“The occult sciences are part of Islamic intellectual history..they constituted a primary mode by which people thought about the hidden, the extraordinary, and their potential for partaking in the divine and wondrous.”

-from “From Ġāyat al-ḥakīm to Šams al-maʿārif wa laṭāʾif al-ʿawārif: Ways of Knowing and Paths of Power” by Liana Saif

In 2015, Dr Liana Saif brought out The Arabic Influences on Early Modern Occult Philosophy, a path-breaking text that assesses the manifold ways in which Islamic esotericism shaped and informed the ideas of Renaissance philosophers like Marsilio Ficino and Pico della Mirandola. Saif, who is also one of the main researchers attached to the similarly pioneering Magic in Malta project, is also fast at work producing the first critical English edition of what is arguably the most infamous book on Arabic magic and astrology: the Picatrix. We caught up with her to learn more about Islam’s intriguing relationship with Western occultism.

The Custodian: For years, some esotericists in the West have used aetiological narratives to claim intellectual descent from and spiritual continuity with ancient sages from the Near East. Much has already been said about the prevalence of fantasised portrayals of Zoroastrian and Egyptian priesthoods in these kinds of origin myths, but what do we actually know about the elusive Sabeans? What role did the Sabeans have in early Islamic works on magic and philosophy?

Liana Saif: Elusive as they are, the Sabeans have become entwined in the narrative of wisdom transmission in the Persio-Arabic world because their religion was reputedly monotheistic yet included star-veneration. In Ghāyat al-ḥakīm by the Andalusian esotericist Maslama al-Qurṭubī (d. 964), otherwise known in Latin as the Picatrix, the Ṣābiʾa are noted for their mastery of talismanry. The tenth-century secret brotherhood known as Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ, in the 52nd epistle on magic, the last in their encyclopedic opus magnum Rasāʾil Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ(“The Epistles of the Brethren of Purity”), consider the term “ṣābiʾa” as one of the names given to the Greeks. Other reports also relate them to the Greeks although it is not clear whether this is an ethnic or ideological link.

According to the Brethren, the Sabeans were also masters of talismans. They received their knowledge from the Babylonians and Egyptians. Their own ancient masters were Agathodaimon, Hermes, Ūmhars, and Aratus. We are told that they were divided into four schools: the Pythagoreans, the Aristotelians, the Platonists, and the Epicureans. Perhaps, given the planetary associations of the Greek god and goddess cults, the Brethren thought they could be classified as “Greek”.

The precise identity and whereabouts of the Sabeans in the Persio-Arabic world have been a topic of contention; particularly their association with the inhabitants of the ancient Mesopotamian trading city of Harran, southeast of Urfa in Turkey.

Christian sources report that the Harranians worshipped many deities including the Sun and the Moon but as has been stressed by many scholars, these Christian accounts were based on antagonistic attitudes to Harranian paganism, which were often more sensational than accurate. Legend has it that the Caliph al-Maʾmūn passed through the city of Harran during a military expedition to Byzantium. He came across a group of people. He asked whether they were Jews, Christians, Magians, and whether they had a prophet.

After replying that they were none of these, he accused them of being worshippers of idols and threatened them with annihilation unless they converted to Islam or one of the Religions of the Book which God mentions in the Qur’an. Some of them converted and others did not. The latter adopted the name Sabeans, as advised by a Muslim Harrani, since their religion is mentioned in the Qur’an. What makes their story more intriguing is the fact that they are indeed mentioned in sura 2, verse 26:

“Indeed, those who believed and those who were Jews or Christians or Sabeans—those [among them] who believed in God and the Last Day and were righteous – will have their reward with their Lord, and no fear will there be concerning them, nor will they grieve.”

They are thus included, as a religious group, alongside the people of the Book favourably. It’s worth remembering that all this is merely anecdotal. Upon closer inspection of historical sources, many scholars have concluded that there is no evidence to consider the Harranians known by the Arabs to be Sabeans or that the story of al-Maʾmūn is true. It is still the case that our knowledge of their doctrines and practices is derived indirectly.

For example, we find a report on the Sabeans of Harran in Murūj al-Dhahab (“The Meadows of Gold”) by the historian and geographer al-Masʿūdī (d. 956), who personally visited Harran. For him, the Sabeans were worshippers of the stars; therefore, they included the ancient Egyptians and Greeks, in addition to local contemporary groups, like the Harranians. He tells us that in Harran, the Sabeans built ten temples: seven for the planets, one for the Temple of the Chain, another for the Temple of the Form, and the last for the Temple of the Soul.

They also performed sacrifices and burned planetary suffumigations. In addition, al-Masʿūdī’s sources informed him of a temple dedicated to Azar, Abraham’s father, that had four crypts holding various speaking planetary idols. In another work, he names among their prophets, Agathodaimon, Hermes (the Prophet Idrīs, in the Islamic tradition), Homer, and Aratus. The Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾalso provide an elaborate description of their beliefs and practices, though it is not clear which group of Sabeans they are referring to.

For example, The Ikhwān report that the group believed the universe is infinite and ruled by a Great God who had given the planets domain over the world below. They believed in spirits, such as angels which they venerated to attract goodness, and devils which they venerated to avoid evil. Moreover, in this group’s ritual practices, the spirits of planets were addressed by astrological elections and interrogations, astral magic, and planetary temples. The Ikhwān also mention an elaborate rite of passage which qualified a young person to receive secrets of the religion.

The actual role they played in Islamic magical traditions is difficult to pinpoint simply because we do not have texts that are explicitly Sabean, but their astral knowledge must have infused Persio-Arabic medieval intellectual culture. In this culture, astrology and the occult sciences were considered an integral part of wisdom.

Still, we do know of an influential Sabean from Harran, the mathematician and astronomer Thābit ibn Qurra (d. 901), to whom is attributed a text on astral talismans that survives in a Judeo-Arabic Genizah fragment and two Latin translations by the famous twelfth-century translators Adelard of Bath and John of Seville. Some of the talismans in this text are similar to ones found in Ghāyat al-Ḥakīm.

C: You’re currently producing the first critical edition of the Picatrix in the English language. Can you tell us a bit more about its medieval and early modern readership? What are some common misconceptions about the text itself?

Yes, I am translating the original Arabic into English and it will be published by the Warburg Institute. It’s part of the chain of publications related to the work at the Institute from Hellmut Ritter’s Arabic edition, his and Martin Plessner’s translation into German, and David Pingree’s Latin edition. I am happy to see that this is a widely anticipated edition, as it demonstrates the ubiquitous appeal this text has had on the Western occult imagination since its Latin translation in the mid-thirteenth century under the patronage of Alfonso X of Castile. Surprisingly, it was not until the Renaissance that the Picatrix gained recognition and exerted influence.

A high number of manuscripts are extant in the libraries of Paris, Florence, Oxford, London, Krakow, Hamburg, Prague and Darmstadt, copied between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries. It is found in the collection of John Argentine (b. c.1442), doctor of medicine at Cambridge and later doctor of divinity. He was a physician to Edward V and his brother Richard Duke of York until they were assassinated in1483. He also had in his library the De imaginibus.

The Picatrix was also known to Lodovico Lazzarelli (1447–1500) and the physician Symphorien Champier (1471–1538). It was influential on many in the who’s-who list of early modern occult philosophers including Marsilio Ficino, John Dee, and Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa. Even though the book contains mostly instructions, it was really the philosophical and theoretical parts—which justified the practices—that had a strong impact on its early modern readers. As I have argued in the book, The Arabic Influences on Early Modern Occult Philosophy, in the Picatrix they found worldview in which all things are connected by astral causation and divine volition expressed through networks connecting the world above and the world below.

The multiplication of spiritual, astral, and physical realities originate from the divine realm. According to the author of the Picatrix, magic is the ability of the sage to manipulate the chains of causation by intimate knowledge of the workings of nature and the celestial bodies and by connecting his/her soul to divine volition as it manifests in the dynamics of the cosmos. Thus, the book seems to have steered clear of what could appear to Christian eyes as demonic intervention. I think most misconceptions hinge on this very central point.

Binaries are invented according to epistemological and ideological specifics pertaining to a certain culture at a certain period. Applying such binaries as demonic versus natural, black versus white, high versus low, to an Arabic medieval text like the Ghāyat and its translation is misleading. Nonetheless, such interpretations of the text persist. When the Picatrix speaks of spirits, these should not be immediately referred to “supernatural” entities such as demons or any kind of accountable creatures, but rather divine volition manifest in the universe.

One should be careful describing planetary speech as idolatrous or astrolatrous, since this implies entering a subversive contract that bypasses God and his decrees. Another trap the reader should try to avoid is judging the text’s ideological and theological undertones based on our perception of Islamic “orthodoxy” today. The Picatrix is not an isolated literary product and there is much to learn from it and many similar texts that have luckily survived about the beliefs, practices, and anxieties of the people of its time.

C: Another fascinating text with a mysterious history is the Liber vaccae. Among other things, the book includes some surrealistic, rather transgressive magic experiments involving human-animal copulation. Why was this text kept and studied by Christian monastics? What appears to have been the philosophical aims of its original creators/redactors?

L: The Liber vaccae, also known as Liber aneguemis and falsely attributed to Plato, remains, in my opinion, one of the strangest texts I read on magic. This is the title given to an Arabic text, now lost, known as Kitāb al-Nawāmīs (“The Book of Secrets”), and indeed it contains such bizarre and horrible experiments involving sexually abusing animals to produce both rational and non-rational creatures who can be of service to the operator, dead or alive.

It also includes fantastic spells for splitting the moon in half, causing giants to appear in the sky, causing all kinds of delusions and illusions such as seeing people as if they are dead and imagining serpents crawling everywhere. It is very difficult to assess why the scriptorium and library of Benedictine monks of the Abby of St Augustine in Canterbury would own (possibly have created) a copy.

Since they were both literate and privy to extensive historical records and artefacts, clergymen were considered guardians of knowledge. Certainly, dealing with this kind of text requires literacy and resourcefulness. Some clergymen were even notorious workers of magic. But it is more credible to understand the reception of the text in terms of the value of the ideas it delivers about nature and human control over it.

As I have shown in an article entitled “The Cows and the Bees: Arabic Sources and Parallels for Pseudo-Plato’s Liber vaccae”, the work fits within a scientific and magical debate on spontaneous and artificial generation. Can life emerge out of natural or magical causes without traditional sexual conception? The Liber vaccae says yes! For its early readers, it is Plato here who is saying yes; now that’s attractive. The most important, and more dangerous, question would be: do these artificially generated creatures have souls? We can create, but can we ensoul? For the thinkers behind the Liber vaccae, the answers to these questions either challenged or verified the exclusivity of God’s creative act.

C: How did you first get involved with the Magic and Malta project? Why did Sellem get a relatively light sentence for practising sorcery? Can you give us some updates on the forthcoming book?

L: Prof. Dionisius Agius, the principal investigator on the project, asked me to become one of its consultants, based on my expertise on Arabic magic. One of my responsibilities is to study the practices that Sellem, the Moorish slave, might have practiced according to the statements of witnesses in his inquisition trial. This, of course, requires contextualising these practices by looking at the nature of magic practised in early modern Europe from which Sellem hailed, as well as the attitudes about it.

In addition, I looked at how these Arabic ideas clashed with the Catholic conception and attitude of the inquisitors and Maltese folk. It became clear to me that magic and witchcraft became hyper-ambivalent constructs and the Inquisition became an arena for setting racial and social identities firmly in place by using these same constructs to communicate the inferiority, malevolence, emasculation, and otherness of Sellem the Cairene moor.

Yet, like you say, after the conviction, the punishment was relatively mild: the sentence was that he should be “lightly beaten” publicly in the cities of Vittoriosa and Valletta, with a trumpet sounding before him and a notice placed on his head. From there he would be taken to “the dishonourable place of chains” and kept for an hour tied up, then returned to the prison awaiting further notice. However, on the day of carrying out the sentence—due to a storm— he was lightly beaten only in Vittoriosa, not Valletta.

Generally speaking, the Inquisition’s sentencing of witches and heretics in the southern countries was relatively less severe than its northern counterparts. It is also possible that the sentence was intended to deter him from providing magical services to Christian clients rather than for heresy, since his soul had always been lost as a Muslim.

C: Can you tell us about your upcoming talks and conference presentations? What other projects are in the works?

L: I am editing a special issue on “Islamic Esotericisms” for Correspondences: Journal for the Academic Study of Esotericism, which will feature articles on the varieties of Islamic esotericism, such as those expressed by the Bengali Bauls, Andalusian mystics, and The Five Percenters. I will also be presenting in the conference the findings from my contribution to this special issue entitled “What is Islamic Esotericism? Contouring a New Field”. Additionally, I am editing with Francesca Leoni, Farouk Yahya and Matthew Melvin-Koushki a volume provisionally entitled “Islamicate Occult Sciences: Theory and Practice” that will—hopefully— come out next year.

In September of this year I will present a paper on Sellem (“It’s Never Just Witchcraft: The Trial of Sellem the Moor in Malta (1605)”), for the Living in a Magical World: Inner Lives, 1300–1900 which will take place at Oxford, 17-19 September.

In October, I begin working at the Warburg Institute in association with the Université Catholique de Louvain as a postdoctoral researcher in the ERC PhilAnd project, “The Origin and Early Development of Philosophy in tenth-century al-Andalus: the impact of ill-defined materials and channels of transmission.” My objectives are to provide an in-depth analysis of the understudied Kitāb al-Baḥth attributed to Jābir ibn Ḥayyān, and to gauge its influence in al-Andalus. I will also produce a critical English edition and translation of the text.

Want more stories? Check out our spin-off project, Godfrey’s Almanack.

Share this: Twitter

Facebook

