An Exercise Revisited

Jun. 8th, 2023 02:57 pm
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Gardener logoBack in February, I posted something here about an interesting exercise I'd found in early 20th century American occult literature, the Rising Call exercise. I'd meant to post something else in a week or two. Then, as the legendary school history exam paper put it, some other stuff happened, and I'm only just picking up the threads I had to drop at that time.

The Rising Call exercise was one of the many items to come from the busy pen of Harry Gardener, a Los Angeles occultist active from the 1920s through the 1960s. Gardener was also a small-time occult publisher, and he came to my attention because his press was the one that originally released The Eye of Revelation, the booklet that introduced the Five Rites exercises to the US occult community. (My book on the Rites will be out in the fall.) Gardner seems to have been active in an odd little Rosicrucian order in the 1930s and 1940s -- not one of the major orders, and not one that seems to have left many more traces -- and that appears to be the source of the Rising Call exercise and a range of other teachings and traditions.

Rising CallThe Rising Call exercise is of interest to me because it works with a dimension of occultism that's been largely forgotten in recent times -- the ductless glands in the brain. Alongside the main parts of the brain -- the cerebrum, the cerebellum, and the brainstem -- there are various little glands and nerve centers, mostly scattered around the underside of the brain.  These communicate to each other and to the brain as a whole partly through nerve linkages and partly through chemicals released into the bloodstream, but they have a third route. The whole brain floats in a pool of cerebrospinal fluid, which is held in by a set of membranes that line the inside of your skull.

When you're young, the cerebrospinal fluid flows freely around the brain. With age, the membranes get stiff, dead cells and assorted gunk builds up in the channels and passages that allow the fluid to flow, and so the ductless glands can no longer use the cerebrospinal fluid to get chemicals all through the brain. This is a difficulty in general, but it's especially problematic for the occultist, because that flow of chemicals from gland to gland is important in certain kinds of spiritual development; notably, certain exercises that stimulate the pineal gland won't have their full effect unless the pineal secretions can make their way through a channel at the front of the third ventricle to the pituitary gland.

This exercise is meant to get your brain fluid moving. It works by gently increasing blood pressure in the brain -- that's why you bend forward, so your head is lower than your heart -- and also by using the retained breath to put pressure inside the nasal tissues and sinuses. In effect, you're gently squeezing your brain, in order to get the fluid in motion again.

So that's the point of the exercise. I've heard from several readers who've tried it and found that it seems to be useful. I'll be interested to hear from anyone who has experiences to report.

Edit: If you're interested in the original source, you can download a PDF copy here. Keep in mind that it's most of a century old and the author has the attitudes and opinions of his time rather than ours.

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An Exercise

Feb. 23rd, 2023 04:46 pm
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emblemOne of the side effects of doing research into the byways of  occultism is that every so often something very interesting comes up. Recently I did a lot of digging into 20th century American occultism, in order to chase down the background of those interesting exercises, the Five Rites. A book on the subject, The Secret of the Five Rites: In Search of a Lost Tradition of Western Inner Alchemy, will be out this fall, but in the meantime I have a few useful things to share. The material below is one of them.

The Eye of Revelation, the 1939 pamphlet that originally made the Five Rites public, was published (and partly written) by a remarkable Los Angeles occultist named Harry J. Gardener.  During the 1940s and 1950s, he was apparently part of a Rosicrucian magical lodge I'm still tracking down -- it doesn't seem to have been affiliated with any of the known Rosicrucian orders -- and his voluminous writings include various tidbits of spiritual practice I've never encountered elsewhere. (The star, circle and triangle logo above and to the left was apparently the emblem of Gardener's lodge; if anyone else has seen this elsewhere, I'd be most interested to hear about it.)

One of the practices Gardener taught was a breath and movement exercises he called the Rising Call. Here's how it's done:

Rising Call"The exercise is as follows: Standing erect, place the right thumb against the right nostril, allowing the fingers of the hand to extend upward in line with the forehead. Now through the left nostril completely fill the lungs with air. Then with the index finger of the same hand close the left nostril also.

"With the lungs filled and the lips partly open so that there will be no pressure in the mouth, bend over from the waist, getting the head lowered as far as is conveniently possible. Then allow a portion of the air in the lungs to gently come back into the nose so as to create just a very slight pressure there. This position allows the blood to flow into every part of the brain which, along with the air in the lungs, has a very energizing effect upon the entire system and especially upon the sensitive nerve centers of the brain.

"When the desire to resume breathing is quite strong, rise to the erect position, then close the left nostril and allow the breath to escape through the right nostril by removing thumb. Do not force it out with great speed; nor should you retard it to any great extent. Just let it flow out freely and naturally until the lungs are emptied without forcing out the last particle of air through sheer force.

"Now, with positively no intervening breaths—in other words, with the very next inhalation of air—repeat the process. Close the right nostril with the right thumb; inhale through the left nostril; close both nostrils; bend over until ready to exhale; then stand erect; remove the thumb from the right nostril and exhale. Do this three times. That is, you fill the lungs three times, you hold the breath and bend over three times, and you exhale three times."

-- Harry J. Gardener, Streamline Minds (1936)

One thing Gardener says elsewhere in the book, which is worth repeating, is that this is done only three times per session, and only one session is done per day. More than that can be too much. Also, do it gently; there are no prizes for using excessive force.

What's interesting to me is that this is a very precise and gentle way to change the pressure in the cerebrospinal fluid. Your brain floats in a puddle of fluid, which is separate from the blood and held in by a set of membranes; the fluid is partly there as a shock absorber, but it also functions to carry hormones and neurotransmitters from one part of the brain to the other, and also from the pineal and pituitary glands to each other and to various parts of the brain.  The Rising Call, by gently and temporarily increasing the pressure on the cerebrospinal fluid by increasing the blood pressure on the brain and then using breath pressure in the sinuses to add to that, seems to flush fluid through the brain's ventricles and around the periphery of the cerebrum and cerebellum.

It's supposed to have various beneficial effects. For the sake of an informal experiment, I'm not going to mention what those are just now -- I'll describe what Gardener says, and what my experiences have been, in a week or so. I will say that I've practiced this now daily for three months without any ill effects whatsoever, and with notable benefits. I'd like to invite readers to give it a try, and post whatever experiences they have as a result.
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Tracing an Occult Tradition

Mar. 13th, 2021 01:06 pm
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vital bodyA little while ago I reread Peter Kelder's classic early 20th century occult exercise book, The Eye of Revelation.  It's partly a classic because of its framing -- it retails the standard cod story about a seeker finding a strange lamasery in Tibet where he learned mysterious exercises that he brought back to the Western world, and does so in high style -- but it's also a classic because the exercises it teaches, the Five Rites, are good solid physical culture exercises with reliable effects on the material and subtle bodies, and they have a substantial following all over the world these days. (You can read a good description of them here.) 

There are a few odd things about the Rites, however, and one of them -- to my mind, the most important of them -- is the set of energy centers described briefly in Kelder's text.  Here's what he has to say about them: 
 
“The first important thing I was taught after entering the Lamasery,” he began, “was this. The body has seven centres which, in English, could be called Vortexes. These are kind of magnetic centers. They revolve at great speed in the healthy body, but when slowed down – well, that is just another name for old age, ill-health, and senility.
 
“There are two of these Vortexes in the brain; one at the base of the throat; another in the right side of the body opposite the liver; one in the sexual center; and one in each knee.  These spinning centres of activity extend beyond the flesh in the healthy individual, but in the old, weak, senile person they hardly reach the surface, except in the knees. The quickest way to regain health, youth, and vitality is to start these magnetic centres spinning again.

"There are SEVEN Psychic Vortexes in the physical body. They are located as follows:
  • Vortex “A” is located deep within the forehead
  • Vortex “B” is in the posterior part of the brain
  • Vortex “C” located in throat at the base of the neck
  • Vortex “D” located in the right side of the body (waist line)
  • Vortex “E” is in the reproductive anatomy or organs
  • Vortexes “F” and “G” located one in either knee."
vortex locationsIn the illustration that accompanies the text, shown on the right, the placement of vortex D is shown as though you're looking in the mirror.  Earlier that led me to confuse it with the Theosophical idea of the spleen center as a major chakra, but this time, I was smart enough to pay attention and notice what the text actually says. 

There has been a lot of discussion in recent years about the source of the Five Rites, most of it based on the assumption that Kelder's claim of a Tibetan origin should be taken literally. Those seven energy centers, however, point in a different direction. You can find them discussed at length in the pages of Max Heindel's Rosicrucian Cosmo-Conception, from which I took the diagram at the top of this post. The same centers described in Kelder's book are shown in that diagram as points around which the desire body (astral body or aura) forms vortices. Here's one bit of Heindel on the subject: 

"There are no organs in the desire body, as in the dense and vital bodies, but there are centers of perception, which, when active, appear as vortices, always remaining in the same relative position to the dense body, most of them about the head. In the majority of people they are mere eddies and are of no use as centers of perception. They may be awakened in all, however, but different methods produce different results." 

Heindel got most of his ideas originally from Rudolf Steiner, whose student he was back before he came to the United States. I don't know Steiner's voluminous works well enough to know whether these same centers appear in them; I do know that they were picked up and used by some other Rosicrucian groups in the United States during the twentieth century.  There was a great deal of interest in energy centers other than the standard chakras at that time, not least because a rush of incautious students in the 1920s tried to practice it using Sir John Woodroffe's book The Serpent Power as their manual, with disastrous results. (According to Manly P. Hall, the body count was considerable.) Since the Five Rites work quite well -- I've practiced them with good results -- and Heindel's Rosicrucian Fellowship has earned a solid reputation as one of the saner occult groups out there (I'd probably be a member myself if I was a Christian and could handle a vegetarian diet), tracing the lore of these centers and seeing if there are other practices that make use of them is one of my current research projects.
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