Indian concepts of breath-energy – prana – may have predated and inspired those of Europe and China. Hindus teach that in addition to the physical body, there is an astral body, occupying the same space and connected to the physical body by a thread, severed at death. The vital energy, prana, flows through this astral body within thousands of channels – nadis – connecting seven energy centres or wheels of light, known as the chakras. Health and consciousness can be controlled by regulating the flow of prana, using pranayama (breathing exercises), asanas (yoga postures), and meditation. Normally, most of our prana is carried by the Ida and Pingala nadis, which pass through the left and right nostrils respectively, and carry cooling moon energy or warming sun energy respectively. Yogis claim to control their level of consciousness by minutely regulating their breath and thus the flow of prana, by changing the depth, rhythm, and nostrils used for breathing. In one type of yoga, ‘Kundalini Yoga’, the yogi uses breathing techniques and meditation to mobilize the creative female energy (Kundalini) latent in all – men and women. This energy is symbolized by a sleeping snake coiled around the bottom chakra at the base of the spine. The yogi attempts to create an inner heat that rouses the serpent-power from its sleep, driving it up the central nadi along the spine, piercing each chakra in its path, and absorbing their energy, until finally uniting with the male energy of the crown chakra at the top of the head. Kundalini may be experienced as if a bolt of electric charge were passing up the spine, and, if successful, results in a higher level of consciousness where all illusions are dispelled.
The heart and heartbeat were associated with the soul or spirit in most early cultures, and it is not hard to see why. The heart beats rhythmically and continuously at the body’s centre from birth to death. It speeds up during strong emotions and exertion. It slows down with age and rest. Its stopping is synonymous with death. It is the only internal organ with spontaneous motion, and can be extracted from the body still beating. It is associated with the pulse and the movement of the blood. In Egypt, the heart held the power of life and the source of good and evil. According to the Book of the Dead, the heart of each human was weighed on a scale against a feather after death to determine the balance of good and evil, and thus the fate of the spirit. In many Indian and Chinese languages, the words for heart and mind are more or less synonymous. The Toltecs and Aztecs of ancient Mexico ripped the still-beating heart out of their human sacrifices to offer to their sun god. Most early cultures located consciousness and emotions in the heart (or chest/lungs). Interestingly, the soul (psyche), which survived death and produced new life, was often located elsewhere, usually the brain. However, many early cultures did not have such a strongly dualistic concept of the separation of mind and body. Thus it is not always appropriate to talk separately of the mind and body, or of locating the mind in a particular organ of the body.
The Ilongot, a society of headhunters with relatively little contact with the modern world, living in the Philippines, have a word liget which means something like energy and anger. This force arises in the heart, because for them ‘motions of the heart are emotions’ – a belief not far removed from modern, psychological theories of emotion. However, the word liget is also used by the Ilongot in ways that we might regard as metaphorical. For example, chili gives liget to a stew, ginger revitalizes liget in a killer, and winds have more liget when obstructed. Liget is also revealed in people when they pant and sweat, flowing inwardly and generating redness in the self. It is dynamic, organic, chaotic violence, and also the stuff of life.
Early cultures often did not distinguish between the literal (or concrete) and metaphorical (or abstract) use of a concept – the concept of metaphor was only invented by Aristotle in the fourth century BC. So the ancient Greeks used a word such as psyche to refer to both a substance in the body and the behaviour of the soul. The temptation is to say that the ancient Greeks and other early cultures were more literal minded and their thought was less abstract. Yet, most modern discourse also fails to distinguish between literal and metaphorical uses of words. The word ‘energy’ is popularly used to describe everything from the charge supplied by electricity wires, to the intensity of an artistic performance. One manifestation of literal mindedness is the tendency to explain a property of something as due to a discrete substance within the thing (an unfortunate tendency known as ‘reification’). For example, Dr Pangloss, in Molière’s Candide, explained falling asleep as due to a ‘dormative principle’ within the body or mind. Similarly ‘living’, which is essentially a state or way of being, has been explained in terms of substance: life or vis viva (the life-force). Doing things intensely or passionately has been explained in terms of the possession of ‘energy’, the energizing substance swirling around the body or mind. In some cases, thinking of a property or behaviour as a ‘thing’ can be helpful, but more usually scientific or intellectual progress has been made by explaining ‘things’ in terms of processes. Thus most scientists no longer think of life or energy as things to be explained by separate substances, rather they are particular arrangements or processes of matter. However, in popular culture, life and energy still have mixed literal and metaphorical meanings, which partly reflect those of much earlier times.
In early cultures the heart’s beating was associated with the movement of blood in the body, which was indicated by the pulse and by the rhythmic spurting of blood from severed arteries. The pulse was used in the diagnosis of health and illness, vigour and death in the medicine of ancient Greece, India and China. The violent colour of blood, its dramatic eruption from wounds, its ability to rapidly congeal once outside the body, and the fact that its loss was associated with death, all contributed to the idea that it was intimately connected with life. Indeed for some cultures, blood was seen as the substance of life itself. Many stone-age burials have been discovered where the bones have been covered with a red ochre probably representing blood, which would suggest that the connection between blood and life (or death) was very early indeed. The drinking of blood, either literally or symbolically (as in the Christian Eucharist), was a means of transferring the soul/energy of the human, animal or god to the drinker.
Our caveman has now got some theories, but it does not seem to be doing his cavewoman any good. She has gone cold. The caveman now needs to add one more item to his list of differences between living and dead: body heat. The body temperature of living mammals and birds is normally higher than their surroundings, cooling to that of their environment at death. If our body temperature is lowered by more than a few degrees, if for example we fall into freezing water, then we rapidly die. Clearly heat has an important connection to life. In pre-industrial times, the only significant producers of heat were animals, fire and the sun. Aristotle, for example, thought of the life-force partly as a kind of fire inside the body. And the association between heat (and movement) and the life-force, may well explain the widespread belief that the sun was a god, and the use of fire in religious rituals. In fact there are a number of other important similarities between life and fire: both are produced by the burning of organic matter (fuel/food) with air (supplied by a bellows or breathing), which generates heat, movement, and residual waste (ash/faeces). This analogy was important both in ancient Greece and in much more modern times. For it was the key concept in the development of the modern scientific idea of body energy, although the theory could not be used productively until chemical concepts of burning were developed by Lavoisier in the eighteenth century.
Back with our caveman, things are looking bleak. The cavewoman’s body has started to decay. First the flesh rots away, leaving the skeleton, then the bones themselves disintegrate to dust. Although the process is slow, its effect is dramatic: we start with a highly organized human body and end with a pile of dust, which merges into the soil. There is obviously little hope of reversing this process, and nowhere for the soul to hide afterwards. This is clearly the great disaster of the human condition. Many cultures have expended immense efforts trying to either prevent or circumvent this problem. The ancient Egyptians were the most zealous, utilizing mummification, pyramids, tombs, sacred objects, temples, an extensive priesthood, literature and mythology to evoke a whole parallel world beyond death. In Egypt, bodies were at first buried in dry sand in which they could survive for up to a thousand years, but were shrivelled and dried out. Subsequent use of stone coffins resulted in