project_muse_Conjuncting Astrology and Lettrism, Islam and Judaism.pdf

(680 KB) Pobierz
Afterword: Conjuncting Astrology and Lettrism, Islam and
Judaism
Matthew Melvin-Koushki
Magic, Ritual, and Witchcraft, Volume 12, Number 1, Spring 2017, pp. 89-97
(Article)
Published by University of Pennsylvania Press
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1353/mrw.2017.0004
For additional information about this article
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/655311
[ This content has been declared free to read by the pubisher during the COVID-19 pandemic. ]
Afterword
Conjuncting Astrology and Lettrism, Islam and Judaism
M AT T H E W M E LV I N - K O U S H K I
University of South Carolina
Language is a virus from outer space.
—William S. Burroughs
T
hese three papers represent a new turn in the intellectual historiography of
the Islamic world: eschewing both
positivism
and the equally ideologically
pernicious
religionist
reaction thereto, both of which have dominated the his-
toriography throughout the twentieth century and to the present, they inves-
tigate their science—Islamic and Judeo-Islamic astrology—with evenhanded
empiricism.
Which is to say, they simply ignore the science-magic-religion
triad as the nineteenth-century colonialist-orientalist-vivisectionist construct
it is—for all that that triad still structures history of Islamic science in particu-
lar as an academic field.
As a case in point: in 2016, egregiously, it was still possible to dismiss
astrology out of hand as
pseudoscience
in specialist surveys of that field, and to
ignore its interpenetration with other mainstream occult sciences like let-
trism, alchemy, and geomancy altogether.
1
Such has long since ceased to be
possible in Europeanist historiography of science, which in recent decades
has become overtly occultophilic, especially that treating of the early modern
period; but its Islamicist cognate remains largely positivist and teleologically
Eurocentric to a shocking degree, and equally blatantly occultophobic. There
the reigning (and hence usually implicit) narrative is one in which Arabic
1. This most recently in Stephen P. Blake,
Astronomy and Astrology in the Islamic
World
(Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016), which, despite its title, and
like Ahmad Dallal’s
Islam, Science, and the Challenge of History
(New Haven: Yale Uni-
versity Press, 2010), cites astrology only in merest passing as foil for the “moderniza-
tion” of astronomy by select post-Mongol Muslim thinkers.
Magic, Ritual, and Witchcraft
(Spring 2017)
Copyright 2017 University of Pennsylvania Press. All rights reserved.
90
Magic, Ritual, and Witchcraft
Spring 2017
astrology historically but functioned as cement shoe dragging Arabic astron-
omy, epitome of True Science, down into the miasmic depths of Unscience,
where it finally perished, the valiant efforts of Muslim heroes of science—few
and far between—all notwithstanding.
2
The only question is as to whether
Islamic science met its sorry end as late as the sixteenth century or as early as
the eleventh.
3
Either way, the civilizational torch was unquestionably passed
from Islamdom to Christendom by the early modern period; and it was the
terminal Islamic addiction to occultism that made Europeans alone the heirs
of Western rationalism, the sole architects of hegemonic scientific modernity.
This narrative, expressly whiggish and Neomanichean, must be exploded;
and our occultophilic authors calmly accomplish just that. To this end, and
despite covering very different times, places, and scholarly communities—
Segol on a series of rabbinical authorities in Iran, Iraq, and Italy from the
sixth to the tenth century, Gardiner on an esotericist Sufi reading community
of thirteenth-century Ifriqiya and Egypt, Sen on the religious-scholarly elites
¸
of sixteenth-century Ottoman Istanbul—, their articles converge in one
remarkable and perhaps surprising respect: all three marry astrology to
lettrism.
As an intellectual historian whose work centers precisely on the latter Neo-
pythagorean science, I must emphasize the unprecedentedness and subver-
siveness of this strategy in the field. I should also note that I too participated
in the 2015 “Characterizing Astrology” conference at the University of Chi-
cago from which the present special issue derives; and I too focused my
analysis on the increasing interdependence of astrology and lettrism, this in
Arabic and Persian classifications of the sciences produced over eight centu-
ries. That all four of us found it empirically necessary to take the same tack,
without conspiring beforehand and hailing from very different academic bai-
liwicks (my own speciality is Timurid-Safavid Iran and the broader Persianate
world during the fourteenth to seventeenth centuries), suggests the integrity
of our findings, and indeed marks the beginnings of a new narrative of Islamic
and Judeo-Islamic intellectual history—one featuring lettrism as indispensable
pivot. Due to its unusual length and highly specialized nature, I have pub-
lished the resulting article elsewhere;
4
but I will here summarize its central
argument, as it proposes a new macroscopic analytical framework for the
2. For examples see Matthew Melvin-Koushki, “Powers of One: The Mathemati-
calization of the Occult Sciences in the High Persianate Tradition,”
Intellectual History
of the Islamicate World
5 (2017): 127–99.
3. The first periodization has been advanced by George Saliba and Jamil Ragep in
particular, and the second by Fuat Sezgin; for references and discussion see ibid.
4. To wit, as “Powers of One”; see n. 2 above.
Melvin-Koushki
Afterword
91
historical development of occult science in Islam (and Judaism by extension)
over the millennium of Western intellectual history covered by our authors,
and into which their articles slot quite nicely.
Based on the first survey of the Islamic encyclopedic tradition from the
tenth to the seventeenth century, with emphasis on Persian classifications of
the sciences (sg.
tasnıf al- ulum),
I there demonstrate the ascent to philosophi-
¯
. ¯
cally and sociopolitically mainstream status of various occult sciences (
ulum
¯
gharıba)
throughout the post-Mongol Persianate world. Most significantly, in
¯
Persian encyclopedias, but not in Arabic, and beginning in the twelfth
century, certain occult sciences—astrology, lettrism, and geomancy—were
gradually but definitively shifted from the natural-philosophical to the math-
ematical sciences as a means of reasserting their scientific legitimacy in the
face of four centuries of anti-occultism polemic. At the same time, they
were increasingly reclassified as sciences of
sacral power
(wala
ya),
the contest
¯
for which drove early modern Islamic imperial ideology, which alone
explains the massive increase in patronage of professional occultists at the
Safavid, Mughal, and Ottoman courts in the runup to the Islamic millen-
nium (1592 CE). I argue that the
sanctification, de-esotericization,
and then
mathematicalization-Neopythagoreanization
of occultism generally and lettrism
specifically in thirteenth to fifteenth-century Mamluk Egypt and 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 fifteenth century and the
resurgence of Neoplatonic-Neopythagorean philosophy in Safavid Iran in
the sixteenth and seventeenth—processes which have heretofore been
studied in atomistic isolation and, in accordance with positivist-religionist
intellectual-historiographical orthodoxy, consistently stripped of their
occult-scientific valency.
5
Lettrism, Hebrew kabbalah’s coeval Arabic twin, is the golden thread that
runs throughout this new narrative and gives it epistemological coherence.
6
5. On occult science as the primary mode of philosophical praxis in the early
modern Persianate world see e.g. my “World as (Arabic) Text: The Neopythagorea-
nization of Philosophy in Safavid Iran,” in Sajjad Rizvi, ed.,
Philosophy and the Intellec-
tual Life in Shı ¯ Islam
(London: Bloomsbury, 2017).
¯ı
6. Among the occult sciences that became permanently intertwined with Islamic
culture from its very inception, particularly in early Shi i circles, it is the science of
letters (
ilm al-huruf
), or lettrism, that underwent the most complex evolution. Most
. ¯
significantly, it eventually emerged as the most
Islamic
of all the occult sciences despite
its explicitly late antique, non-Islamic parentage—this due to its reformulation in the
early thirteenth century by Ibn Arabı and al-Bunı in particular, as discussed by Gardi-
¯
¯ ¯
ner in his article in this special issue. Conceptually, as an umbrella science, lettrism
92
Magic, Ritual, and Witchcraft
Spring 2017
In Islam and Judaism alike, lettrism and kabbalah respectively functioned as
the primary means of
Islamicizing
and
Judaicizing
the Hellenic heritage of late
antiquity in general and Neopythagorean-Neoplatonic philosophy-science,
especially occult science, in particular.
7
That is to say, the reinterpretation of
first the Torah and then the Quran in Neopythagorean-gnostic mode ren-
dered the Hebrew or Arabic letters of scripture
cosmogonic
and their totality
the matrix of creation; and the divines that mapped this physics-metaphysics
onto the preeminent Hellenic occult science, astrology, thereby rendered it
encompasses the two modes of applied occultism as a whole in its basic division into
letter magic (sı
miya
) on the one hand and letter divination (jafr) on the other. Letter-
¯ ¯
magical techniques include most prominently the construction of talismans (sg.
t
¯
.ilasm),
whose engine is usually a magic square (wafq
al-a dad),
to be populated with
letters or numbers relevant to the operation at hand; these are designed to harness the
specific letter-numerical virtues of personal names, whether of humans, jinn, or
angels, phrases or quranic passages, or one or more of the names of God. (The latter
operation is a typical example of the Sufi-occultist practice of “assuming the attributes
of God” or
theomimesis
(takhalluq
bi-akhlaq Allah)—hence
the divine names as a major
¯
¯
focus of lettrism, often termed for that reason
ilm al-huruf wa-l-asma
,” “the science
¯
. ¯
of letters and names,” or even simply “ilm
al-asma
,” “the science of names.”) Letter
¯
divination, for its part, includes most prominently the construction of a comprehen-
sive prognosticon (jafr
jami
), a 784-page text containing every possible permutation
¯
of the letters of the Arabic alphabet. From such a prognosticon may be derived the
name of every thing or being that has ever existed or will ever exist, every name of
God in every language, and the knowledge of past, present, and future events—
especially political events—to the end of time. This divinatory aspect of lettrism is
associated in the first place with both the House of the Prophet and the mysterious
separated sura-initial letters in the Quran (muqat
.a at),
similarly held to contain com-
.t ¯
prehensive predictive power, and to have inspired the basic lettrist technique of
taksır,
¯
separating the letters of words or names for the purposes of permutation (cf. the sister
kabbalist techniques of
gematria
and
temurah).
Most letter-magical and letter-divinatory
operations are profoundly astrological in orientation, moreover; careful attention to
celestial configurations is essential for the success of any operation, and letter magic
often involves the harnessing of planetary spirits (taskhı
r al-kawakib),
together with
¯
¯
angels and jinn. Fasting, a vegetarian diet, seclusion, and maintenance of a state of
ritual purity are also regularly identified as conditions of practice in manuals on these
subjects. For references and a brief overview of lettrism’s historical development see
Matthew Melvin-Koushki and James Pickett, “Mobilizing Magic: Occultism in Cen-
tral Asia and the Continuity of High Persianate Culture under Russian Rule,”
Studia
Islamica
111/2 (2016): 231–84, 247–63.
7. On the late antique Christianization of the same see e.g. Joel Kalvesmaki,
The
Theology of Arithmetic: Number Symbolism in Platonism and Early Christianity
(Washing-
ton, DC: Center for Hellenic Studies, 2013); on subsequent Jewish receptions see
e.g. Y. Tzvi Langermann, “Studies in Medieval Hebrew Pythagoreanism: Translations
and Notes to Nicomachus; Arithmological Texts,”
Micrologus
9 (2001): 219–36.

Plik z chomika:

Inne pliki z tego folderu:

Inne foldery tego chomika:

Zgłoś jeśli naruszono regulamin