Dr Angela Puca: Hello, Symposiast. I’m Dr. Angela Puca, a religious studies PhD, and this is your online resource for the academic study of magic, esotericism, paganism, shamanism, and all things occult. I hope that you’re ready with your questions and to fire up your intellect and try to understand different forms of esotericism from the ones that you might be exposed to because today we have a very special guest that I will now bring on, and that’s Dr Liana Saif. Thank you so much for being here.
Dr Liana Saif: Thank you so much, Angela, for having me. I’m very excited to be here.
Dr Angela Puca: Oh, I love your research. I’m not an expert in your field, so I’d love for you to speak about it on my channel. But I’m impressed by your research and everything that you’ve done. You can say a bit more about you. You’re a professor at the University of Amsterdam, which is very well known, as you know, probably the biggest university and the only one, to my knowledge, that has an entire department dedicated to the study of esotericism and Hermetic spirituality, as Hanegraaff has said. We should use that kind of term. So, yeah, I was fangirling over your research. So, when I saw you in person at the European Association for the Study of Western Esotericism conference in Malmö, Sweden, I was like, “How can I approach her now without sounding weird?” Don’t sound weird, and then I probably sounded weird, but…
Dr Liana Saif: Sure, so I’m an assistant professor at HHP, the Center for Hermetic History and Related Currents, and before that, I was an associate researcher at The Warburg Institute as part of an ERC project that was based at the Université Catholique de Louvain. I was researching Jabir ibn Hayyan, who maybe we will talk a little bit about. Before that, I was at Oxford as a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow, undertaking a project on magic in medieval Islam. I was curious about the different trends and the epistemological shifts that influenced the way magic, in particular, was practised. But before that, I was writing about the entanglement of Islamic traditions with Europe. However, I focused more on the medieval context in the projects after my book. Still, I often find myself back in the Renaissance, looking at Marsilio Ficino, Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, Athanasius Kircher, and others. So, I have many tentacles in different eras and different practices. But I also like to look at the reception of Islamic esoteric currents, like Sufism, but not exclusively, on Western esoteric currents from the 20th century onwards, from traditionalism to the New Age, etc. And if anyone has any more questions about my history, I’m happy to answer.
Dr Angela Puca: Yes, absolutely. So, do you want to tell us something more about yourself so that your audience can know you a bit better before we crack on with the difficult questions?
Dr Angela Puca: Yes, of course. In our conversation, we realized that some terms need a bit more clarification before we proceed because they are not commonly known qualifiers. So, could you explain the difference between Islamic, Islamicate, Arabic esotericism, occult sciences, and these terminologies used in reference?
Dr Liana Saif: Sure, I hope you have time. I’ll be brief. As we were saying, Angela, I think it’s always helpful to start by unpacking the qualifiers that I use to avoid confusion.
Islamicate
So, for example, the term Islamicate, in particular, is a term that a prominent historian of Islam coined called Marshall Hodgson, particularly in a multivolume text called “The Venture of Islam,” published in 1974. It is used in this context to describe cultural and intellectual aspects that developed in connection with or in the context of Islamic civilization but may not be necessarily religious or might not have been articulated by Muslims. So basically, it includes broader cultural and intellectual activities shaped by Islamic thought and practices but might not be religious. So, the example I give is that one of the most influential authors on astral magic, particularly talisman, is Thabit ibn Qurra, a Sabian and not a Muslim. So, in this context, Islamicate works for me.
Islamic
Then, when we use Islamic in general, it refers to anything directly related to Islam as a religious tradition, including its beliefs, practices, institutions, laws, etc. The lines between Islamicate and Islamic can be blurry, so this forms part of an ongoing conversation in unpacking these terms and just to understand the relationship between intellectual production by non-Muslims such as Christian and Jewish agents within an Islamic civilization is Islamic culture.
Arabic
Arabic is different because it is used in two types of ways: it is an ethnic marker, and in the Islamic and Islamic contexts, not everyone is Arabs. There are a lot of Persians and very influential Persian astrologers, for example, not just Persians but also other ethnicities. But we can also use the term Arabic to refer to the lingua franca and the language of intellectual and scientific production, which indeed, in the Medieval Era, particularly before the 12th century, was the language of science. But again, that is not to say that people only wrote in Arabic, but this is one way that people know what we mean when we say Arabic, that it’s not necessarily an ethnic marker. Should I go more with the occult or esoteric, or would that…
Dr Angela Puca: Yeah, to understand the difference between occult sciences and esoteric, if there is a difference in that kind of context.
Dr Liana Saif: Yeah, also, I think this is a very good binary to unpack together. So, I rely on the writings and authors, and, of course, translation presents, as you know, a lot of grey areas. However, the way that I distinguish them, based on the sources that I use, is that occult is an ontological category, and that basically means the innate nature of something. So, the occult sciences become those that deal with phenomena whose causes are not immediately available to the senses. For example, with astrology’s astrological influences, we see their effects, but we don’t necessarily experience their causes immediately or immediately to the senses. For magic, as well as talismans, how they— the occult properties of things, these occult properties that you know distinguish the use of copper for certain purposes but not lead for other purposes. These properties are inherent in natural things but are not immediately available to the senses. So, in that sense, the occult has also traditionally included medicine, surprisingly, because medicine deals with symptoms or causes that are hidden and then produces knowledge based on their symptoms. So, in that sense, they’re occult. In this sense, the Arabic word for occult is ‘ghamid’, to be hidden.
Conversely, esoteric is more or less an epistemological category, which refers to how something is understood or the knowledge approach to understanding it. So, esoteric is a position of interpretation and explanation, interpreting phenomena and exegesis to seek their divine causes or origins and attain a connection with them. This is quite a reduction, but it also reflects the Arabic use of ‘batin’, which means something hidden, something beneath, and even like the belly button. So, in that sense, not everything occult is esoteric, and not everything esoteric is occult. So you can practice astrology in a non-esoteric way. For example, Abn Ma’shar ul-Balkhi, a very important astrologer, is very influential in the Islamic, Latin, and Western contexts. If you look at astrology there, it’s about technique, it’s about predictions, it’s about symptoms, and it’s about how to interpret signs in nature and the heavens of hidden things. But you can also see astrology used, for example, by Sufis, which takes an esoteric sense, where astrological knowledge is not just about finding out what was just hidden but also becomes knowledge for attaining proximity with the divine. So, these are the basic distinctions I make based on the sources I study.
Dr Angela Puca: Thank you, and by the way, hi Filip, a dear friend of mine who is a great online resource for studying everything about Islamicate and Islamic traditions. It is so nice to see you here in the chat. But I was thinking about how come, or if it is my ignorance, please correct me. Still, my impression is that in the field of esotericism, I hear about the term occult science primarily when it comes to the Islamicate world. Is it just my impression? I don’t think that I hear it as much.
Dr Liana Saif: That’s a very good observation, Angela because I think this leads us to the notion of science. It’s the occult sciences in Arabic because ‘al-‘ilm al-ghamid’ literally translates as the sciences of things occult or hidden. What’s important here is to highlight that the occult sciences have become branches of natural philosophy. They are the sciences whereby we apply knowledge of the cosmos and nature. Other natural sciences and philosophy will explain phenomena in the different layers of the cosmos: nature, the celestial world, and the divine world. You will read a lot of Aristotelian notions of generation and corruption, how things are generated and dissipated, and the Neoplatonic emanation scheme. So, this is natural philosophy, but the occult sciences become the application of that knowledge in life to make things happen for the benefit of human beings, well, depending on the perspectives, because sometimes magic is not for the benefit of anyone. But that’s why I think it’s important to stress the fact that in the context that I look at, in the medieval context particularly, but also in the early modern context, these are part of natural philosophy, and that’s why they become very attractive in the European context, right? And we can talk a bit more about it if you want, in the context of the medieval Latin world. This de-demonizes magic, right? It stopped being about demons, and it started being about natural dynamics, and that helped make the natural world more knowable and more defensible, I think, in practice.
Dr Angela Puca: Could you elaborate a bit more about the influence of Islam? I’m going to use Islamicate because I’m scared of using the wrong term. But would it be correct to say that Islamicate means culturally Islamic but not necessarily, yet possibly, religiously Islamic?
Dr Liana Saif: Yeah, is it correct.
Dr Angela Puca: I don’t know that I have understood the definition
Dr Liana Saif: No, you have it right. There’s always more ways to know one thing, of course, but I think at its core, that is absolutely correct, yeah.
Dr Liana Saif: No, you have it right. There’s always more ways to know one thing, of course, but I think at its core, that is absolutely correct, yeah.
Dr Angela Puca: Yeah, because if it also includes the religious Islamic, it is the most all-encompassing term. So, that’s good to know. So, I’m going to use that one. Can you tell us a bit more about the significant influence that the Islamicate world and the Islamicate traditions have had on the development of what we now understand as Western esotericism? And when did it start, and who were the main contributors and influencers, if that can be the applied term?
Dr Liana Saif: That’s fine. So, to talk about these influences, I think it’s important to go back to the 12th century in Europe, and the 12th century at that time was going through a lot of intellectual and economic changes as well. One aspect of that was the development, obviously, of cathedral universities in Paris, Montpellier, Oxford, Salerno, and Bologna, and in the context of the universities, these developing urban centres were very important for translating Arabic sources because they were feeding the curricula at that time, particularly the natural philosophy and the natural sciences. It led to what Charles Haskins described as the Renaissance of the 12th century, and that’s when the Arabo-Latin translation movement happened. Arabo-Latin because it’s from Arabic into Latin, and that happened particularly in the 12th century. There were notable centres around Europe, Toledo, and Sicily as well, and it involved Jewish scholars who often served as cultural and linguistic intermediaries. There were very famous translators of that time, for example, Hugo of Santalla, who was Spanish; Daniel of Morley, who was English; and Gerard of Cremona, who is arguably one of the most accomplished translators of scientific texts and was active in the late 12th century in Toledo. He translated many of the Arabic works of Ptolemy, Almagest, and other texts that influenced astrological practice, such as Al Biruni‘s Elements of Astrology.
Dr Liana Saif: So, you had these celebrity translators basically who were translating a lot of works on astrology, on medicine, and natural philosophy, but also you had a lot of patronage, for example, King Alfonso the 10th. He gathered around him a learned community of Muslim, Christian, and Jewish scholars, and he had what we call a scriptorium that he commissioned for a series of translations, mostly on astrology and magic. So, this is more like the practical side of how this material entered. Still, regarding intellectual and scientific value, the Arabic materials on astrology, medicine, and natural philosophy promoted a worldview that became more knowable and intelligible. The cosmos became more knowable, more intelligible. Now, that is not to say that before that, people did not think or know anything about the universe. Still, it was quite a wealth of information that provided an anatomy of the cosmos in detail that matched the texts or the knowledge available. And so, you have texts on astrology that provided theories on astral influences, so how do the stars influence the terrestrial world, and particularly this notion that the Islamic texts were emphasizing, which is causality, that the activity of the stars and their influences on the terrestrial world was not random. It was basically because the stars acted as causes; in this sense, they were using Aristotelian ideas of causes. Just to get a little bit more technical, Aristotle posits four causes: the form of something, the matter from which something is made, the agent that made that thing, and the purpose of that thing. Astrologers such as Abu Ma’shar particularly proposed that the stars were the efficient causes, the agent cause that brings form and matter and thus generates the thing. This might sound a little bit basic to us, but that helped to, as I mentioned earlier, de-demonize astrology, astral influences, and magic. But I think it’s also important to look at the influence of medicine. We mentioned earlier that medicine in some texts was considered an occult science. Still, the medicine and medical texts, whether translations of Galenic texts, provided intelligibility about the human body. As a result, when the stars became knowable, the body became knowable. They were connected, so the notion of the microcosm became established even more as the human body and the being of being human is a microcosm of a macrocosm because the macrocosm caused the microcosm, which is the human. So, that became a really important point of influence that also runs through the Renaissance. And so, in very general terms, I think this intelligibility, this integration of a causal way of thinking, was very important and was integrated into medieval universities where, in some ways, it was described as ‘al-faydiqa’, so it’s not physics but physica, which is kind of like the study of nature and the study of the connection with the celestial world based on understanding causes and effects in a Neoplatonized Aristotelian type of way if that makes sense.
Dr Angela Puca: That’s very interesting, so it was a big influence. Do you think that there’s something particularly surprising or little known about the Islamicate influence on what we now call Western esotericism? We know it is a 19th-century category that has been applied retroactively, and most people would not be aware of it.
Dr Liana Saif: Yeah, or little known. I think it’s in things like when theologians, prominent Christian theologians, are talking about the occult sciences. I think often that seems to be quite surprising. For example, Thomas Aquinas. Indeed, I wouldn’t say that he was an occultist by any means. Still, in his works, he often talked about the different ways in which occult properties were interpreted and commented on the validity of some of the arguments that were taking place about the naturalization of astrology and magic, oftentimes to assert that, for example, any kind of divinatory practice involved demons. So, he did not approve of all the theories that naturalized astrology, for example, or other divinatory practices. Still, he had the open mind to write about the nature of occult properties of natural things, arguing, for example, that certain materials did have certain occult properties and occult powers, but—and that’s important—as long as you don’t add things on that object that might make the object addressative. “Addressative” I use in the sense that it seems to be addressing a power that listens, whether it is a demon or not. I think it often surprises people that theologians, who we often assume are not involved in this kind of knowledge, were involved in them as well.
Dr Angela Puca: Yeah, and also, I think that knowledge in those centuries was really almost precluded to people who were in some kind of religious capacity, so it kind of makes sense in that sense. But how did the translation movements, particularly during the Renaissance, transform Western esoteric thought through these Islamicate texts?
Dr Liana Saif: I guess in the Renaissance, one way that I think can be challenged about the way we think about the Renaissance is that it was a cutoff point, but many of the Arabic influences continued quite seamlessly into the Renaissance. What was different in the Renaissance is that there was, because of the name “Renaissance,” right—it’s a rebirth, and particularly a rebirth of Greek knowledge. And so there was the sense that the Greek material had to be translated into Latin directly. However, exaggerating that the people in the Renaissance were bypassing the Arabic material is incorrect. I think the Arabic material came to be very influential, particularly in their commentary forms. And again, this idea of naturalizing the occult sciences, and, for example, Marsilio Ficino, who we talked about, integrates a lot of this material. For example, he refers to Abu Ma’shar al-Balkhi, who arguably is the first to articulate a theory of astral influences based on Aristotelian notions of causality, and that remains quite important for someone like Marsilio Ficino, Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, or Heinrich Agrippa, and John Dee, who read these texts, who knew the Picatrix, who I think we’re going to talk about a little bit more later. And so this idea of the stars acting as causes, and therefore making a talisman a reproduction of a natural process, was also very influential in the Renaissance. We also see that in the way, for example, Marsilio Ficino talks about medicine and making in his three books on life; when he talks about making these pills for diseases, he speaks about these medicines in terms of occult properties that exist in these materials because of these astral influence that’s why they need to be astrologically timed. And in that, he proposed a model where it’s not about demons but about astral influences and the emanations of the cosmos.
Dr Angela Puca: That’s very interesting, and yeah, I think it would be a good idea to talk a bit more about the Picatrix. Your work on the Picatrix is definitely groundbreaking, so what are the most intriguing aspects of this text that challenge our contemporary understanding of magic and astrology?
Dr Liana Saif: I think it concerns the point you made earlier when you asked about sciences. These were, I think, considered natural sciences rather than marginalised or illegitimate knowledge. It was quite mainstream. That does not mean that there were no negotiations. There were a lot of works that aimed at differentiating between the different types of practices, the different types of magic, for example, that are legitimate and that are not legitimate. As you would expect, it goes around whether it is demonic or natural or astral agency, but it’s still considered natural sciences. You have prominent philosophers who were not occultists, like Ibn Sina, who classified them as natural sciences. Another aspect that might be little known or rather surprising and important to emphasise is that I focused on natural philosophy as the dominant model for understanding the occult sciences in the medieval period. But with the rise of Sufism and its institutionalisation, particularly in the 12th and 13th centuries, another competing model for understanding occult influences emerged, and that one is more esoteric. So, in that context, occult or magical knowledge is not necessarily based on intellectual engagement with the cosmos, meaning studying causality and understanding natural dynamics, but becomes the prerogative of the spiritual elite. It becomes knowledge given by God to the spiritual elite as a sign of confirming their development in the esoteric path.
What is surprising is that we talk a lot—I talk a lot, at least—about Ghāyat al-Ḥakīm and the Picatrix, but if you go further in time, you will find that it has much less influence in the early modern period and onward in the Islamicate context. Here, particularly talking about the Islamicate context, in the early modern period, it stops being so influential, and another occult science based on Sufi cosmology comes to the fore, and that’s the science of letters and divine names, which is to this day practised. So if we come to modernity, the astral magic of Ghāyat al-Ḥakīm, the Picatrix, the Brethren of Purity, or other authors and works on astral magic stop becoming so influential. You have letterist treatises and letterist magic becoming more influential. And I’m sure a lot of your audience. You know about Ahmad al-Buni, who became like the arch sorcerer with quite a grim reputation, unfairly so, that became associated with the science of letters and divine names. To this day, as I said, that has become the more prominent Islamic practice.
Dr Angela Puca: Can you tell us a bit more about him and this practice and the text surrounding this practice of the divine names?
Dr Liana Saif: Yeah, of course. So, the science of letters and the divine names can be compared, for the sake of clarity, to Kabbalah. It proposes that the universe’s different components and layers have essences based on letters and God’s attributes, so his divine names. An esotericist can induce effects in the celestial world, the natural world, and their psychology based on manipulating letters and divine names. Although there are many letterists that we could mention, the most prominent author, as I mentioned, is Ahmad al-Buni, who was active in the 13th century, perhaps died in 1225. But not much is known about his life other than he was North African and active in Cairo, but also that he was a Sufi known to perform miracles. His identity quite early on was a bit obscure, but nowadays, he is known as an infamous sorcerer, based on a text called “Shams al-Maʿārif al-Kubrā” (The Sun of Knowledge: the larger version).
This text turns out, based on the studies of Noah Gardner and Jean-Charles Coulon, to be not actually by al-Buni but rather a 17th-century production of probably adherents of al-Buni type esotericism that emphasize the occult more than the way that you see in al-Buni’s authentic texts. His work continues to be influential but also controversial to this day. He’s not the only author who’s written on this, but he became very central, especially in modern culture. In the last, I would say, five years, he became very prominent, and the text “Shams al-Maʿārif” became very prominent, especially since it was translated recently by Amina Inloes in a modern edition. It’s incomplete, but that offered a great gateway for modern practitioners and also academics to get into the science of letters and divine names, which, as I said, correlates the letters of the Arabic alphabet with the hierarchy and the emanations of the universe as decreed by God. But this knowledge of the divine letters, the divine names, is not attained by processes of understanding nature but rather by pursuing an esoteric path, and it gets revealed to esotericists in, if you will, like a heightened spiritual state.
Dr Angela Puca: This is very interesting, and it’s something that is found in other traditions too, like in Jewish mysticism and also in Indian mysticism with—I’m thinking about Tantra and the Spandakarika in Kashmiri Shaivism—you also have kind of… But what’s the most controversial about this text and the alleged author?
Dr Liana Saif: the most controversial aspect is the jinn and the demons. So, in the context of astral magic, the Jinn is generally absent, and demons are generally absent. The Picatrix and the Ghāyat al-Ḥakīm and other texts speak about spiritual forces. Still, these spiritual forces are usually tied to the influence of the stars rather than them being demonic entities. They’re called rūḥāniyya, and of course, the term ‘rūh’ means soul; it can indicate a kind of entity, but if you read the Ghāyat al-Ḥakīm and the Picatrix, the author explicitly says that we’re not talking about jinn and we’re not talking about demons; we’re talking about kind of like the volitional network of the cosmos that stems from God’s own decrees. But by the time we get to the Shams al-Maʿārif al-Kubrā and the time we get to the science of letters and divine names, they become more prominent. It makes sense because the idea of the science of letters and divine names is to manipulate or hold power over letters in a way that can dominate and control different layers of reality, and that, of course, includes jinn and demons as well. So that is what gave it its dark reputation. But if you ask someone, for example, I’m now in Jordan, if you ask someone about the Shams al-Maʿārif, they will tell you that just owning the book just owning the book is unleashing demons and jinns. So there’s a lot of narrative, what I call narratives of danger, about these types of texts rather than, for example, the Ghāyat al-Ḥakīm or the Picatrix because the Ghāyat al-Ḥakīm explicitly says as well, and emphasizes that alchemy and astral magic are parts of natural philosophy. And I guess, and I think it would be interesting since we’re talking about the influence of the Arabic material in the European and then later the Western context, it’s worth mentioning that, you know, in the 13th century, Alfonso the 10th, who I mentioned earlier, he sponsored the translation of the Ghāyat al-Ḥakīm, the first into Castilian and then into Latin, and there was also a Jewish translation.
Still, it gets picked up in the Renaissance as well. But in the Renaissance, the European Renaissance was the time when the science of letters and divine names in the Islamic context was more prominent. And so one of the questions I’ve asked is, where is the science of letters and divine names in the Renaissance? You won’t find it so much in Ficino or Pico della Mirandola, where the Kabbalah is more prominent in these sources. But in a recent work I’ve conducted on Athanasius Kircher, he refers to a peculiar type of Kabbalah in his Oedipus Aegyptiacus, curiously called Kabbalah Sarasenca. Hence, the Kabbalah of the Muslims and the Saracen is a pejorative term that was used in the medieval period but also in the Renaissance to refer to Muslims. And so he refers to this as Saracenic Kabbalah. So he saw in the 17th century that there is a similarity between the science of letters and divine names and the Kabbalah, and then upon looking at his sources and digging around archives and identifying some of his sources, it turns out that he was reading legit text on the science of letters and divine names and trying to systematize them in some way, but he considered it as an inferior form of what he called Hebrew Kabbalah.
So, this is a fascinating instance of the European reception of the science of letters and divine names. We don’t find al-Buni, although I tried so much to look at the Oedipus Aegyptiacus and other texts as well to find a reference to al-Buni or someone who maybe sounds like al-Buni because, in truth, Kircher did not necessarily transpose the names quite accurately a lot of the time. So I was looking for al-Buri, Alburni, or whatever, and I couldn’t find it, but we do find Abdulrahman Bustani, who also was a very prominent letterist. So this is, I think, an exciting instance of the reception of the science of letters and divine names because we like to talk about the Picatrix and other texts. Still, recently, we have been working a lot on the reception of the science of letters in the Renaissance, and Kircher is an excellent starting point.
Dr Angela Puca: That’s great, and another thing that you reminded me of is the idea of jinn because contemporary esoteric practitioners seem to be very interested and attracted to the jinn as entities. Are there similarities with the typical ideas of demons found in Europe, in a more Christian context, but also influenced by the Solomonic tradition? Do you think there is an overlap between the entities of jinn and demons, or are they different? Do they have different traits and characteristics compared to the demons from the Solomonic tradition?
Dr Liana Saif: Very interesting, a very good question. I know people get excited, as I do when we talk about Jinn and demons and angels. I think this is good because it tells us about the different shifts that took place in the medieval and early modern periods in the Islamic context. As I mentioned, here in the earlier medieval context, there’s this notion of the ‘rūḥāniyyah’, which literally means spiritual forces. As I mentioned, they are just like volitional forces that transmit astral influences, and you can see similar concepts in Neoplatonism and Stoic philosophy. In other ways, they’re like the multiplication of the Neoplatonic universal soul. The emanations from the universal soul flow through the celestial world, and that flow is the essence of the ‘rūḥāniyyah’. But also, the ‘ruhānṣufah’, for example, do make a distinction between two types of spirits: one is the ‘rūḥāniyyah’, and the other ones combine like the Jinn and the devils.
So they, as I said, the Jinn at that early stage were not particularly part of astral magic. But Jinn, just to give a very general introduction to them, the word Jinn comes from possibly ‘junūn’, which means insane or going mad. They are entities that live parallel to the human world, but they are made of smokeless fire, as described in the Qur’an. They are invisible; they are said to be shape-shifting; some are good, some are evil, and the evil become demons. They are like humans, accountable to God; they adopt different religions; they live a life parallel to humans. As I said, they’re mentioned in the Qur’an. There’s a whole chapter in the Qur’an called Al Jinn, and in different narratives, they are said to aid in divination, and of course, they are subjugated by Solomon. I also can mention that someone like the librarian Ibn al-Nadim wrote a text called al-Fihrist, where he lists different types of books based on different topics. He makes a distinction, for example, between astral magic that uses astral forces and adjuration type magic that subjects demons and Jinn by adhering to religious obligations, or sorcerers were like the negative, the bad type who appeal to demons with sinful acts and sacrifices. But you still don’t see them being the main agents of magic, in Islamic magic to be more accurate, until the 12th century, and this is something that I have been working on recently of why what happens. This new genre of magic that started appearing in the 12th century seems to mediate between astral magic à la the Picatrix but not letterist yet but includes things related to subjugating demons. It seems this is tied to integrating the Jewish adjuration style of magic. So, like the Jewish adjuration style magic, they appeal to supernatural powers, usually angels, but also names, letters, and demons.
Usually, these entities are addressed in the first person; they use a lot of expressions of restriction; they use expressions like in the name of B’shiem followed by the names of God and names of angels, and they seem to be very similar to a kind of sanctified astral magic where the ‘rūḥāniyyah’ now changed into angels. It’s through subjugating the angels that you can control the Jinn. Also, what is interesting is that in the, and I use the ‘Rhya’ for an example, astrology is quite intense, so you cannot be a cosmic magician if you’re not a consummate astrologer. There is still astrology in this type of magic, but it’s a bit more elementary and more based on day-hour-angel-letter correspondences. You also find a lot of Qur’anic material, whereas if you look, you won’t find the Qur’an or verses from the Qur’an integrated into the practice. But most fascinating is that this type of magic, like Hebrewized astral magic, uses voces magic, so words are from Hebrew, and that’s fascinating. You see Hebrew integrated into adjurations. And just to give an example of such a text, I’m thinking of Ibn al-Nafīs, who died in 1229. He wrote a text called Al-Shāmil fī al-Ṣinā’ah al-Ṭibbīyah, which translates into “The Comprehensive Book on the Complete Sea.” If you look at that text, you will find this type of magic that integrates great Jewish practices of adjurations, not necessarily Kabbalah. You won’t find Kabbalah, but you’ll find practices that were practised in the local context as well as in the Islamicate context by Jews.
So you see why here the Islamicate context using Islamicate makes sense. There’s Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī, who died in 1209. He was a prominent exegete and philosopher in a text called ‘al Sil Machtum’, the concealed secret or the hidden secret. There you also find this type of magic where particularly the angelification of the ‘rūḥāniyyah’, the ‘rūḥāniyyah’ explicitly start getting names that end with the Hebrew E-L, so you know Gabriel, Rachmiel, Shemiel, and you don’t see those in prominence in the Ghāyat al-Ḥakīm. In this context, you start seeing the Solomonic references. So it’s in the Islamic context, you will struggle to find sources that you can call Solomonic Magic in the way that we understand them; we understand Solomonic Magic in the European context, but you’ll find a lot of similarities, God’s greatest names expressions like ‘al-Ḥayy al-Rashīd al-Ḥayy’, here you will find it, you will find even like the angel Metatron who is present in an Arabic version of The Sword of Moses, a very important text, so these texts were translated. I think the practices, the local practices, were integrated into this 12th century Jewish-Islamic Magic, and it’s truly fascinating. I think the Sufis started offering a more Islamic model of magical efficacy through the Sufi context. Hence, the letters become more prominent, rather than in this kind of magic that is neither letterist nor purely astral that I just described. But this is also a work in progress, and I hope to publish soon an article on this as part of a project that I’m a member of taking place at the University of Exeter and led by Emily Selove.
There’s information on that project online; it’s called “The Sorcerer’s Handbook,” so you can look it up, and we’re studying al-Sakkākī’s text in particular. But when we say Solomonic magic, we’re really talking about the Latin European tradition which emerged in the 12th and the 13th centuries, and this is pretty much a Christian type of magic. However, it has non-Christian roots, whether ancient Greek or Jewish, as represented by the “Liber Ritualis.” It’s as you know, it’s pseudoepigraphic, and texts like the Ars Notoria and the Liber Juratus Honorii represent it. It has features similar to the type of magic I described earlier, but the goal is different. The goal is like power in knowledge and getting intellectual enlightenment. Still, it does involve inner discipline and purity rituals, which we also see in this al-Sakkākī and Fakhr Al-din Al-Razi type of magic, and it has invocations of angels, and of course, Solomon becomes important. So, there are similarities, but they are not the same. But this is a very, I think, understudied subject, and it would be great to have more people doing more research on it.
Dr Angela Puca: So if you’re listening and trying to get a PhD on something, that could be your proposal for you or the topic.
Dr Liana Saif: You need three languages to work on: Hebrew, Latin, Arabic.
Dr Angela Puca: We have already put everybody off, but…
Dr Liana Saif: No, no, no, no, that’s a lot of fun, and I will help you there.
Dr Angela Puca: I agree, I agree. I’ve studied many languages, so I agree that studying languages is a lot of fun. Still, I know it can be intimidating for those who have never learned a second language. But you know, there’s always time to start.
Dr Liana Saif: Absolutely, and there’s always a way in of getting into it by just like diving into texts, getting dictionaries, and fluffing around, and then taking courses, you know, can be a lot of fun; it’s like deciphering.
Dr Angela Puca: Yes, exactly. So, let’s move from astrology and demons to alchemy. So, could you discuss the role of figures like Jābir ibn Ḥayyān—I hope I’m pronouncing it right—in developing alchemical thought both in the Islamicate and European world?
Dr Liana Saif: Sure, just a disclaimer: I am more of a magic person in astrology than alchemy, so I’ve dedicated more of my research to the subject of magic, astrology, demons, and jinn and such. And so, I’m currently studying the Jabirian corpus, but I’m looking at his work on talismans called Kitāb al-Nukhab. But just to give more of a background, when we’re talking about Jābir ibn Ḥayyān, one of the first questions that will pop up is, who the hell are we talking about, because there’s a historical Jābir ibn Ḥayyān, his full name is Jābir ibn Ḥayyān. He probably died in the first half of the 9th century, and he’s an alchemist, a natural philosopher and Mage. He’s also said to be the disciple of the Shi’ite Imam Jaʿfar al-Ṣādiq, who died in 765; he’s the sixth Imam of Shia Islam.
But even historically, if you go back in time, the identity of Jābir was also obscure; some historians claimed that he didn’t exist but rather that he was a legendary figure. So, this is a very contentious subject about who Jābir ibn Ḥayyān was. But rememberIbn-Nadim mentioned him, the guy I talked about who wrote Al-Fihrist, like the librarian who wrote this bio-bibliographical source in the 10th century, and he refers to some treatises supposedly written by Jābir ibn Ḥayyān. He also claims that it was dedicated to some members of the Barmakid family who came to power in 786. Still, one very influential person, Jaʽfar ibn Yahya Barmaki, the vizier of the Abbasid caliph Harun al-Rashid, featured in texts like the 1001 Nights. So, the biography of Jābir is somewhere between historical reality and legend, but there’s no text of what we refer to as the Jabarian corpus with those details. So, the attribution of that corpus, which we now call the Jabarian corpus, to the historical Jābir ibn Ḥayyān is historically ambiguous. But based on a lot of research that took place in the 20th century by prominent historians of science like Paul Kraus, for example or Holmyard, it is now widely accepted that what we call the Jabarian corpus is pseudepigrapha that was probably produced during the late and early 10th century. So, there were many debates about this corpus’s authenticity. You still have some camps, like the prominent historian the late Fuat Sezgin, Fuat, who insisted that this corpus did belong to the historical Jābir, which means that it belongs to a much earlier period than we now accept, which is a very interesting challenge for research, like what are the implications of that dating on the development of the occult sciences?
So, his corpus is huge, and it contains material on alchemical processes about the elixir, the occult properties of natural things, and a lot about talismans, but also, the corpus is famous for presenting the theory that we call the science of balance. The science of balance is this mathematicalisation of the occult properties where the author or authors claim that the essence of all natural things is based on numerical proportions and that if those numerical proportions are known, the material can change from one to the other. So, the alchemist is not just someone who dabbles with material things but also is aware of the mathematical essence of things. And so if you know how to manipulate these mathematical or numerical ratios, you can change one method to another. Still, also, that’s alchemy, but you can create talismans based on these numerical ratios. So, as I mentioned earlier, I’m working on editing and translating, hopefully sometime in the near future. Still, I do say that quite carefully, but a text called ‘Kitāb Nukhab’ can be translated as the compendium. This text has not been studied almost at all; it was dismissed by prominent historians of alchemy because, you know, in the early 20th century, with a positivist kind of approach, alchemy was legitimised as an academic subject of study because of that outdated notion that alchemy is a pseudoscience that it’s the science that led to the proper science of chemistry.
You can’t do that so much with talismans in that framework, so it was explicitly pushed aside, as you know, not a central book in the Jabirain corpus, but in this text, it’s all about talismans. It does not have any instructions on making talismans, but it explains occult properties and how the science of balance works in magic. It applies Aristotelian theories of causality again to explain that making a talisman is an act imitating nature because in nature, when form unites with matter, and then you have the stars being the causes, it emerges as a thing with power or you know or something with occult powers and so he argues that making a talisman is the human equivalent of you know creation or like let’s call it secondary generation, which is quite a remarkable idea. The author insists that magic is the most authentic science because he claims that when humans saw fermentation or when they saw spontaneous generation, so this idea that things can generate spontaneously, like bees from cows or stuff like that, that the first act of magic is people seeing these processes and fermenting things. So, for him, fermenting is a kind of magic because it reproduces natural processes and produces new material. So I find that quite fascinating, and I’m glad others did not look at it because then I can, which is a lot of fun. But since we’re talking also about the European influence, when we talk about Jābir, we’re also talking about Geber, or are we? So there is in the history of alchemy, there’s what we call the “Geber Problem,” which is, again, who is that Geber? Geber is a Latinised name of Jābir, but this emerged in the 13th century in Europe, and it became a name given to an anonymous writer who we now refer to as pseudo-Geber. And in the 13th century, these alchemical and metallurgical writings started popping up under this name. Now, one of the books of Jābir, or rather one of the treatises of the Jabiran corpus, was translated. It was called the “Book of Seventy,” the translation of Kitāb al-Sabʿīn. It was partially translated into Latin by Gerard of Cremona, who I mentioned as one of the main, very important translators in the 12th century.
Still, that translation did not have the name Jābir in it. And so when you look at some of the list of translations compiled by his student, the students of Gerard, they list the book of 70 as the Liber Divinitatus de Septuaginta, but they don’t include the author’s name. So yeah, all of Geber’s Latin Works were considered to be Latin by Latin authors, with the exception of what I just mentioned, the “Book of the Seventy” and the “Book of Mercy” as well, Kitāb al-Raḥma. Still, particular texts became central to the medieval alchemical tradition that was attributed to Geber, for example, the Liber Claritatus, the Liber fornacum, and what’s interesting about the Liber fornacum is that the manuscript, I can’t remember exactly where that manuscript is, but it was translated in Spain. The scribe gives the date of this manuscript, and he gives it in the Hijiri, so the Arabic year 720 is equivalent to 1320 AD. But I guess the most if we’re talking about Geber, we should highlight the Summa Perfecitonis because it was of particular importance. The text itself claims that it presents, quote-unquote, the whole science of chemistry or alchemy, and the author claims to have collected it from all kinds of ancient writings, but what is important about this text is that it pushed to the fore this idea that all metals are composed of sulfur, a unified combination of sulfur and mercury corpuscles. He describes and justifies the issue of making an elixir. But we also find a lot of influence of this pseudo-Geber in editions and manuscripts produced in the 16th and 17th centuries. So, I’m saying this to say that the Jābir-Geber situation is a mess with regard to who wrote these texts. Still, it shouldn’t matter because you know it shouldn’t matter to just fixate on who the author is historically. Do we have evidence of that particular person existing at a particular time? For me, particularly in the occult sciences, I think what’s important is the construction of authority and authorship. So, although Geber might not be a real person, his influence is real enough to talk about Geber and Jābir and Hermes and many others as actual authorities. So, that should be what we focus on more than the historical reality of the existence of Geber and Jābir.
Dr Angela Puca: Yes, I also wanted to ask about the Brethren of Purity, but I think you mentioned that already. You know its influence on Western esoteric traditions. So, do you want to add anything more about its influence?
Dr Liana Saif: Sure, I mean, the Epistles of the Brethren of Purity, their influence cannot be underestimated. They’re influential on the Ghāyat al-Ḥakīm and influential on so many other occult texts as well. But they weren’t translated into Latin, and we don’t have evidence, at least till now, of their direct influence in the European context. However, they were very influential via the Ghāyat al-Ḥakīm because the Ghāyat al-Ḥakīm copies and transposes a lot of the material in the epistles of the Brethren of Purity, particularly their epistle on magic and astrological also epistles. So, they might not be directly influential, but they were influential through the influence of Ghāyat al-Ḥakīm. But they are fascinating, especially since we still don’t know who they are. The only thing we have surviving is these 52 epistles, which comprise a whole encyclopedia that covers mathematical sciences, natural sciences, esotericism, and the occult sciences. They had this very interesting project where knowledge, especially occult knowledge, is presented as a means for esoteric aspiration. So, remember when we said that not everything occult is esoteric and not everything esoteric is occult? Still, for the Brethren of Purity, the occult has to be mobilized for esoteric purposes. For them, this is a project of ‘hikma’, of knowledge of wisdom, that has to have a comprehensive knowledge of nature and the celestial world to become closer to the divine by knowledge by intellectual engagement. It’s quite a unique text in how it does that, and it’s also expressed a lot of times in pretty elegant ways. But yes, the only translation we have in Latin is an epistle on geography, and I’m not sure; I think it’s also not complete, but I’m not sure if it’s complete or not. But I think that is the only section, if I am not wrong, that has been translated— their epistle on geography but not the magic, which is a shame.
Dr Angela Puca: I will ask my last question, and then we will take something from the chat. If people wanted to start studying the Islamicate occult sciences, where would they start? I would imagine that for somebody who’s perhaps more educated on Western esotericism, it might be difficult to start, and they might feel a bit disoriented. So, do you have any advice on somebody who’s starting to get a bit more knowledgeable on the subject?
Dr Liana Saif: Sure, I mean, we are lucky in the fact that I would say, the last 10 years, there’s been a boom, an absolute boom, in studying the Islamicate occult sciences. You have so many scholars working on this, and we have many sources. But as an entry point, I recommend a publication called “Islamicate Occult Sciences in Theory and Practice,” edited by Francesca Leoni, Matthew Melvin-Koushki, and Farouk Yahyaa. It combines chapters that were based on a conference that was organized at Oxford when I was there. What is nice about this text, in particular, is that it was consciously a marriage between the study of the occult sciences from the intellectual history aspect and the material culture. Francesca Leoni, who curated a fantastic exhibition at the Ashmolean on the Islamic occult sciences—sorry, I forgot the name, which is very embarrassing, but “Supernatural in Islam,” I’m so sorry Francesca if you’re hearing, I’m sorry—but that is a good text to just get a general idea about what was up-to-date at that time in manuscript studies, in historical studies, but also the study of material culture and archives. But there is quite a lot out there that I recommend. A quick Google search, I think, will show that we have been quite successful in placing the occult sciences in a central position in Islamic Studies specifically but also in the study of esotericism at large.
Dr Angela Puca: Thank you, Liana. So, first of all, I want to thank all those who sent a Super Chat. Thank you all so much. There’s a lot of enthusiasm about you, Liana. Mark says that you are amazing; this contribution is beyond qualifiable value. And thank you all, thank you, Rachel, for the incredible interview and the super chat. And S Mill is asking, can you please put these references in the comments or description? Yes, I will, yeah, if you can send me a list of references, Liana, I can quickly…
Dr Liana Saif: That’s a great idea, yeah, that’s a great idea. I’ll send it to you after the interview, sure.
Dr Angela Puca: You will see that in the description box. Let me see, thank you also, Hank, and yes, all of you, smash the like button as you know that that’s important. And Len is saying both of you do great work. I’m very happy you’re doing this joint discussion, so that’s nice. So I think there’s a question. Can you speak about pseudo-Empedocles’ practical theurgy? I’m not sure if it’s part of your expertise.
Dr Liana Saif: I would like to know more about what is the reference to theurgy in this context.
Dr Angela Puca: Yeah, it’s a bit generic, probably.
Dr Liana Saif: Yeah, especially when it comes to pseudo-Empedocles because there is a tradition in the Arabic context of the pseudo-Empedocles, who is a little bit different than the Greek origin because it’s quite actually quite a subject of debate about the influence of the Arabic pseudo-Empedocles on medieval Latin philosophy, and I recommend the work of Daniel De Smet on that context. So, if you want to know more, I highly recommend it. I think he writes a lot about demystifying pseudo-Empedocles, but only in the Arabic context, which I’m not sure how it ties into theurgy, so I would need more details. I’m sorry for any disappointment.
Dr Angela Puca: That’s okay, don’t worry. Then, Owais asks, whose English translation of the Ghāyat al-Ḥakīm would you recommend reading?
Dr Liana Saif: Right, so there is a translation, but I’m not going to specify the publisher. It’s widely available. I’m not going to specify the publishers, but this one is widely available. Unfortunately, it does have quite a lot of issues. I just don’t want to call it out because, you know, it’s an admirable effort, and I’m not here to dis anyone, but the English translation from the Arabic has not been done yet.
But I’ve been doing that. I know it has taken so long, but that’s because I’m working with 32 manuscripts. I thought I could use around 20 manuscripts known to Hellmut Ritter, who produced an Arabic edition in 1933. Still, looking in archives and knowing people who love that, I have ended up presenting my way 32 manuscripts, so every time I get a manuscript, I have to collate it. But I have good news: I do have a manuscript, so I’m working on it right now. I hope I’ll be able to submit it soon. But this will be based on Hellmut Ritter’s Arabic edition that, as I said, was published in 1933 by The Warburg Institute. It doesn’t have footnotes to elucidate much of the material, but I got more manuscripts.
However, there is a German translation of this Arabic edition by Hellmut Ritter. Hellmut’s edition is quite reliable; I fixed some things in it, but that is not to say it’s unreliable. There is a German translation of this, and a Latin translation was published in the ’60s and edited by Martin Plessner. Based on that edition, Dan Attrel and David Porecca recently published a Latin Picatrix translation. So, if you’re patient, it will come out. I’m still working on it. I stopped collating any manuscripts coming my way; I’m just adding them to footnotes, and I’m not revising the entire thing. So soon, I will announce that it’s complete and will be going through the review process soon.
Dr Liana Saif: Right, so there is a translation, but I’m not going to specify the publisher. It’s widely available. I’m not going to specify the publishers, but this one is widely available. Unfortunately, it does have quite a lot of issues. I just don’t want to call it out because, you know, it’s an admirable effort, and I’m not here to dis anyone, but the English translation from the Arabic has not been done yet.
But I’ve been doing that. I know it has taken so long, but that’s because I’m working with 32 manuscripts. I thought I could use around 20 manuscripts known to Hellmut Ritter, who produced an Arabic edition in 1933. Still, looking in archives and knowing people who love that, I have ended up presenting my way 32 manuscripts, so every time I get a manuscript, I have to collate it. But I have good news: I do have a manuscript, so I’m working on it right now. I hope I’ll be able to submit it soon. But this will be based on Hellmut Ritter’s Arabic edition that, as I said, was published in 1933 by The Warburg Institute. It doesn’t have footnotes to elucidate much of the material, but I got more manuscripts.
However, there is a German translation of this Arabic edition by Hellmut Ritter. Hellmut’s edition is quite reliable; I fixed some things in it, but that is not to say it’s unreliable. There is a German translation of this, and a Latin translation was published in the ’60s and edited by Martin Plessner. Based on that edition, Dan Attrel and David Porecca recently published a Latin Picatrix translation. So, if you’re patient, it will come out. I’m still working on it. I stopped collating any manuscripts coming my way; I’m just adding them to footnotes, and I’m not revising the entire thing. So soon, I will announce that it’s complete and will be going through the review process soon.
Dr Liana Saif: I truly appreciate your willingness to help me understand this concept better. Could you please provide more context, particularly in the Arabic context or in what kind of textual tradition? This would enable me to give a more comprehensive answer. So, is it incubation in the sense of creating a creature? If you could provide more, it would be greatly beneficial. I apologize for any disappointment caused, but your additional information would be invaluable.
Dr Angela Puca: Yeah, give it more detail.
Dr Liana Saif: Maybe even, Angela, you can shoot that question or those details to me, and I can send you whatever I can find out.
Dr Angela Puca: You mean even after this, in an email, if you wish? Yeah, sure. Then we have another question: can you discuss the relationship between the Western Aristotelian-influenced Sufi and the Eastern Advaita Sufi movement, their tension and/or cross-pollination?
Dr Liana Saif: Can you discuss the relationship between the Western Aristotelian-influenced Sufi? I’m not sure what this refers to in the context I study. Hence, this is like a medieval and a little early modern Islamicate context. Sufism leaned more on the Neoplatonic emanationist universe than the Aristotelian context, and this is quite an observable shift where occult and esoteric discourse at some point was understood through an Aristotelian cosmology, and in Sufism, that becomes more based on an emanationist hypothesis, an emanationist scheme because then each layer of the cosmos—so God at the top, and then the universal intellect that contains the ideas of all things, which emanates the universal soul, which gives life to everything and which then multiplies—the generation of everything gives life to individuals. These levels get associated with letters and divine names, so it ties in quite well with the letterist point of view, and you see something very similar in the Kabbalah. So maybe a little bit more detail about what is intended by Aristotelian influence Sufism, I will try to find out. Still, I’m unsure I know about the connection with an Eastern Advaita Sufi movement. Still, Sufism in the Indian context is a very important and fruitful context to study, especially with the entanglement of Hindu and tantric traditions with Sufi practices.
Dr Angela Puca: Thank you, Liana. Oh, and then Martin asks if you could give us an example of something that is occult but not esoteric.
Dr Liana Saif: A very good question, very good question. So, something that is occult but not esoteric—I gave the example of astrology earlier because, in the Islamicate context, astrology is considered one of the occult sciences. So, look at Abu Ma’shar al-Balkhi‘s “The Introduction to Astrology” (Kitab Al Madkhal Al Kabir Fi ʿilm Ahkam Al Noudjoum). You will see that here we have an astrologer who was systematising, you know, correspondences, astrological correspondences, techniques, but also the theory of astrology. It was based on Aristotelian notions of generation and corruption, and his idea—which I know to modern astrology is quite controversial—but that the stars are signs because they are causes. And I’m very aware of how controversial that is in the modern context, but that was the first step to naturalising the astral influences. There was no interest in that text, particularly in reaching divine truths and getting closer to the divine. It was more dealt with as a science, particularly based on Aristotelian epistemology, which means that you understand the causes of things by looking at their effects, and the astrologer’s job is to categorise effects and movements and reach conclusions about the causes from there. So in that sense, it’s occult but it’s not esoteric.
I would say Thābit ibn Qurra, active in Baghdad, was a mathematician, astronomer, and very established, very important figure; he wrote a text on talismans that was translated twice in the 12th century. He talks about making talismans to protect your house from scorpions—a concern that people had. So he tells you that you take a piece of, I think, frankincense, you chew it, and then you make a figure on a ring with Scorpio’s image. So you see, correspondences, astral correspondences are important. You chew that frankincense, then press it on it, and it becomes a talisman that protects from scorpions. Nothing in that process or in that text says that in this process, there’s a transformation or a divinisation of one’s soul. Now, you can argue that this is all like disciplines of wisdom, so you will have to become a sage, a wise person, which is a fair comment to say, but it was not described in what the Sufis and other esotericists will call a botany kind of context.
On the other hand, you look at a talisman made in Shams al-Maʿārif, for example, or in the works, authentic works by al-Buni. It is stressed that you make these talismans, which could be for things as simple as removing scorpions. Still, it is completely dependent on the operator to be someone who has attained high status in the Sufi path or become a quite established esotericist. In that sense, the esotericists in context insist that this knowledge of how to make that talisman or how to make other talismans did not come because they investigated things from the natural philosophy point of view but because occult knowledge came as a revelation from God because of the advancement in the esoteric path. Whereas for Ikhwan al-Safa and the Brethren of Purity in ‘anarya’, it’s you being a scientist, right, with the idea of science in the Islamic context. It involves wisdom, so it’s not just science for science’s sake; it’s for cultivating the intellect, but it’s very different than you see it in the Islamic context.
So these are some examples that I can give, and you can find that within the same corpus, for example, in the Jabirian corpus, the text that I’m studying that I mentioned, the Kitāb al-Nukhab. The author explicitly says that this is not an esoteric text. He says that what I’m doing is explaining to the beginner, to the student, how talismans work and why they work, and he explicitly says that this is a utilitarian approach. There’s nothing about purifying the soul and entering into an esoteric path. However, he does say that this is a starting point to that advancement, so these things can become esoteric, you know, with the right teacher, with the right master, and with the right aspiration. So, even within one program, things can start as just occult and then become occult and esoteric. I hope that answers the question.
Dr Angela Puca: Yes, thank you. S Mill asks if you can give your opinion on Dervish’s influence on Modern Islamic occultism as part of Sufi mysticism.
Dr Liana Saif: Right, so you know, the Dervish tradition comes from a very mainstream Sufi tradition. When we think of Dervishes, we think of the twirling dervishes, for example. And to answer that question, I have to talk about the influence of Sufism on the occult sciences. So, I look at Sufism as an esoteric path, and as I said, the occult can be esoteric, and it cannot be esoteric. When the Sufis dealt with the occult sciences, as I said, the most prominent type of occult sciences was the science of letters and divine names. Of course, the divine names are important elements in a practice that Dervishes and other Sufis practice called Dhikr, which means remembrance, and it’s usually remembrance of God’s names God’s attributes, which is integrated into Sufi rituals. Through this Dhikr, through this remembrance, the practitioner is trying to empty the mind and control the ego by instilling the power of these divine names in their awareness. And so, when that took an occult turn, so to speak, that’s when the science of letters and divine names became used as an application of the cosmology of the Sufis, which depended on this view that the letters make up the building blocks, as many of us say, of the universe. So, in that sense, Sufis influenced a lot of occult practices in the Islamic context.
Dr Angela Puca: Thank you, Liana, so I’ve kept you on long enough, but it was really a treasure trove of knowledge. Where can people find you and your work if they want to, which I’m guessing that they will be very keen on doing after this interview?
Dr Liana Saif: Sure, I try to post everything I publish on academia.edu, so I have a profile there with almost all of my publications, and they’re all downloadable. So that would be the best place to access my academic work. I also have an account on Twitter, but it’s not under my name; it’s to update people on my work and my translation of the Picatrix, but it also contains other things that I am interested in regarding the occult and even contemporary political situations. But that’s where I also update you if you want to know when the Picatrix is out. That’s where my translation is out; that’s where you go, but also, it’s called Ghāyat al-Ḥakīm. Angela, we can put that on the list of things just so they know.
Dr Angela Puca: You can send me all the necessary links via email, and I’ll ensure they’re included in the description box. So, when you return here in a few days, you’ll find all the information readily available in one place, the description box.
Dr Liana Saif: And I also have a photography account on Instagram with my name LianaSaif125, and in that, I try to present my photographic work on the theme of religion in general. So this is where you can get, you know, you can just see my photography, but for my academic work, I highly recommend referring to my academia.edu page.
Dr Angela Puca: Thank you so much, Liana. This was such a valuable interview.
Dr Liana Saif: Thank you so much for having me. I’m really grateful for you inviting me and for your work.
Dr Angela Puca: Oh, that’s lovely; thank you so much.
Yes, and I hope we can bump into each other and hang out a little bit more.
Dr Angela Puca: Oh yes, absolutely, we’ve got to have some drinks together and talk all things esoteric and beyond.
Dr Liana Saif: Yes, for sure, and thanks to everyone who tuned in. I really appreciate it.
Dr Angela Puca: Yeah, everybody seems to be super enthusiastic about you and your work, so thank you to everybody who showed appreciation and thank you again, Liana.
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