Above : author pic Marinos Sariyannis
With a title that has a tantalising hook embedded in the first line, how could I resist. This book is a tome filled to the brim with a comprehensive survey, the first, of Ottoman occult sciences drawing on a uniquely broad range of textual sources from across four centuries focusing on cosmography, philosophy, theology, medicine, historiography, biographies and travelogues. It complicates Eurocentric understanding of early modern magic and occult science.
In recent years, supernatural belief systems in medieval and modern Islamic cultures have been of scholarly interest. But we know very little about these concepts and practices, proposes Marino’s Sariyannis in his analysis of events and ideas that were classified “Miraculous”, “Strange” or “Extraordinary” by their authors. This allowed him to build a coherent picture of how different societies within the Ottoman Empire understood nature and its counterpart, the supernatural and how this related and influenced the thinking and knowledge of the time, so contrary to differences in the way thinking of Christian and Enlightenment thought. As the author explains….man is part of nature and for most of us nature includes all that exists, in a tangible way. Yet for some, there is another world of spiritual existence governed by divinity. In this view, the supernatural world interferes with the natural. Either everything that happens is ordained by the divine entity or spiritual activity is the cause of extraordinary and inexplicable natural phenomena.
Historians and Sufi mystics filled their texts with accounts of wonders during the 15th and 16th centuries, not only strange buildings and inexplicable phenomena but also different sorts of human and quasi-humans were generally accepted as living in the outer regions of the world( not to mention deformed people, who were also termed ‘wonders’). Some examples follows: people living closer to the equator were considered closer to animals; an Arab tribe in Yemen, whose bodies are half, without any intellect; a society in the Maghrib Desert which is solely constituted by women, who became pregnant by swimming in the river which flows everyday except Saturdays( which incidentally is how Alexander the Great managed to cross it.) Tribes of half-men and dog-headed people are often mentioned in narrations of strange lands, oracles, monsters and talismans probably disseminated the view that African Blacks were similar to animals, castigating this vile view that persisted through Medieval times. In Shakespeare’s The Tempest, Caliban the islander native was viewed by the marooned white sailors and the Queen of Milan as an animal worthy of work as a beast of burden with no redeeming humanity.
Ghost stories peppered the thinking of the times, as did tales of possessed individuals that fuelled imagination and folklore. The connection between numbers and celestial bodies enhances the impression of a unified cosmos where interdependent forces and hierarchies interact according to mathematical harmonies, the secret properties of fractions, minerals, plant properties and secret properties of animals. Garlic was considered to possess secret properties which can not be understood by reason, or grasped by the senses. The magnet had enormous input in the scientific community as well as the heretical ones. Interestingly, the world of dreams, the power of letters, terrestrial wonders and magic teachings was taken to exist, yet all these phenomena and their causes were steadily located in the realm of things concealed from the human intellect. So, how was was the knowledge of supernatural or preternatural realities acquired?
The obvious answer is, through revelation. For mysticism, in particular revelation, was indeed a major source of knowledge, a direct conduit to the supernatural world through ecstatic state of mind. It goes without saying that the revelation and inspiration were glorified by Sufi Sheiks. The philosophers reached this science known as the occult and alchemy, by studying and learning. But for divine sages there is an alternate way, by revelation and ‘walking the path’. The role of experience in acquiring knowledge was opposed by Medieval scholars who accepted witnessing of inexplicable and occult phenomena as part of popular and empirical knowledge, as emerged with the work of Roger Bacon. The more experiment reoccur, the greater the certainty, that preceded Newtonian scientific tradition of using astrology, optics, medicine for attaining logic and science, ushering in the advent of the Scientific Revolution.
Revealed knowledge was to pass from the ancient prophets, Idris and Hermes, to select initiates, a kind of top-down ‘gnoselogical’ elitism set against egalitarian encroachment. The epilogue of the book summarises the chapters in relation to the historical context of both European and Islamicate development and how it was linked to social change, such as the rise of the new mercantile class and how exploration between Muslim and non-Muslim populations interwined and interacted.
Marino’s Sariyannis is a research director at the Institute for Mediterranean Studies and primary investigator in Geographies and Histories of the Ottoman Supernatural Tradition. He has published several books and articles on Ottoman social, cultural and intellectual history.
