Why do thousands of pilgrims slither on stone grounds of mountain ranges? Why are some naked, others covered up to their eyes, or clean shaven and with their long hair and beards wrapped under massive turbans? Some dwell in bodies striped with blood, limbs girt with belts, covered in ashes, decorated with bones, feathers and hooked implants? Who’s underneath the fire-tattooed skin or painted with intricate signs? Who’s behind the mask, who’s behind the veil? Before the cycles of Nature, vault of the Cosmos, the ancestral past, the intangible future, spaces, distances, proportions of things, a very quiver cuts across a labyrinth of paths, disclosing a pattern of gestures that codify the space-time ritual. Like “guest”, the term the gift in the transitive epitomizes a convergence of inseparable and contrary meanings- to offer and to receive; to sacrifice, to thank but also to take, render and particularly its most arcane sense that weaves into its opposite: in the Sumerian pictographs of 3000 BC the term khadra is an X in the middle of a circle: “what is inside”, “what lies at the heart”. The echo of a sole resonance overcomes all contradictions, binding them into a chain of correspondences, but what is the hinge for all the rituals that get caught around the mystery of the bodily evidence in its earthly limit? The Gift is life. It is the breath that animates and pierces life; what we inhale and exhale of that Spirit that, as is said, “renders itself” when we expire.