master point” of CV-15 (located halfway between CV-15 and CV-14) should be needled in the possession treatment. The point name refers to the Asian turtle dove, a bird whose native distribution spans from Central Asia to East Asia and Japan. In one Chinese legend, a turtledove helped the Han-dynasty Emperor, Gaozu, escape from his arch-nemesis, Xiang Yu. This myth portrays the Chinese view of the turtledove as a symbol of heavenly protection from evil. If we translate this myth into the language of Chinese medicine, then the turtledove protects the “emperor” (Heart) from evil influences. As Deadman (2016) notes, the primary action of this point is to regulate the Heart and calm the spirit, with its indications including the “five types of epilepsy”, “mania”, “mad-walking”, “mad singing”, “fright palpitations”, and “oppressive sensation in the Heart”. (p. 516)

What we know as epilepsy today was often regarded as a form of possession in indigenous cultures—and epilepsy is an indication for CV-15 and ST-41, while mania is a pervasive indication of all seven points. Whether these indications, point names, and “Earthing” theory serve as adequate explanations or not, they do establish a resonance in tandem with Worsley’s usage. We can also consider that individuals who have experienced shock or overindulge in psychedelic drugs or use meditative practices to ascend from the body are becoming ungrounded—the psyche is uprooted, and the navel is empty. 

External Dragons

The internal and external dragon protocols encompass the front and back of the body, respectively. Chinese medicine regards the front of the body as yin and the back of the body as yang. These meanings resonate with Worsley’s designation of the protocols as “internal” (front, yin) and “external” (back, yang). As we noted earlier, the choice between internal and external dragons has nothing to do with the etiology of possession or the patient’s symptoms. However, we can still offer some insights on the points chosen for external dragons.

GV-20 (One Hundred Meetings) is the baihui, located on the crown of the head, corresponding to the crown chakra of Indian yoga and the entry point for heavenly qi in Daoism. Deadman (2016) notes that one connotation of the point name is its function as the meeting point of the Governing Vessel with the Bladder, Gallbladder, Sanjiao, and Liver meridians. GV-20 is also listed in the “Sea of Marrow” category. Deadman (2016) references other names for this point that reveal its function: niwangong (Mud Ball Palace) is a reference to Daoist qigong theory which located the “material aspect of spirit” in the brain; tianshan (Mountain of Heaven) is a reference to the point’s location on the summit of the body; guimen (Ghost Gate) is a reference to the point’s ability to expel ghosts, which Deadman interprets as its “influence on psycho-emotional disorders”. (p. 553) Deadman (2016) lists several indications for GV-20, of which the following are noteworthy: wind stroke, loss of consciousness, wind epilepsy, agitation and oppression, fright palpitations, disorientation, much crying, sadness and crying with desire to die, and mania. (p. 553) These indications represent different aspects of possession syndromes. The psychological symptoms are obvious, but beyond this, we see stroke, epilepsy, disorientation, loss of consciousness, and fright—conditions that have been historically associated with spirit-possession.

BL-11 (Great Shuttle) is the meeting point of the Bladder, Small Intestine, Sanjiao, Gallbladder, Governing Vessel, and bones. It is also one of the points grouped in the “Sea of Blood” category. The point is located 1.5 cun lateral to the lower border of T1, an area in proximity to the “wind gate” where pathogenic invasions enter the body. Indeed, the point is used for expelling pathogenic factors and “firming” the exterior. Deadman (2016) notes that BL-11, as the meeting point of bones, is indicated for “various bone diseases and rigidity and pain of the neck, spine, and lumbar region” due to external pathogenic invasions. (p. 264) Its relevance for treating possession is given in the Ling Shu which recommends BL-11 “for treating contraction of the sinews that may accompany madness”. (Deadman, 2016, p. 265) As a point in the “sea of blood” category, BL-11 has a powerful effect on Blood, an essential yin substance that anchors the spirit.

BL-23 (Kidney Correspondence) is the back-shu point of the Kidney, located on the lower border of L2, 1.5 cun lateral to GV-4 (mingmen, the gate of life-destiny). Deadman (2016) writes that BL-23 is “one of the principal acupuncture points to strengthen the Kidneys, fortify yang, nourish yin, and benefit essence”. (p. 283) The Kidneys are the root of life, the seat of jing (essence), and the source of pre-natal qi. The location of this point on the same level as the mingmen indicates the depth of its function in restoring the yuan qi of the individual. By empowering the mingmen, this point nourishes the source qi and, thereby, our alchemical destiny—seen in Daoist alchemy as the dynamic interaction of constitutional nature (xing) and life-destiny (ming).[55] 

In summary, we see that the points used in the external dragons protocol are appropriate and well-justified in classical sources. Together, these points form a critical dynamic in the treatment of possession: GV-20 connects the patient to the heavenly source of qi, BL-11 expels pathogens, restores yang, nourishes Blood, and BL-23 resurrects the root-vitality of the mingmen.

Soul-Loss and Resurrection

For every needling, the method above all is not to miss the rooting in the Spirits.
—Ling Shu, Chapter 8.

The symbol of exorcism is encountered again in another of Worsley’s blocks to treatment, the “spirit block”, defined by Worsley as a block in “level”. Worsley describes needling a point as a multi-dimensional event that simultaneously reaches the patient's body, mind, and spirit. A block in “level” occurs when the patient’s “spirit” is unable to be reached in treatment. Worsley differentiates this from possession—the patient is not possessed, but they are spiritually resigned and robotic in presentation. The “spirit block” is also diagnosed in the eyes, where a patient is still present but the light in their eyes is dim. Thus, the “spirit block” is a form of temporary spiritual deficiency that is less severe than possession (where the patient is not spiritually deficient but spiritually absent).

The treatment of this block centers around one point, needled bi-laterally: KD-24 (Spirit Burial Ground). Worsley places great emphasis on the name of this point, describing the spirit burial ground as the place where the patient’s access to the spirit-level of existence can be resurrected. The word “access” is key here, because Worsley did not believe that acupuncture could treat the spirit, rather it could restore a person’s access to the spirit level. The idea of a burial site (death) being the site of new life (resurrection) is ancient. Thus, there is life where there is death, and transformation in the burial ground. In discussing the meaning of an acupuncture point, Matsumoto and Birch (1998) suggest that the Chinese term for an acupuncture point (xue) refers to a burial ground:

The character xue, commonly translated as "point" or "acupoint," literally means "hole” . . . The true connotations that accompany the Chinese character need to be associated with the English translation. The character xue itself has more the meaning of a hole, a pit, than the more geometrical concept of a point or position. Classically it meant a cave. The Shuo Wen Jie Zi says the xue refers to a "chamber below the earth" (Mor). Several other classical texts report that the term refers specifically to a grave or gravesite. (p. 20)

The location of KD-24 in the third intercostal space is also significant because of its proximity to the Heart (the seat of shen). Jarrett describes the location of this point as being on the “Kidney / Heart axis”, two organs that are related in six-channel theory as comprising the shaoyin channel. The treatment consists of burning seven moxa cones on KD-24, bi-laterally, and then needling the points with tonification technique.[56][57] The efficacy of the treatment is confirmed by examining the patient’s eyes post-treatment, and noting whether the “shine” of the spirit has returned or not. If not, point location, the presence of other blocks, the use of spirit-level points, or an inaccurate C.F. diagnosis should be considered.

A variant of the “spirit block” is noted in rare cases where a patient is not merely spiritually resigned but spiritually disconnected. The treatment of this block involves needling HT-1 (Utmost Source) bi-laterally, where the meaning of the name describes the function of reconnecting the patient to the spiritual source of existence. Thus, in Worsley’s system, we see parallel themes of possession/exorcism and resurrection/re-connection. Encompassed within them is the rich history of Chinese medicine, its shamanic origins, and the clinical relevance of their psychotherapeutic applications today.

IV. Demon or Daemon: The Vale of Soul-Making

Call the world, if you please, “the Vale of Soul-making.” Then you will find out the use of the world.
—John Keats, Letter to George and Georgiana Keats, 1819.

We cannot conclude our discussion of possession without asking the question it so clearly begs: What is it that possesses us? In the course of our examination, we encountered an evolving answer to this ancient query. We traced the notion of invasive pathogens from malevolent spirits to climatic conditions, from possession by entity to possession by shadow, and from obsessive compulsions to soul loss. Regardless of how we conceive of possession, the ritual of treatment in acupuncture therapy maintains the ceremony of exorcism—from excising demons to empowering the psyche, from driving spears to inserting needles, from fumigation to moxibustion, from tribal relations to professional rapport, from mediumship to instrumentality.

Despite the pathological connotations of possession, our consideration would remain incomplete without examining possession as a phenomenon of health. Spirits are not only external invasive factors that rob us of life-force, they are also intrinsic energetic factors that maintain the life-force, as each of the yin organs are said to have a spirit. The question returns: What are we possessed by? We are not only possessed by the other, we are also in possession of soul and spirit. Perhaps we are not possessed by demons but dis-possessed by our daemon, left vacuous in our soul. What if possession is not an invasion but an emptiness in our soul, a block in our creative instinct? What the Greeks referred to as daemon was the guiding spirit of fate, as daemon means “god”, “power”, and “fate”.

The daemon is the calling of character, and it possesses us with purpose, meaning, and destiny. The truth hidden within the unconscious emerges of its own accord as the synchronicity of the present and the fate of the future. As Hillman said, “A calling may be postponed, avoided, intermittently missed. It may also possess you completely. Whatever; eventually it will out. It makes its claim. The daemon does not go away.” (Hillman, 1996, p.8). Perhaps the only demon is the one who blocks our daemon, who silences the call of the spirits, who cools the gate of life and delays our destiny.  If so, then the treatment of possession can be re-visioned as a clearing of this daemonic block, empowerment of calling before empowering the character it emerges within. Thus, when entering the clinic, we are not only asking for a cure, we are standing in the vale of soul-making.

As Keats said, “There may be intelligences or sparks of the divinity in millions—but they are not Souls till they acquire identities, till each one is personally itself.” (Keats, 1965) The treatment of possession with acupuncture beckons us to consider the esoteric mechanism of its therapeutics for the body, mind, and spirit. Acupuncture can be used not only to relieve physical pain but also psychological suffering. Our existential angst can be transformed by making the unconscious conscious in the body, by becoming who we are in the spirit of every point and flow. 

Notes

[1] Demonic possession is also a well-established category of illness in Ayurvedic medicine where it is known as bhūta vidya (the knowledge of spirits) and in Tibetan medicine where it is known as gdön nad (provocation disorders).

[2] In Tibetan medicine, parasites are not necessarily regarded as demonic spirits, but demonic spirits (provocations) are regarded as the primary etiology in contagious and epidemic diseases (rims nad and nyen-rims).

[3] “Demon” is a translation of the Chinese gui. The term is also translated as “ghost”. Jarret (2005) substitutes “ghost” for “demon” in his list of the thirteen ghost points.

[4] Hammer (2005) writes that the inspiration for his perspectives on integrating Chinese medicine with psychoanalysis came from Lawson-Wood (1965) in 1973. He writes, “My exposure to the Worsley school came long after these ideas were conceived. Recently, I have been drawn to that school, as well as to the Japanese system of the hara and Toyahari, as a part of returning to a way of working with energy that accentuates balance and a more sensitive, delicate, and respectful use of energetics.” (Hammer, 2005).

[5] Eckman (2007) cites Lawson-Wood as a “an early colleague of Worsley’s” (p. 99).

[6] See The Book of the It and The Meaning of Illness. Alan Watts said of Groddeck. “. . .  He practiced massage for people who came to him for analysis, and analysis for people who came to him for massage”. (https://www.organism.earth/library/document/who-is-it-that-knows-there-is-no-ego)

[7] Freud formulated the hypothesis that dreams were a symbolic expression of wish-fulfillment in The Interpretation of Dreams (1899).

[8] Unschuld, Su Wen, 286.

[9] For more on the relationship between the Metal element, destructiveness, and tyranny, see Fruehauf’s article, “Visions of the Baojun: Donald Trump and the Pathological Large Intestine Archetype in Classical Chinese Medicine” (2017).

[10] See Anna Freud’s elaboration of her father’s concepts in The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defence (1936).

[11] Freud’s theory of the superego is intimately tied to the Oedipus complex. He writes, “The ego ideal is therefore the heir of the Oedipus complex, and thus it is also the expression of the most powerful impulses and most important libidinal vicissitudes of the id”.

[12] Jung’s concept of the libido expands upon Freud’s instinct theory to include the totality of one’s “psychic energy”. See The Psychology of the Unconscious (1907).

[13] Jung’s discussion of conscience runs parallel to Freud’s superego, but differs in its specification of two levels of the conscience—the ethical and the moral—where Freud had only identified the “moral” aspect of the superego.

[14] For an excellent interpretation of anality, see Brown, N. O. (1959). Life Against Death: The Psychoanalytical Meaning of History, Part Five: Studies in Anality, pp. 179-307.

[15] While eliminative pathologies can be described in correspondence with the Metal and Water elements, this does not mean that Metal and Water C.F.s are necessarily possessed, or that a higher incidence of possession is found in patients diagnosed as Metal and Water C.F. Worsley would strongly discourage making such diagnostic associations, because symptoms in any of the five elements are necessarily in evidence due to the presence of a C.F. in any element. The purpose of highlighting the association with obsession, possession, and anal-stage pathologies is to better understand the psychological sources of possession.

[16] DBS treatment is indicated for adults eighteen years and older who have not responded to other therapies. Electrodes are implanted in parts of the brain, the idea being that electrical impulses will help control the obsessive impulses of the OCD patient. This treatment is not widely available and is rarely used.

[17] TMS treatment makes use of one of three FDA-approved devices that uses magnetic fields to stimulate nerve cells in the brain.

[18] For a psychological exploration of the five spirits, see Dechar, L. (2006). Five Spirits: Alchemical Acupuncture for Psychological and Spiritual Healing. Lantern Publishing and Media.

[19] Wilhelm, Jung, Golden Flower, p. 115.

[20] Worsley differentiates between two levels of energetic circulation: ying and wei. The ying level reflects the flow of “nutritive” qi within the meridians, the wei level reflects the superficial flow of protective qi and moves in a cycle per the meridian clock.

[21] The concept of participation mystique is credited to the French philosopher, Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, who coined the phrase in his book How Natives Think (1912).

[22] Worsley defines the “causative factor” (C.F.) as the source of imbalance in the five-element cycle. The C.F. is necessarily one of the five elements, the diagnosis never changes, and is evident at birth. According to Worsley, the C.F. is discovered solely via a perceptive diagnosis of the patient’s color, sound, odor, and emotion—not through symptomatic, behavioral, astrological, or structural analyses. For a discussion of C.F. diagnosis, see Worsley (2012, pp. 29-45). While Worsley maintained the C.F. as an etiological factor rather than a constitutional component, Hicks (2004), Jarrett (2005), and Eckman (2007 ) refer to the C.F. as the “constitutional factor”, maintaining that the term “constitutional” is more accurate. Judy Worsley elaborated upon this issue in “Professor J.R. Worsley: Causative Factor (C.F.) and More”.

[23] In occult literature, obsession is explicitly linked with demonic possession. In Psychic Self-Defense (1930), Dion Fortune writes, “The question of obsession is an exceedingly important one. The word is used freely in occult circles, and is held to mean the withdrawal of a soul from its body and its replacement by another soul. . . . (p. 51)

[24] See Freud’s landmark essay, “Civilization and Its Discontents.”

[25] Per Worsley, the draining of aggressive energy is conducted as a preliminary procedure in an initial five-element treatment. Needles are inserted superficially and bi-laterally into the back shu points of the yin organs, with the patient seated in a chair. If erythema appears around any of the needles, then aggressive energy is indicated, and the needles are retained until the redness dissipates (or the aggressive energy “drains”). Worsley taught that aggressive energy was held in the yin organs (because yin has the function of “storing”), and thus aggressive energy circulates throughout the k’e cycle. If left untreated, aggressive energy can re-circulate as a consequence of five-element treatment and thus make the patient worse. The concept of “aggressive energy” can be likened to xie qi and/or yin fire. For more discussion on aggressive energy and its treatment, see Worsley (2012, pp. 175-178).

[26] These English translations are from Heiner Fruehauf.

[27] The Confucian application of the five virtues is one of the earliest examples of five-element theory in Chinese history.

[28] Jung uses the term “Self” to refer to the individuated person who now exists in a condition of wholeness, where previously the ego maintained partiality through repression. 

[29] These symptoms can be correlated to the eight-principle diagnoses of “Heart-Fire Blazing”, “Phlegm-Fire Harassing the Heart”, and “Phlegm Misting the Mind”. (Maciocia, 2015).

[30] Although pulse diagnosis is used in identifying other blocks to treatment, Worsley does not use the pulse to diagnose possession or to confirm its clearing. In classical texts, the closest notion to a possession pulse is found in the Nan Jing. In difficulty fifty-nine, the pulse quality associated with mania and epilepsy is that “the three positions yin and yang are all exuberant”. The Tibetan medical tradition features numerous descriptions of possession pulse qualities (see the Subsequent Tantra of Tibetan Medicine).

[31] This translation is from Heiner Fruehauf (2024).

[32] The point needled is the “master point” of CV-15, located 0.25 cun below CV-15, or halfway between CV-15 and CV-14.

[33] Jarrett (2005) notes that the needle action should produce a qi sensation for the practitioner: “You must feel the qi at all points for the protocol to be effective”. (p. 49). I have not encountered this emphasis in Worsley’s discussion of possession but include it here for further consideration regarding the role of needle stimulus in treatment efficacy.

[34] Worsley uses the Japanese system of measurement for needle depth, known as fen. Ten fen = one cun, therefore, one fen is 1/10 of a cun. A 30mm needle = 10 fen, though the fen measurement should always be made relative to the patient’s own body rather than the length of the needle.

[35] The pulse is not used as a benchmark for either diagnosing possession or verifying its successful treatment. In Tibetan Medicine, a possession pulse is described as irregularly irregular and is measured on the radial and ulnar arteries. 

[36] Worsley only recommends tonifying the needles if possession does not clear with sedation technique. Jarrett (2005) recommends tonifying the needles before removing them in patients who are qi or yang deficient.

[37] The idea of “possession with depression” can be compared to the ancient concept of melancholia. In the Middle Ages, melancholia was thought to have been caused by demonic possession. While synonymous with depression, melancholia included a broader range of symptoms that were largely delusional. For example, Galen added “fixed delusions” to the Hippocratic symptomology of melancholia. See also Freud’s “Mourning and Melancholia” (1917).

[38] The variant protocol of “possession without depression” is maintained in Hicks (2004), published one year after J.R. Worsley’s retraction of the protocol and subsequent passing.

[39] In Worsley’s approach, back treatments are always given with the patient seated upright on the table or in a chair.

[40] Worsley numbers the outer Bladder line differently from Deadman. However, for the points listed in the external dragons protocol, there is no disagreement in numbering between Worsley and Deadman.

[41] If Possession is not present, then Aggressive Energy would be drained first in all initial visits.

[42] In Worsley’s language, command points refer to all the acupuncture points located distal to the elbows and knees, as originally discussed in the Nan Jing. Command points of the meridians on the C.F. are typically employed as the conclusion of any given treatment, for their stabilizing and anchoring effect. In TCM, the phrase (command points) refers to a set of six points (ST-36, BL-40, LU-7, LI-4, P-6, GV-26) that each have a broad effect on a bodily part or region. There is no relationship between the two concepts aside from sharing identical nomenclature in English.

[43] After clearing possession, Jarrett (2005) recommends treating HT-7 in addition to the source point on the patient’s “constitutional meridian”. He also advocates for coupling KD-6 with KD-27 immediately after clearing possession, noting that it is an “excellent treatment for people who wake with night terrors or who are in shock from near-death experiences”. (p. 50). Jarrett credits this latter point combination to a student of Kiiko Matsumoto.

[44] A practitioner may also use Windows of the Sky points to treat the spirit level directly, though Worsley recommends using these points judiciously, when a patient is seriously in need of perspective, and after an established period of treatment frequency. While not impossible, it is unlikely that “windows” would be used in the same treatment as a possession clearing.

[45] In treatment, point selection is otherwise limited to the two meridians associated with the C.F. element.

[46] Eckman notes that a focus on point names was historically important to the “medically inclined religious Daoists” and is “exemplified in the Yellow Court Classic (c. second century) a component of Daoist Patrology (Dao Zang)”. In addition to Worsley, he cites Jeffrey Yuen as a contemporary practitioner with a similar emphasis. (Eckman, 2007, p. 227).

[47] For a discussion of the relationship between Kundalini Awakening and possession, see Lee Sanella’s Kundalini: Psychosis or Transcendence? (1976).

[48] In psychoanalysis, introjection is the unconscious adoption of the traits of others and is considered a defense mechanism.

[49] Eckman (2007) notes that “Hsuie” is also “reported as being spelled Hsiu, Hsui, Shiu and Shsiu at different times, and as being pronounced ‘Shoo’ or ‘Su.’”).

[50] Worsley uses the analogy of a child’s relationship to the mother throughout his description of the Stomach official. The relationship between Worsley’s possession and Jung’s mother-complex is worth further exploration.

[51] Master Kiyoshi Nagano was a famous twentieth-century blind acupuncturist from Japan. He is well-known for his influence on Kiiko Matsumoto and for his “Stomach Qi Line” protocol.

[52] Worsley places the Stomach meridian 3 cun lateral to the umbilicus, while Deadman places it 2 cun lateral to the umbilicus.

[53] This may explain Worsley’s emphasis on centering the umbilical pulse.

[54] Some might say that this point name refers to the shape of the thigh muscle it is located upon. This is likely to be true, and we should be open to point names being anatomically and archetypally resonant. 

[55] See Lonny Jarrett’s text, Nourishing Destiny (1998), for a deeper consideration of xing and ming in acupuncture treatment.

[56] In Worsley’s tradition, tonification technique refers to a slow needle insertion in tandem with the patient’s exhalation, a 180° clockwise rotation of the needle, and a swift withdrawal of the needle. The needle is not retained. The hole is then quickly covered by the practitioner’s thumb to prevent leakage of qi. Tonification technique is the most widely applied needle technique in Worsley five-element acupuncture.

[57] Deadman states that KD-24 should be needled with a transverse-oblique insertion laterally along the intercostal space. However, in Worsley’s approach, KD-24 is needled perpendicularly to a fen depth of 3 (or 0.3 cun). The superficial nature of the insertion and the lack of needle retention in this point makes Worsley’s method a safe approach.

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Appendix A

Pills for the Five Kinds of Possession

Compiled by the herbalist Zhen Quan in 600 CE

Cinnabar—pulverize

Arsenopyrite—burned for a half-day in earth

Realgar—pulverize

Croton seed—discard the skins, roast

Hellebone—roast

Aconite root—subject to dry heat

Use 2 fen of each of the above ingredients

Centipede—broil, remove the feet

Press these seven ingredients through a sieve and combine with honey to form pills the size of small beans. The correct dose is one pill daily. This will result in a cure. If the suffering is not relieved, an additional pill should be taken at midnight. This will certainly end all complaints. One pill should be carried on one’s person at all times to ward off future misfortune. Pork, cold water, fresh-bloody things, and fox meat are to be avoided. (Unschuld, 2010).

Appendix B

Ghost Point Names

[58] CV-1 is used for men.
[59] Yumen is an extra point used for women.

Appendix C

Worsley’s Blocks to Treatment

The following list includes all of Worsley’s blocks to treatment, listed in order of their treatment.

Appendix D

Spirit-Level Points in Worsley Five-Element Acupuncture

Central to Worsley’s observation of possession is the idea of three etiological layers (or “levels”): physical, mental, and spiritual. Worsley established possession as a spirit-level pathology and lamented the rise of mental and spiritual levels of disease. In another passage, he writes:

It is astounding how much the level of disease has changed within my lifetime. When I first began to practise, the vast majority of my patients were relatively strong in mind and spirit and they thus presented predominantly physical problems, usually the result of the poor conditions in which they lived. Despite all the modern advantages of good housing, heating, and food, physical problems have not only persisted but have become more common. This is not, however, because the physical level is still the primary source of illness; it is because people are so much more troubled at the level of the spirit. (Worsley, 2012).

What does Worsley mean by “mind” and “spirit”? In my interpretation of Worsley’s schema, the body represents the physical and gross dimension of the being; the mental represents the subtle mind of thoughts; and the spiritual represents the psyche. Worsley often uses “spirit” to refer to the quality of the patient’s shen, evident in the eyes but also in the vitality of their presentation and the quality of their pulses.

In the Worsley tradition, every point has a “spirit,” an esoteric action coded in its name and its character image. In addition, certain points are called upon for their unique ability to reach the patient’s spirit level. These points are located on the outer Bladder line, upper Kidney meridian, and the Conception and Governor vessels. They should be considered in the context of possession treatment and follow-up treatments to support the patient’s spirit.

Of these points, III 37, III 39, III 41, III 42, and III 47 correspond to the five spirits, respectively:

• III 37 is the outer shu for the back shu of the Lung (III 13)

• III 39 is the outer shu for the back shu of the Heart (III 15)

• III 42 is the outer shu for the back shu of the Liver (III 18)

• III 44 is the outer shu for the back shu of the Spleen (III 20)

• III 47 is the outer shu for the back shu of the Kidney (III 23)

In contrast to the outer Bladder line and Kidney chest points, any points on the Conception and Governor vessels can be used to support the C.F., especially when the C.F. is notably deficient. However, a few points on these vessels can be used to reach the spirit level in particular.

[60] Jarrett (2016) has given consideration to the diaphragm as the “internalized wall” of repression in the body. His insights help establish a useful rationale for the psycho-spiritual import of III 41 (Diaphragm Border) and III 46 (Diaphragm Gate of Vitality). See Jarrett’s article, “Chinese Medicine and Psychoanalysis”.