This presentation considers the interconnected ancient cosmologies between China and the Muslim world, via the herbal pathways of cinnamon, which featured prominently in the Silk Road herbal drug trade of the Golden Age of Islam (8th to 13th century CE) and the early Tang Dynasty. For example, the synergies between Islamic medicine and ancient Chinese medicine can best be seen in Hui medicine, which synthesizes traditional Islamic Arabia medicine and philosophy with Traditional Chinese medicine (TCM). I am particularly interested in the pungent spice cinnamon, which is referenced across ancient Chinese and Islamic medical traditions to balance elemental deficiencies of the body, whether to dispel the coldness, promote warm circulation in the gut, or to promote and induce menstruation in women. Today, we see the adaptation of Chinese-Islamic cosmological and metaphysical ancient thought in astrological magic, for example, the use of cinnamon in Venusian oils and talismans by modern-day Picatrix practitioners like Sphere + Sundry. Extending the possibilities of such an herbal pathway into the realm of art and culture, I wish to propose the possibilities of an anti-inflammatory cinna-matic aesthetics that “warms the heart yang” and promotes loving circulation. Drawing from Nathaniel Dorksy’s suggestion of a metabolic cinema in Devotional Cinema, Elizabeth A. Wilson’s consideration of bile in “gut feminism,” as well as ancient medical texts, this paper explores the possibilities of a Chinese-Islamic cosmological cinema through transnational analyses of "A First Farewell" (Lina Wang, 2018), a film about Uyghur children and their ailing parents, and Kelly Reichardt’s "First Cow" (2019), in which cinnamon appears as way to signify the troubled gains of Chinese racialized settlement in the new frontier of the American Pacific northwest. In both cases, I suggest that cinnamon appears even where Islam or Islamic knowledge does not/cannot. Bibliography: Buell, Paul. "Food, medicine and the silk road: The Mongol era exchanges." Silk Road 5.2 (2007): 22-35. Dorsky, Nathaniel. Devotional Cinema (University of Berkeley Press, 2014 third edition). Kotyk, Jeffrey. “Buddhist Astrology and Astral Magic in the Tang Dynasty,” PhD Dissertation (Leiden University, 2017). Wilson, Elizabeth A. Gut Feminism (Duke University Press, 2020 second edition). Yoeli-Tlalim, Ronit. ReOrienting Histories of Medicine: Encounters Along the Silk Roads (New York: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2021).