Ian Whittlesea: The Egyptian Postures

Softcover | 14.8 x 1.1 x 21 | 156 pp

The Everyday Press | 2017 | 9780993372858

The Egyptian Postures is a guide to the most advanced Mazdaznan exercises that Johannes Itten taught his students at the Bauhaus. Often performed while singing or humming the postures were intended to activate glands and re-channel internal energies, stirring the blood in ways that contributed to the perpetual evolution of humanity. They were also said to induce auto-illumination, the participant’s body generating an intense light from within. 

This edition of Dr. Otoman Zar-Adusht Ha’nish’s original instructions has been newly edited and illustrated by Ian Whittlesea with images of actor Ery Nzaramba demonstrating the postures and an in-depth essay by Pádraic E. Moore that explores the relationships between esoteric movements, their racial theories and early modernism's embrace and eventual dismissal of the occult, Mazdaznan and Itten.

Ian Whittlesea is an artist whose work explores the relationships between language, light, image and diagram both on the page and in the world. His translation of Yves Klein’s Les Fondements du Judo was published in 2009, Mazdaznan Health & Breath Culture in 2012, Becoming Invisible in 2014, On Colour... in 2019 and Trataka in 2020. These texts have been collectively described as ‘instruction manuals for transcendental exercise’.