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Origins of the Occult: Medieval Lineages of Magical Knowledge

Submitted to Program Units
1: Islamic Mysticism Unit

Seth Auster-Rosen,, Presiding

Abstract for Online Program Book (maximum 150 words)

Modern theories of disenchantment often relegate enchantment to distant times and places: the "enchanted Dark Ages," the "irrational Orient." But how did medieval practitioners and theorists of the occult sciences vest their ideas with particular genealogies and geographies? This panel explores the ways in which premodern Muslim, Jewish, and Christian writers in the Islamicate world created lineages and genealogies of occult knowledge in order to render it legitimate. Ideas of occult origins were informed by the real circulation of occult texts across linguistic, communal, and temporal boundaries. References to Greece, Egypt, Chaldea, India, and elsewhere, attest to the cosmopolitanism of these texts. Combining the historical diversity of their sources and their own creativity, medieval Muslims (and some Iberian kings and Jews) contrived ancient and diverse lineages for the history of astrology, magic spells, and more. This panel considers the politics of associating a place, religion or linguistic group with the occult.

Papers

  • Alexa Herlands,

    Useful Prologues and Bad Geography: Magic’s Origins Between Ghāyat al-ḥakīm and the Picatrix of Alfonso X

    Abstract

    The Andalusī grimoire known as the Aim of the Wise One or Ghāyat al-ḥakīm (ca. 4th/10th c.) was famously translated century by Alfonso X el Sabio of Castile (d.682/1284). Relying on bilingual Jewish intermediaries, Alfonso created the mysteriously-named Castilian Picatriz and Latin Picatrix, monikers he took as the author’s name. Bursting with planetary prayers and gory rituals, the idiosyncratic and influential Ghāya/Picatrix is, like most occult texts, erased from mainstream intellectual history. I argue that the text, in both Arabic and Latin, uses Ancient and foreign lineages to legitimize its project of the production of magical knowledge. In other words, both the Muslim author and Alfonso located the origins of occult knowledge with peoples who were temporally and culturally Othered (the Arabs of Picatrix, and the Kurds, Nabateans, and Ethiopians of Ghāya) even as they claimed magical authority for themselves.

  • Lillian McCabe, Yale University

    The Four Schools of Magic: An Islamic Theory of Comparative Religion

    Abstract

    This paper traces and analyzes a theory of comparative magic that circulated in premodern Arabic bibliographic and magical texts: that there are four schools of magic, each identified with a particular nation or group of people. The four groups are the Indians, the Nabateans, the Greeks, and the monotheists—referred to as Hebrews, Copts, and Arabs. My analysis focuses on one particular application of this theory by Muḥammad al-Kashnāwī al-Sudānī (d. 1142/1741-2) in his text titled al-Durr al-Manẓūm, a commentary on and expansion of Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī’s (d. 606/1210) popular handbook of practical magic, the Book of the Hidden Secret (Kitāb al-Sirr al-Maktūm). The paper argues that Kashnāwī’s discourse of comparative magic conceals a theory of comparative religion. His four schools describe different religious groups and their practices. By labelling them magic, he enfolds those practices into an Islamic framework, thereby accounting for their efficacy and enabling their use.

  • Alex Matthews, University of Chicago

    An Ismā‘īlī Shekhinah: the Divine Magic of Egypt in Fāṭimid Ta'w

    Abstract

    Historians, both contemporary and medieval, have regarded the Fāṭimid conquest of Egypt as merely one stop on their path to a worldwide Shī‘ī empire. The Fāṭimid Ismā‘īlī dā‘īs (missionaries), however, tell a different story. For Ja‘far b. Manṣūr al-Yaman in particular, Egypt was not an intermediary stage nor a layover on the way to Baghdad and Constantinople, but a land of divine magic where God's connection with His chosen regents was particularly strong, where miracles could take place, and where God's favor upon His imams was most strongly felt. Ja‘far’s notion that a particular land could be more favorable for prophecy may have influenced the writings of the Andalusian Jewish thinker Judah Halevi (1075 – 1141), who argued for a proto-nationalistic view of Israel as a land where prophecy descends on God's elite (ṣafwa) and where the shekhinah, or divine presence, can be most strongly felt, highlighting the already-established intellectual exchange between Fatimid Ismaili and Jewish thinkers

  • Rachel Katz, University of Chicago

    Segulah as Index for Jewish Particularism

    Abstract

    Translating the Arabic khāssah, the Hebrew segulah had multiple valences: It could signify a characteristic property in Aristotelian taxonomy. More commonly, it signified an “occult” property of some natural object, verifiable by empirical experience but inexplicable according to the laws of Aristotelian science. While scholarly investigations of segulah have contributed to understandings of medieval Hebrew astral magic and medicine, I suggest they simultaneously obscure an important dimension indexed by segulah, suggested by the term’s appearance in the Biblical text itself: as a modifier for the Israelite people—viz., as indicative of Jewish chosenness. Accordingly, this paper traces shifting deployments of segulah from the 13th–15th centuries. Asking not what kind of property is a segulah, but rather, what kinds of things have segulot, I argue that the concept of segulah functions as an index for changing ideas about Jewish particularism in medieval Hebrew literature.

  • Ariela Marcus-Sells, Elon University

    Science, Sorcery, or Superstition: Debating Cosmology in the Sahara

    Abstract

    In the early twentieth century, a Senegalese Sufi scholar named Musa Kamara composed a short work in Arabic entitled Sharḥ al-ṣadr fī kalām ʿalā’l-siḥr. Kamara addressed his work to a French colonial administrator, Albert Bonnel de Mézières, with the goal of explaining practices that fell under the category of sorcery (siḥr) in “lands near and far.” The Sharḥ al-ṣadr itself pulls from an earlier debate at the turn of the nineteenth century between two Saharan Muslim scholar, who disagreed over the permissibility of certain practices related to the realm of the unseen (ʿālam al-ghayb). Musa Kamara directly cites the work of these two figures, but recontextualizes their debates within a new constellation of discourses about race and rationality. My paper uses the Sharḥ al-ṣadr to examine the process of translation that stripped a pre-colonial debate of its cosmological foundations and brought it into a colonial-era debate about logic and rationality.

Audiovisual Requirements

Resources

LCD Projector and Screen
Podium microphone

Full Papers Available

No
Program Unit Options

Session Length

2 Hours
Schedule Info

Monday, 12:30 PM - 2:30 PM

Tags

#Sufism
#occult
#colonialism
#magic
#cosmology
#islam

Session Identifier

A25-212