UNTITLED MAGIC BOOK: MEDIEVAL MAGIC AND THE ISLAMIC WORLD - 2/10/2022

The day is full of work and song. The night is deep and cold. Every sunday sit under the effigy of a man in agony. A priest incants words in an ancient language you do not speak or understand. He says the words are holy and you believe him. How else could flesh and blood taste of bread and wine? Wondrous things are possible. You know this to be true. You taste it for yourself every sunday. The priest says there are the good wonders, the miracles of God, and the bad wonders, the magic of the devil. You believe him. The night is deep and cold. The dead are buried deeper.

Magic in the medieval world is characterized by two things: Ruin, and the church. For better or worse, the roman empire was the skeleton of europe, with its collapse the flow of technology and information through europe was hamstrung. Many communities suddenly became isolated as knowledge of how to repair and maintain roman bridges, roads, and irrigation was lost. The remnants of a powerful yet fallen civilization were everywhere. One could only imagine the wonders they achieved.

At the center of medieval life was the church, but interaction with magic was far from simple. The boundary between miracle and magic was nuanced and complex, and priests often had to walk a fine line between official church doctrine and the folk practices which evolved naturally from the privations of medieval village life. Attempting to place medieval magic in too rigid a box would be a mistake, as creative use of church artifacts and tactful syncretism with folk belief was fairly common. [WHY IS THERE NO ACCESSIBLE INFORMATION ON EUROPEAN MAGIC FROM LIKE 410 TO 1150 AD THATS A 500 YEAR GAP QUIT MAKING ME PIRATE SHIT CHALLENGE ILL BE BACK TO THIS AFTER IVE READ MORE]

Gilchrist: https://books.google.com/books/about/Medieval_Life.html?id=T3EwHTrRZEsC

Thomas: https://books.google.com/books/about/Religion_and_the_Decline_of_Magic.html?id=yQwSAQAAIAAJ

All this said, the medieval world gives rise to an exciting new phenomenon for the aspiring occultist: The spell book. Indeed, one of the Catholic Churches most important contributions to magical history in the middle ages was its network of dedicated scribes. Europe was dotted with stone buildings full of monks who spent their days creating, copying, and translating tomes of knowledge. But magical texts generally only start to appear in Europe around the 11th century.

Let us back up a bit, to the 8th century AD. For there can be no discussion of medieval magic without the Islamic Golden Age.

In 762, Caliph Al-Mansur founded the city of Baghdad. The newly formed Abbasid caliphate invested heavily in the scholarly arts, with astronomical research budgets and salaries for the best scholars comparable that of modern professional athletes. [1] The library at its center, the Baghdad House of Wisdom, used its funding to collect and translate a diverse array of texts, but special interest was placed upon the collection and translation of greek texts into arabic. [2]  Additionally, newly introduced technology for the mass-production of paper allowed for the creation of cheaper, more durable texts than ever before. [3] All of this combined to make Baghdad a fountainhead of science, art, and technology. The efforts of Islamic scholars resulted in the translation and preservation of an untold number of texts that may not have otherwise survived the throes of history.

And like a candle casting a shadow, where there is knowledge, there is the occult. The Baghdad House of Wisdom produced no shortage of magical texts. Chief among them was the 10th century Sirr al-Asrar, the Secret Book of Secrets.

The Secretum Secretorum as it was known in latin, is a text attributed to pseudo-aristotle (meaning the author says they were aristotle, but was almost definitely not aristotle.) which claims to be a letter from Aristotle to his student Alexander the Great. It speaks on a number of mundane topics like statecraft, and ethics, but features an encyclopedic discussion of more magical topics like physiognomy, astrology, alchemy, and the magical properties of plants, gems, and numbers. [4] It is difficult to understate the sheer popularity of the text. The Secretum Secretorum was one of if not the most widely read text of its time. [5] The popularity of the text is indicative of a europe increasingly infatuated with plumbing the depths of history for its strange and esoteric wisdom.

[1] - (https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01k2bv8 )

[2] - (https://archive.org/details/greekthoughtarab00guta )

[3] - (https://asadullahali.files.wordpress.com/2012/10/ibn_khaldun-al_muqaddimah.pdf )

[4] - (https://archive.org/details/lewis_e_016 )

[4.1] - (https://www.colourcountry.net/secretum/ )

[5] - (Abd al-Raḥmān Badawī (1987), La transmission de la philosophie grecque au monde arabe, Paris, Librairie Philosophique Vrin, p. 11)

We need to mention the dichotomy between magical and mundane earlier in the text

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The medieval world was a time of astrologers.

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Abu Musa Jabir ibn Hayyan is the purported 9th century author of the comically large body of arabic magical texts often called the “Jabirian Corpus.” touching on topics from cosmology, astronomy, astrology, medicine, pharmacology, zoology, botany, metaphysics, logic, and grammar. His work features several achievements of chemical science, from the oldest known instructions for deriving an inorganic compound from an organic one, to the invention of the sulphur-mercury theory of metals, which would remain the dominant theory of mineralogy until the 18th century. [1] (More on this later)

It is quite possible that he never existed. The sheer volume of work attributed to Jabir ibn-hayyan (more than 600 named works, yet only approximately 215 still exist today) strains the bounds of possibility. A prevailing theory is that the name was a Pseudonym, which an anonymous school of alchemists published under. [?]

While attributing medieval magical texts to their true authors is no simple task, as an aspiring occultist it is important to remember: Wizards will lie to you for fun. Take nothing at face value.

(we should probably sidebar about alchemy at some point)

Generally, I will try to refrain from explaining the contents of a magical text, but there are key features of note in the Jabirian corpus that are necessary for understanding later magical (and mundane) history.

Jabirian writings make several mentions of earlier graceo-egyptian alchemists like Pseudo-Democritus, Agathodaemon, Zosimos of Panopolis, and Maria Herbrea, as well as legendary figures like Hermes Trismegistus and Ostanes. However, Jabirian alchemy (and medieval Islamic alchemy in general) stands apart from earlier alchemical works in that it relies less on allegory and metaphor for its exploration of chemistry, and takes a notably more coherent and systematic approach that places heavy emphasis on laboratory experiments and real-world application. [2] This will come back later.

(Alchemists are sort of famous for being insufferably smug about all the Big Special Secret Secrets they know. Clarity and systemization are welcome and refreshing.)

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Also famous among the medieval world was a text of astrology and magic called the Ghayat al-hakim 400-page manuscript of magic and, which most scholars translate as “The goal of the wise” The book was translated into Latin around the 13th century, at which point it gained the Latin title Picatrix. The text is of particular note for its size, combining and synthesizing older works on magic and astrology into a single tome, covering everything from the construction of magical talismans to the strange workings of the celestial world, the night sky.

While not nearly as popular as the secretus secretorum, the Picatrix was significantly influential on the occult tides to come. The manuscript in the British library alone passed through the hands of English astrologers like Simon Foreman, Richard Napier, Elias Ashmole, and William Lilly. The foundation laid by the Secretum Secretorum was being increasingly built upon by magical text after magical text, and by the advent of the 16th century, europe was stuffed to the gills with grimoires.

[1] - Stapleton, Henry E.; Azo, R.F.; Hidayat Husain, M. (1927). "Chemistry in Iraq and Persia in the Tenth Century A.D.". Memoirs of the Asiatic Society of Bengal. VIII (6): 317–418

[2] - Kraus, Paul (1942–1943). Jâbir ibn Hayyân: Contribution à l'histoire des idées scientifiques dans l'Islam. I. Le corpus des écrits jâbiriens. II. Jâbir et la science grecque. Cairo: Institut Français d'Archéologie Orientale.

The medieval body was a thing of balance. Just as the world was made from four elements, earth (solid matter), air (gaseous matter), water (liquid matter), and fire (energy), so too was the body. We were black bile, yellow bile, phlegm, and blood. When these humors existed in balance, the body was healthy.

In addition, each humor was associated with a particular temperament, or type of personality. Galen laid them out as such in his medical treatise On the Constitution of the Universe and of Man:

• The people who have red blood are friendly. They joke and laugh about their bodies, and they are rose tinted, slightly red, and have pretty skin.
• The people who have yellow bile are bitter, short tempered, and daring. They appear greenish and have yellow skin.
• The people who are composed of black bile are lazy, fearful, and sickly. They have black hair and black eyes.
• Those who have phlegm are low spirited, forgetful, and have white hair.

(we should talk about how assigning personality traits to occult traits isn’t great)

Now, this division of personality traits may seem silly to modern minds, but it is important to remember that this model of the body and the personality was as good as fact for quite a long time. Crucially, it is important to remember that just because an idea from magical history was widely accepted, that does not mean it should continue to be. A practitioner must incorporate nothing without criticism.

(Include the empedocles mandala of the body here?)

Speaking of the body, there can be no discussion of the medieval body without a discussion of Avicenna, a man regarded as one of the most significant physicians, astronomers, thinkers and writers of the Islamic Golden Age, and the father of early modern medicine. [1] in 1025, Avicenna completed The Canon of Medicine, a text so influential it would stay in use well until the 18th century. [2] Avicenna uses the humorist model of the body as “the foundation of the whole Canon” [3]

Here we see a curious thing: Magic making headway towards science. We have a long way to go, but the increasing rigor and focus on application applied to strains of magical thought at this period are indicative of what will come.

Also introduced by Avicenna was the idea of the primmum mobile, [4] the outermost celestial sphere of the heavens.

[1] - (https://books.google.com/books?id=DoMVs4HuDAoC&q=avicenna+father+of+modern+medicine&pg=PA33#v=snippet&q=avicenna%20father%20of%20modern%20medicine&f=false )

[2] - (https://archive.org/details/avicennagreatmed00mcgi )

[3] - (https://archive.org/stream/AvicennasCanonOfMedicine/9670940-Canon-of-Medicine_djvu.txt )

[4] - G. Galle, Peter of Auvergne (2003) p. 233

(compare / contrast the different element systems from china / india)

TEXTS TO TALK ABOUT HERE

• Malleus
• Book of da composition of alchemy
• We HAVE to mention Alfonso X
• Kieth Thomas “The medieval church...appeared as a vast reservoir of magical power, capable of being deployed for a variety of secular purposes.”
• Godsen: “It is impossible to understand Medival magic without embedding it within the context of the church, and medieval society more generally.”
• Talk about how the roman empire fell in like 410 but continued to influence life
• Talk about humorism here, as an example of as above so below
• Talk about the spheres of the world, medival cosmology, ideas like the sublunary world and the Primum Mobile and empyrean heaven
• Robert Grossteste
• Demonology
• NEOPLATONISM
• Poltinus
• The texts of Alfonso X of Castile
• St Augustine, everything has its own angel