This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
A subtle energy entry records one tradition's own name for a vital force held to move through, animate or connect a living body and, in many accounts, the wider world beyond it: qi in Chinese medicine and philosophy, prana in Indian yogic and Ayurvedic thought, mana across Polynesian traditions, barakah in Islamic and Sufi practice, orenda among the Haudenosaunee, and comparable concepts in dozens more traditions the atlas records separately rather than folding into one another.
An entry keeps each tradition's own vocabulary, its own cosmology and its own claimed effects distinct, since two traditions naming what looks like a similar force rarely mean exactly the same thing by it: qi carries a documented medical and physiological role within Chinese medicine that prana's yogic breath practice does not share in the same terms, and mana's Polynesian sense of an impersonal, transferable potency is not identical to barakah's specifically divine blessing. An entry states plainly where a later, mostly Western esoteric movement borrowed and reworked an older tradition's own term, rather than presenting the borrowing as the original meaning.
An entry also keeps a subtle energy's traditional account, what practitioners within the tradition itself hold it to be and do, distinct from any outside scientific assessment of the same claim, recording both honestly rather than either asserting the traditional claim as settled fact or dismissing it without recording what the tradition itself actually holds.