Taoist inner geography treats the body as a landscape and an administration at once. There are three dantian, fields of cinnabar — lower, below the navel; middle, at the heart; upper, in the head — plus passes along the spine, a Yellow Court, palaces and towers. Each of the five viscera houses a spirit with a name, a colour, a rank and a costume, catalogued in texts like the Yellow Court Classic, and meditation consists substantially of visualising these officials clearly enough to hold them in place, since a spirit that leaves its post causes illness. The gods inside are the same gods as in the temple, at domestic scale, and the ritual a priest performs at the altar is mirrored by an internal ritual performed among his own organs. This is the reason Taoist meditation manuals read like a cross between an anatomy text and a court almanac, and why translating them is so difficult.