Occult Sciences

More than any other object of historical and anthropological study, Islamicate occult science cuts to the quick of what it means to be modern, to be Western, to be scientific. Yet nowhere else are 19th-century colonialist metaphysics and materialist cosmology more firmly entrenched. The piecemeal, truncated study of “Magic in Islam” to date has thus of-ten been pursued in service of either scientistic or religionist agendas, whereby magic can only ever be failed science or apolitical religion, and Islam can never be the West; Islamic Magic as simply Western and often imperial Science-and-Religion is thereby utterly disappeared from historiographical purview. And even those Islamicist historians of science and historians of religion who eschew ideology in favor of rigorously empirical philology, the majority, have tended to favor outsider, polemical discourses over insider, practitioner ones, and “classical” sources over “postclassical,” resulting in bizarre historiographical distortions and the disenchanting sanitization of Islamicate societies past and present. This manifesto therefore proposes a way out of this dire epistemological and ethical bind. To re-store Islamic Magic to its rightful place in Western intellectual and cultural history, especially history of science, we must take far more seriously the panpsychist cosmology on which it is predicated, and realize that our own reflexive materialism commits us willynilly to a colonialist agenda that is, ironically, both antireligious and antiscientific.

The pseudo-Aristotelian Hermetica (hereafter PsAH) are a group of texts surviving in Arabic that claim to record conversations between Aristotle and Alexander the Great. In these conversations, Aristotle instructs Alexander about the cosmos, the comingto-be of everything in it, and astral magic-more precisely, talismanry, rituals for attracting the spiritual and planetary forces of the cosmos, the creation of amulets, and extensive astrological rules. The purpose of the instruction is to support Alexander's military career and personal life. Aristotle claims to have received this knowledge from Hermes Trismegistus. There are very few studies dedicated to these fascinating and influential texts; therefore, this article offers a preliminary study of the PsAH that introduces the texts and their contexts systematically.

The article analyzes the novel by V. Bryusov "Fire angel" in the context of occult trends of the early twentieth century and the dream poetics of symbolist prose.
Keywords. XX century Russian literature, Russian prose, Valerij Brjusov, dreams, oneiric story, occultism.

In the tenth/sixteenth century six treatises on physiognomy (ʿilm-i firāsat)—a science widely considered able to predict inner moral dispositions (aḫlāq-i bāṭina) based on external appearances (aḥwāl-i ẓāhira)—were written for the Ottoman court. In a world in which statecraft and politics were ultimately based on questions of morality (aḫlāq), physiognomy was presented as a particularly useful skill for the Ottoman court due to its ability to evaluate inner moral character with scientific precision. Based on such knowledge, a partial conception of justice could be implemented with an instrumental coating of impartiality. Moreover, men with prized moral qualities could be selected for the ruling elite. The science also offered the sultan and his court a modus operandi for attaining self-knowledge and, if combined with moral self-disciplining (riyāḍat), a way to acquire divine characteristics.

“Ребис, или Тайна Алхимика” представляет собой, несомненно, один из первых настоящих полных  алхимических трактатов XXI века, три тома которого пытаются предоставить очень точные оперативные ключи к различным аспектам Делания, Великого Делания, именуемого так, поскольку оно является единым и тройственным: то есть материальным, психическим и духовным одновременно.

Первый том, посвящённый Молельне, предоставит магические или теургические инструменты, которые одни позволят алхимику утвердить впоследствии свою власть над материей и направить таким образом эту последнюю на короткие пути, считающиеся невозможными...

В противоположность общепринятому представлению, успех в алхимии заключается не в знании химического сочетания, неизвестного современной науке, но в реализации исключения, чуда, на свершение которого позволяет надеяться только предварительная теургическая практика, “si fata te vocant”, “если такова твоя судьба”: именно тогда Дух оплодотворяет Материю и может произойти немыслимое...

Методы и продвижение, изложенные в этом томе, не являются присущими исключительно алхимии и могут также заинтересовать любого человека, стремящегося стать магом.

Jimmy Page had a deep interest in the occult, especially the work of Aleister Crowley, and this interest, which can also be seen in other British rock acts at the time such as David Bowie, filtered into his work with Led Zeppelin, something that can best be exemplified with the cover of Led Zeppelin IV. This short paper will explore the British rock music scene's flirtation with Crowley during the period of the 1960s and 1970s, and will attempt to put forward a reason behind this strange fascination.

ABSTRACT
The Jacobean era's infamous witchcraft trials are recalled after reservoir repairs close to Pendle Hill reveal a buried cottage with bricked‐up cat. Interpretations of the building as the site of Malkin Tower, recorded in court records as the venue of a witches coven are critically evaluated in the light of archaeological and historical evidence.

KEYWORDS
WITCH, PENDLE WITCH TRIALS, PENDLE HILL, MALKIN TOWER, FOLK BELIEF, MAGIC, LANCASTER ASSIZES, WISE WOMEN, CUNNING FOLK, ARCHAEOLOGY, HISTORY, SEVENTEENTHCENTURY, ALIZON DEVICE, SALEM WITCHES, THOMAS POTTS, LOWER BLACK MOSS, ELIZABETH SOUTHERNS, DEMDIKE, ELIZABETH DEVICE, JAMES DEVICE, ANNE WHITTLE, CHATTOX, ANNE REDFERNE, JANE BULCOCK, JOHN BULCOCK, ALICE NUTTER, KATHERINE HEWITT, ALICE GRAY, JENNET PRESTON, GUNPOWDER PLOT, CAT

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This article attempts to establish a sociology of the occult in general, and a sociology of the Western tarot in particular. The tarot is a deck of 78 cards invented in Italy in the fifteenth century. From humble beginnings as a device for gaming or gambling, the tarot became invested with occult, mystical, divine, spiritual, and even psychological significance. This investing became part of a larger strategy of discipline and indoctrination to ease the transition from pre-industrial structures of power and authority to industrial and bureaucratic structures. That tarot, associated as it was with the emergence of elite Freemasonry, helped provide new ideologies of power and ways of existing within new tightly structured, bureaucratic organizations.

Résumé. Cet article vise à établir une sociologie des sciences occultes en général et une sociologie du tarot en particulier. Le tarot comprend 78 cartes et a été inventé en Italie au XVe siècle. De ses débuts modestes en tant que jeu, le tarot s'est vu associé aux sciences occultes, mystiques, divines et spirituelles, prenant même une signification psychologique. Cette dimension s'est inscrite dans une plus grande stratégie de discipline et d'endoctrinement dans le but de faciliter la transition des structures préindustrielles du pouvoir et de l'autorité à des structures industrielles et bureaucratiques. Ce tarot, associé à l'émergence de la franc-maçonnerie d'élite, a contribué aux nouvelles idéologies du pouvoir et des moy-ens d'exister dans les confins d'organisations très structurées et bureaucratiques.

Occultism remains the largest blind spot in the historiography of Islamicate philosophy-science, a casualty of persistent scholarly positivism, even whiggish triumphalism.  Such occultophobia notwithstanding, the present article conducts a survey of the Islamicate encyclopedic tradition from the 4th-11th/10th-17th centuries, with emphasis on Persian classifications of the sciences (sg. taṣnīf al-ʿulūm), to demonstrate the ascent to philosophically mainstream status of various occult sciences (ʿulūm ġarība) throughout the post-Mongol Persianate world.  Most significantly, in Persian encyclopedias, but not in Arabic, and beginning with Faḫr al-Dīn Rāzī, certain occult sciences (astrology, lettrism and geomancy) were gradually but definitively shifted from the natural to the mathematical sciences as a means of reasserting their scientific legitimacy in the face of four centuries of anti-occultist polemic, from Ibn Sīnā to Ibn Ḫaldūn; they were simultaneously reclassified as the sciences of walāya, moreover, which alone explains the massive increase in patronage of professional occultists at the Safavid, Mughal and Ottoman courts in the runup to the Islamic millennium (1592 CE).  I argue that the mathematicalization, neopythagoreanization and sanctification of occultism in Ilkhanid-Timurid-Aqquyunlu Iran is the immediate intellectual and sociopolitical context for both the celebrated mathematization of astronomy by the members of the Samarkand Observatory in the 9th/15th century and the resurgence of neoplatonic-neopythagorean philosophy in Safavid Iran in the 10th/16th and 11th/17th, whereby Ibn Sīnā himself was transformed into a neopythagorean-occultist—processes which have heretofore been studied in atomistic isolation.

The aim of this thesis is to discover the role that language plays in Renaissance magic, especially in Agrippa’s thought concerning magic as presented in De Occulta Philosophia (1533). I will sketch the philosophical environment Agrippa lived in, and try to reconstruct a coherent Agrippan language theory, and especially how magic becomes operational through language. The definition of language in this thesis will be very broad, as it includes more forms of communication than normal speech. By “language,” I mean all forms of communication.

The divinatory art of geomancy (ʿilm al-raml), Arabic answer to the I Ching, was third in popularity only to astrology and oneiromancy throughout the premodern Islamo-Christianate world, and is still widely practiced today from Iran and Yemen to west Africa and Madagascar. Despite its ubiquity among scholarly and ruling elites, however, the reflexive scholarly elision of occultism from Islamicate intellectual and cultural history means that this science has been very poorly studied beyond its reception by Europe. This holds especially true for the early modern Persianate world: in the wake of the occultist renaissance that swept the Islamicate heartlands from the late 8th/14th century onward, geomancers emerged as influential fixtures at Mughal, Safavid and Ottoman courts, and geomancy, offering detailed knowledge of past, present and future, was widely lionized as a means for controlling history—yet the subject remains almost untouched. And despite its status as a mathematical occult science predicated on a neoplatonic-neopythagorean system and animated by the twin principles of correspondence and secondary causation, its importance to the history of science has likewise only been recognized in its European context. Extending the work of Emilie Savage-Smith, Marion B. Smith and others, I therefore provide the first survey, necessarily tentative, of the development of geomantic theory and practice in the persophone world from the 7th/13th century onward, when Naṣīr al-Dīn Ṭūsī (d. 672/1274) inaugurated a specifically Persianate geomantic tradition for the benefit of his Mongol patron Hülegü. With Ṭūsī as precedent, geomancy went on to exercise some of the best minds of the early modern Persianate world as a mainstream occult-scientific tradition, and enjoyed a crescendo of popularity in the 10th/16th century with the approach of the Islamic millennium. After sketching the development of the eastern geomantic tradition, then, I identify the philosophical-scientific reasons for its great vitality and cultural prestige down to the present, with particular attention to authors on geomancy like Luṭf Allāh Nīshāpūrī Samarqandī (fl. 812/1409), Sharaf al-Dīn Yazdī (d. 858/1454), Shams al-Dīn Khafrī (d. 942/1535) and Hidāyat Allāh Munajjim-i Shīrāzī (fl. 1001/1593), court geomancer to Emperor Akbar at the turn of the millennium.

This dissertation takes as its point of departure two key insights: first, that millenarian, universalist forms of thought were ubiquitous in late medieval and early modern intellectual history, whether in the Islamicate heartlands or Renaissance Europe; second, that the occult sciences (al-ʿulūm al-gharība) were far more integral to such universalist projects than has previously been acknowledged. I therefore focus my inquiry on Ṣāʾin al-Dīn Turka Iṣfahānī (1369-1432), the foremost occult philosopher of early Timurid Iran, whose lettrist or kabbalistic thought (ʿilm al-ḥurūf) constitutes the centerpiece of his universalist project. Most notably, this type of occult philosophy—referring as it does to the neoplatonic-neopythagorean quest to comprehend the cosmos using all available means, whether rational or mystical, scientific or magical, in concert—precisely exemplifies the ‘will to synthesis’ that characterizes so much of later Islamicate intellectual history.

Ibn Turka was hardly exceptional in this regard; recent research suggests that he was the leader of a circle of thinkers based in Isfahan and Yazd, which included such heavyweights as Sharaf al-Dīn Yazdī (d. 1454) and Qāżīzāda Rūmī (d. 1432). This Isfahan Circle, moreover, was but the eastern branch of a vast extra-establishment network of intellectuals propagating from Cairo to Anatolia on the one hand and western Iran (and from thence Central Asia and India) on the other, and calling themselves, cryptically, the Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ. The pivot of this network was Sayyid Ḥusayn Akhlāṭī (d. 1397), occultist and wonderworker at the Mamluk court in Cairo, who proclaimed a new era of human development through the retrieval and open promulgation of the occult sciences. Ṣāʾin al-Dīn presents himself as simply the systematizer of Akhlāṭī’s teachings, and was received as such in the later lettrist tradition.

Despite his importance, however, half of Ṣāʾin al-Dīn’s oeuvre remains in manuscript—including, predictably, his lettrist works, assumed to be the most marginal component of his thought. Ironically, it is precisely the fact that Ṣāʾin al-Dīn has been acclaimed since the 19th century as an important synthesizer of peripatetic-illuminationist philosophy and mystical theory linking Ibn ʿArabī (d. 1240) with Mullā Ṣadrā (d. 1640) that led to his marginalization in the literature; by effectively obscuring the occultist tenor of his larger project, such acclaim abstracts it from its historical context and robs it of its animating virtue. The burden of the present study is therefore to remedy this neglect by presenting and contextualizing the central lettrist component of Ṣāʾin al-Dīn’s thought on the basis of his unpublished lettrist works, with particular attention to his magisterial K. al-Mafāḥiṣ or Book of Inquiries, a summa of intellectual lettrism.

Following a presentation of Ṣāʾin al-Dīn’s biography and religio-historical context in Chapter 1 and an annotated list of his writings (some 45 Persian and Arabic works in total) in Chapter 2, the central chapters of Part 1 of this study investigate various aspects of his universalist lettrist project, with particular reference to peripatetic-illuminationist philosophy on the one hand and Sufism on the other. Chapter 7 consists largely of translated sections from the Mafāḥiṣ; Part 2 of this study is devoted to editions and/or translations of five of his minor lettrist treatises.

A running theme in Ṣāʾin al-Dīn’s works is invidious comparison of lettrism and philosophy: the faux-universal concepts of philosophical speculation notwithstanding, only the letter encompasses all that is and is not, all that can and cannot be; it alone is the coincidentia oppositorum; hence lettrism is the only truly universal science. I argue that Ṣāʾin al-Dīn’s unprecedented lionization of lettrism vis-à-vis philosophy represents a specifically intellectual form of the science distinct from its originary gnostic-messianic and Sufi strains. Indeed, it is typically—and erroneously—assumed that the Hurufi movement of Fażl Allāh Astarābādī (d. 1394) defines later Islamicate lettrism; as an example of popular gnostic-messianic-Sufi lettrism, rather, that movement’s vigor testifies to the religio-cultural valency of lettrism in Iran at all levels. I further argue that lettrist theory informs the ornate literary practice of the period, as may be seen in Ṣāʾin al-Dīn’s status as vaunted stylist of Persian prose.

Far from being fringe thinkers, Muslim lettrists of Ṣāʾin al-Dīn’s stripe saw themselves as both advancing human knowledge of the cosmos and demonstrating the miraculous inimitability of the Quran as the clearest transcript of divine Speech in history. Ibn Turka’s significance within late medieval intellectual history centers precisely on his status as one of a panoply of late medieval and early modern thinkers to understand reality in textual terms, to be driven by the prospect of decoding and recoding the twin Books, the Quran and the cosmos.

As Derrida charged, Plato’s famous declaration of speech’s superiority to writing would seem to have resonated with inheritor cultures similarly transitioning from orality to literacy, and especially the Islamicate; despite the explosion of writerly culture from the 8th century onward, Arabic scholarship continued to evince a categorical, if increasingly rhetorical, mistrust of writing. In the 14th century, however, as the age of encyclopedism dawned throughout the Islamicate heartlands, the superiority of writing to speech was formally and definitively asserted by Arabic and Persian encyclopedists, including most prominently Ibn al-Akfānī (d. 1348) of Mamluk Egypt and Shams al-Dīn Āmulī (d. 1352) of Ilkhanid Iran. It is hardly coincidental in this connection that the same century also witnessed the burgeoning popularity among scholarly and ruling elites of lettrism (ʿilm al-ḥurūf), kabbalah’s coeval cognate—the occult science that posited the cosmos itself as a text to be read, even rewritten. Synthesizing these literary and occult-scientific currents, in the early 15th century a circle of Muslim neopythagoreanizing lettrists—chief among them Ibn Turka of Isfahan (d. 1432)—developed the first formal metaphysics of writing.
    This article analyzes Ibn Turka’s unprecedented valorization of writing over speech in terms both epistemological and ontological, as well as the sociocultural ramifications of this move throughout the post-Mongol Persianate world. Letter-number, he argued, is a form of light eternally emanated from the One; hence vision, that faculty of light, must be the sense most universal; hence visible text must be the form of the One most manifest. In support of this thesis, he synthesized the Avicennan-Ṭūsian doctrine of the transcendental modulation of being (tashkīk al-wujūd) with its illuminationist upgrade, the transcendental modulation of light (tashkīk al-nūr), to produce his signature doctrine of tashkīk al-ḥarf: letters of light as uncreated, all-creative matrix of the cosmos, gradually descending from the One in extramental, mental, spoken and finally written form. Far from being a peculiar intellectual rabbit trail of no enduring significance, I argue that Ibn Turka’s lettrist metaphysics of light was embraced by subsequent thinkers in Iran as the most effective means of conceptualizing and celebrating Islamicate writerly culture; these include the famed philosophers Jalāl al-Dīn Davānī (d. 1502) and Mīr Dāmād (d. 1630), founder of the so-called school of Isfahan. Nor was its influence limited to Aqquyunlu-Safavid philosophical circles; I further argue that Ibn Turka’s system informed the explosion of Persianate book culture more generally, and by extension Persianate visual culture, from the early Timurid period onward. A telling example in this context is the emergence of the album preface as a new genre of art history-theory in early Safavid Iran, a phenomenon that has been well feted and studied by art historians; but they have wholly elided high lettrism as the genre’s most immediate philosophical context. This principle may be extended to the Persian cosmopolis as a whole: two of the most seminal discourses on writing developed in the Ottoman and Mughal contexts, by Taşköprüzāde (d. 1561) and Abū l-Fażl ʿAllāmī (d. 1602) respectively, are demonstrably Ibn Turkian.
    Like Derrida was to do half a millennium later, in sum, early modern Muslim lettrists inverted Plato’s speech-writing hierarchy; unlike Derrida, for whom writing can have no ontological edge, they put forward a profoundly humanistic neopythagorean ontogrammatology as core of the philosophia perennis—and that so trenchantly that it served to shape Islamicate intellectual and aesthetic culture alike for centuries. The modern ideologues of East-West rupture notwithstanding, moreover, I propose this cosmology as a major node of Islamo-Christianate cultural continuity even to the present.

An Exorcism Charm Attributed to ʿAlī

An exorcism charm attributed to ʿAlī in Ibn Ṭāwwūs’s muhaj al-daʿwāt wa minhaj al-ʿibāda (The Spirit-Heart of Invocations and the Path of Worship): Introduction, Critical Translation, Plates and Critical Notes.

This study presents and intellectual- and literary-historically contextualizes a remarkable but as yet unpublished treatise by Ibn Turka (d. 1432), foremost occult philosopher of Timurid Iran:  the Munāẓara-yi Bazm u Razm.  As its title indicates, this ornate Persian work, written in 1426 in Herat for the Timurid prince-calligrapher Bāysunghur (d. 1433), takes the form of a literary debate, a venerable Arabo-Persian genre that exploded in popularity in the post-Mongol period.  Yet it triply transgresses the bounds of its genre, and doubly marries Arabic-Mamluk literary and imperial culture to Persian-Timurid.  For here Ibn Turka recasts the munāẓara as philosophical romance and the philosophical romance as mirror for princes, imperializing the razm u bazm and sword vs. pen tropes within an expressly lettrist framework, making explicit the logic of the coincidentia oppositorum (majmaʿ al-aḍdād) long implicit in the genre in order to ideologically weaponize it.  For the first time in the centuries-old Arabo-Persian munāẓara tradition, that is, wherein such debates were often rhetorically but never theoretically resolved, Ibn Turka marries multiple opposites in a manner clearly meant to be instructive to his Timurid royal patron:  he is to perform the role of Emperor Love (sulṭān ʿishq), transcendent of all political-legal dualities, avatar of the divine names the Manifest (al-ẓāhir) and the Occult (al-bāṭin).  This lettrist mirror for Timurid princes is thus not simply unprecedented in Persian or indeed Arabic literature, a typical expression of the ornate literary panache and genre-hybridizing proclivities of Mamluk-Timurid-Ottoman scientists of letters, and index of the burgeoning of Ibn ʿArabian-Būnian lettrism in late Mamluk Cairo; it also serves as key to Timurid universalist imperial ideology itself in its formative phase—and consciously epitomizes the principle of contradiction driving Islamicate civilization as a whole. 
        To show the striking extent to which this munāẓara departs from precedent, I provide a brief overview of the sword vs. pen subset of that genre; I then examine our text’s specific political-philosophical and sociocultural contexts, with attention to Naṣīr al-Dīn Ṭūsī’s (d. 1274) Akhlāq-i Nāṣirī and Jalāl al-Dīn Davānī’s (d. 1502) Akhlāq-i Jalālī on the one hand—which seminal Persian mirrors for princes assert, crucially, the ontological-political primacy of love over justice—and the Ẓafarnāma of Sharaf al-Dīn Yazdī (d. 1454), Ibn Turka’s student and friend, on the other.  In the latter, much-imitated history Amir Temür (r. 1370-1405) was definitively transformed, on the basis of astrological and lettrist proofs, into the supreme Lord of Conjunction (ṣāḥib-qirān); most notably, there Yazdī theorizes the Muslim world conqueror as historical manifestation of the coincidentia oppositorum—precisely the project of Ibn Turka in his Debate of Feast and Fight.  But these two ideologues of Timurid universal imperialism and leading members of the New Brethren of Purity network only became such in Mamluk Cairo, where lettrism (ʿilm al-ḥurūf) was first sanctified, de-esotericized and adabized; I accordingly invoke the overtly occultist-neopythagoreanizing ethos specific to the Mamluk capital by the late 14th century, especially that propagated at the court of Barqūq (r. 1382-99).  For it is this Cairene ethos, I argue, that is epitomized by our persophone lettrist’s munāẓara, which it effectively timuridizes.  To demonstrate the robustness of this Mamluk-Timurid ideological-literary continuity, I situate the Munāẓara-yi Bazm u Razm within Ibn Turka’s own oeuvre and imperial ideological program, successively developed for the Timurid rulers Iskandar Sulṭān (r. 1409-14), Shāhrukh (r. 1409-47) and Ulugh Beg (r. 1409-49); marshal three contemporary instances of the sword vs. pen munāẓara, one Timurid and two Mamluk, by the theologian Sayyid Sharīf Jurjānī (d. 1413), the secretary-encyclopedist Aḥmad al-Qalqashandī (d. 1418) and the historian Ibn Khaldūn (d. 1408) respectively; and provide an abridged translation of Ibn Turka’s offering as basis for comparative analysis.

The Ifrīqiyan cum Cairene Sufi Aḥmad al-Būnī (d. ca 622/1225 or 630/1232-1233) is a key figure in the history of the Islamicate occult sciences, particularly with regard to the " science of letters and names " (ʿilm al-ḥurūf wa-l-asmāʾ). Drawing on textual and manuscript evidence, this paper examines the role of esotericism—religious secrecy and exclusivity—in al-Būnī's thought and in the promulgation and early circulation of his works in Egypt and environs. It is argued that al-Būnī intended his works only for elite Sufi initiates, and that, in the century or so after his death, they indeed circulated primarily in " esotericist reading communities, " groups of learned Sufis who guarded their contents from those outside their own circles. This tendency toward esotericism, and the eventual exposure of al-Būnī's texts to a wider readership, are contextualized in relation to broader developments in late-medieval Mediterranean culture. Résumé Le soufi ifrīqiyien puis cairote Aḥmad al-Būnī (m. ca 622/1225 ou 630/1232-1233) est une figure clef de l'histoire des sciences occultes islamiques, en particulier en ce qui concerne la « science des lettres et des noms » (ʿilm al-ḥurūf wa-l-asmāʾ). En s'appuyant sur des données textuelles et manuscrites, cet article examine le rôle de l'ésotérisme—

"El estudio académico del “Esoterismo Occidental” entendido como
fenómeno histórico cultural, se consolidó en los últimos veinte
años en Europa y Estados Unidos. En lo que se refiere a su devenir
en Latinoamérica, desde 2011 el Centro de Estudios sobre el
Esoterismo Occidental de la UNASUR, fundado por el Dr. Juan Pablo
Bubello, aglutina a los principales investigadores de América
Latina interesados en este objeto. En este libro se despliegan,
por primera vez, estudios de caso sobre el esoterismo latinoamericano
entre los siglos XVI y XX. Una serie de prácticas y representaciones
culturales específicas pero heterogéneas, que fueron
cambiando con el tiempo, son estudiadas con rigurosidad histórica,
minuciosidad analítica y el abordaje de fuentes primarias pertinentes.
Serán de interés para el especialista y, al mismo tiempo, no escaparán
a la atención de todo lector culto deseoso en incorporar un saber en
torno a este objeto cultural aún muy poco explorado" (de la contratapa)

Indice

Introducción
Juan Pablo Bubello, José Ricardo Chaves y Francisco de Mendonça Jr.

Capítulo 1
Esoterismo, sigilo e segredo.
Francisco de Paula Souza de Mendonça Júnior

Capítulo 2
Difusión del esoterismo europeo-occidental
en el Nuevo Continente (siglos XVI-XX)
Juan Pablo Bubello

Capítulo 3
Juan José Durandó y la Colonia San José (1887-1916)
Mariano Villalba

Capítulo 4
O Brasil Teosófico-Budista na década de 1920
Marcelo Vidaurre Archanjo

Capítulo 5
La pérdida de la Estrella. La gira de krishnamurti
por América Latina en 1935
José Ricardo Chaves

Capítulo 6
A Antroposofia e a demanda pela alma brasileira
Daniel R. Placido

Capítulo 7
Utopia, Modernidade e Magia
Marcelo Leandro de Campos

Capítulo 8
Las instituciones gnósticas de Medellín
Carolina María Tamayo Jaramillo y Johan F. W. Hasler

Capítulo 9
José López Rega, “El Brujo”
Hernán Facundo López

Índice de nombres
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Consideration is given to how elements of the occult: witchcraft, magic and sorcery may be identified in the archaeological record. Working definitions of occult terminology are established before proceeding to propose a new approach, which triangulates data from historic and folkloric sources with archaeological evidence, to establish contextual narratives that stand for the past. Excavation of an occult ritual site at Barway, Cambridgeshire is presented to demonstrate how the approach works in practice. Archaeological evidence, combined with local folklore and historic accounts of spells and sorcery, identify the site as the locus of occult activity performed by cunning folk, or ‘white’ witches, during the seventeenth-century.

KEYWORDS
OCCULT, CUNNING FOLK, WITCH, WITCHCRAFT, SPELL, MAGIC, SORCERY, FOLKLORE, EAST ANGLIA, ELY, SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY, GRIMOIRE, PENDLE WITCH TRIAL, MATTHEW HOPKINS, JOHN STEARNE.

The Ottoman imperial ideology developed under Süleymān the Magnificent (r. 1520-66) was heavily occult-scientific in tenor, as is well known, and especially lettrist; less well known is the fact that Selīm the Grim (r. 1512-20) too patronized the kabbalistic science of letters (ʿilm al-ḥurūf) for purposes both ideological and military-strategic. Taking as representative example a short lettrist treatise ostensibly written by the acclaimed polymath-jurist Kemālpaşazāde Aḥmed (d. 1534) to urge his royal patron to invade Mamluk Egypt, this study traces the development of early Ottoman occult-scientific imperialist discourse on the basis of Mamluk-Timurid-Aqquyunlu precedent, which first incorporated pointedly lettrist arguments in support of competing claims to Islamic imperial universalism. Such is the immediate scholarly context in which Kemālpaşazāde’s curious little work is to be read—and constitutes, I argue, a new and distinctive form of neopythagorean historiography. The Ottoman lettrist imperialism that is such a definitive feature of the expansive and transformative Süleymānic era is thus a product of inner-Persianate scholarly circulation and competition between Egypt, Iran and Anatolia over the course of the equally transformative fifteenth century, and Selīm thus a key exponent of early modern Western imperial expansionism and experimentalism—and occult philosopher-kingship.

This paper is two brief prompt responses regarding "occult forces", and "magical, occult, or pseudo-scientific beliefs" in the west, in the centuries that prelude the modern era. The paper focuses on the intimate relationship between modern science and its predecessor, often referred to as the catch-all term "occult science".

This article looks at the assimilation of Aristotle’s account of ‘coming-to-be’ into conception theories found in Islamic medieval medical and astrological texts. It analyzes the way the four causes work on the level of the universe and that of the womb, and the reconciliation of ideas on planetary influence with the Galenic and Aristotelian expositions on conception. The Arabic astrological theories that explain the receptiveness of humans to astral influences provide the conceptual link between the macrocosmic and microcosmic processes. Conception is an individualization of the coming-to-be of species and the stars act as agents of actuality in both processes.
Keywords: conception, generation, semen, astral influences, causality, embryo

published without the knowledge of the author - . not proofread by the author. an updated and corrected version of the article will appear in my book - Wrestling with the Esoteric (2017)

הדברים נדפסו שלא בידיעתי וללא הגהה מצידי. אין אחריות המחבר על טיב התרגום ודיוקו. נוסח מעודכן, עם תיקונים רבים, יראה אור בספרי  - נפתולי סוד, 2017


Йо н а т а н Ме и р
Михаэль Лайтман и группа «Бней-Барух»
(фрагмент статьи «О последователях рабби
Й.-Л. Ашлага, полемике с ними и о распространении
еврейской каббалистической литературы»)

This is an excerpt from a much bigger article devoted to
several followers of Rabbi Yehudah Ashlag’s agenda who
are trying to disseminate Kabbalistic ideas and practices
outside of the borders of Judaism. This very excerpt analyzes
teachings of Michael Laitman, a Russian-speaking student of
Rabbi Baruch Ashlag, and his movement “Bnei Baruch”,which
try to present Kabbalah as science and lead it out of Orthodox
Judaism. Author considers Laitman’s methodology, his ideas
on correction of the world and salvation from anti-Semitism
through Kabbalah studies, his social ideal. In this excerpt one
can also find analysis of the social context of the movement,
Laitman’s competition with another representative of New Age
Kabbalah Shraga Feivel (Philip) Berg, strategies of gaining
popularity and complicated relations with Jewish Orthodoxy.