Studying occultism involves crossing the boundaries between science and religion, as well as exploring practices shared between different religious communities. In examining “the science of the breath” (Persian: `ilm-i dam), we have to hold two positions as simultaneously true despite their seeming contradictory meanings. One, that `ilm-i dam represents a group of esoteric breathing practices translated from Sanskrit or Hindi into Persian as far back at the mid-14th-century CE. The “Indian-ness” of these practices is consistently preserved in the wide variety of Persian translations, usually in passages where the scribe writes about witnessing these practices “amongst the Hindus/Indians” (hinduvān), or sometimes more specifically the “yogis” (jogiān). Two, that despite the foreignness of these breathing practices, they are still represented as one among the many effective tools available to someone interested in accessing cosmic power. More recent scholarship has argued that rulers (and their advisers) from Persianate imperial regimes in the early-modern period were extremely invested in improving their chances of success in the temporal world through channeling power believed to exist in abundant fashion on the astral plane. Earlier generations of Euro-american scholars relegated Islamicate occultism to the periphery of Sufism, with suspect credentials as “fully” Islamic practices. Despite this pigeonholing, Muslim scholars’ classification of `ilm-i dam easily confounds that assumption, as it is deemed outside of Sufism in numerous Persian encyclopedias, including the Nefais al-funun wa `arayis al-`uyun by Shams al-Din Muhammad Amuli (d. 753/1352) and Abu’l Fazl ibn Mubarak’s ‘Ain-i Akbari (compiled circa 1590 CE). What does it mean that Amuli classified zikr (the “remembrance” of God that contains breath control elements) with the forms of Sufi practice, but `ilm-i dam is part of the natural sciences? Similarly, Abu’l Fazl presents `ilm-i dam using its Sanskrit name, svarodaya, as part of his taxonomy of Indian knowledge traditions. This paper argues that cultivating knowledge of the esoteric, or subtle, body is key to achieving various forms of control or success in the exoteric, or gross, world. The body itself is the conduit through which practitioners of `ilm-i dam channel that breath, attuning themselves to the rhythm of the universe.