The Ecological Alchemy of Late Summer (Part One)

A Dialogue on the Form, Function, and Postnatal Mandate of the Earth Element

Yellow over Purple, 1956. Mark Rothko.

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.

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.

Figure 1. “Elemental Cycles”. Paul Arellano.

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.

Figure 2. “Alternate Flow of 5 Elements”. Paul Arellano.

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.

The human body is structured like an ecological terrain.

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.

Earth is emblematic of the five element cycle itself.

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.

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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

1. The Mawangdui Silk Texts are a collection of Chinese medical and philosophical works discovered in a burial tomb in 1973. The tomb is estimated to have been sealed in 168 BCE, making these texts one of the earliest records of Chinese medical literature. See Palmer, D. (2009). Early Chinese Medical Literature: The Mawangdui Medical Manuscripts. Routledge.

2. See Malcolm Smith’s article “Its a Matter of Taste” for a discussion of Ayurvedic and Tibetan classifications of the six tastes.

3. Also translated as “early” and “late” Winter. See Chapter Fourteen of The Explanatory Tantra of Tibetan Medicine.

4. In Worsley’s five-element system, meridians are given a nomenclature of Roman numerals, from I (Heart) to XII (Spleen), derived from their sequence in the Chinese meridian clock. However, Peter Eckman traces the origin of this nomenclature and enumeration to the French acupuncturist, Roger De la Fuye, who published the sequence beginning with the Heart (I) in Traité d’ Acupuncture. Eckman regards this classification as “an error” in De la Fuye’s transmission of the teachings of Soulié de Morant. This enumeration was subsequently maintained by Lawson-Wood and Worsley. Eckman writes that, “These other schools and all the classical texts, however, start the enumeration of the Meridians with the Lung, rather than the Heart”. See Eckman’s In The Footsteps of the Yellow Emperor (p. 135, p. 213).

Whether De la Fuye’s placement of Heart at the beginning of the cycle is an error or not depends one’s point of view. It can be argued that Heart should be first, owing to its status as Sovereign.

5. In Daoist Inner Alchemy (neidan), jing (essence), qi (energy), and shen (spirit) are referred to as the “three treasures”. The transformation of jing into qi into shen describes the progressive refinement of the body through yogic cultivation. The three treasures can be broadly grouped into the Eastern medical concept of “vital essences”. In Ayurveda and Tibetan medicine, these vital essences are described as śukra/khu ba and ojas/mdangs.

6. Until the third century BCE, the number 5 was written as a cross, X. This evolved, in classical writing, as 五.

7. The locating of an acupuncture point at the juncture of tissues was, perhaps, first given by Suśruta as the definition of a marma point. However, Suśruta identified marma points in the context of a prohibitionary paradigm, where such “vulnerable points” were to be avoided by the surgeon, as their puncture would injure the vital force of the patient. In China, the concept of points developed in the context of a complex meridian network and as a therapeutic paradigm. These differing emphases—of point as caution vs. point as locus—remain a mysterious departure between Ayurveda and Chinese medicine.

8. The oral stage refers to Freud’s theory of psychosexual development, where it constitutes the first stage of development, spanning birth - eighteen months.

9. Worsley describes two possible Possession treatment protocols: the Seven Internal Dragons and the Seven External Dragons. The origin, theory, and application of these protocols is examined in Spirits of the Unconscious: Possession and Resurrection in Acupuncture Therapeutics.