Dr Angela Puca: Hello, Symposiast. I’m Dr Angela Puca, Religious Studies PhD, and this is your online and now live stream, a resource for the academic study of magic, esotericism, paganism, shamanism, and all things occult. And today, the occult is in the Islamic and Islamicate world, which we will talk about in just a minute. But first of all, let me do some housekeeping.

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So now, let’s get on with the interview and let’s bring on our fantastic guest, Dr Matt Melvin-Koushki. Thank you so much for being here and for coming over to Angela’s Symposium.

Dr Matt Melvin-Kouski MMK: Thanks for having us, it’s fabulous.

AP: Yeah, I really appreciate your work, and I think it’s really needed. Yours, like that of some of your colleagues that work on the Islamic and Islamicate world, is something that is understudied. Well, the field of esotericsim and Western esotericsim is quite small, but the study of Islamic occultism is even smaller than that. So, I really appreciate your work. So, I guess my first question would be, to explain to us the certain basic terminology for those of us who are not particularly familiar, there are people are in the audience that are not familiar—what’s the difference between occult science and occultism, and what’s the difference between Islamic and Islamicate, and then we can talk about what Islamic occultism is.

MMK: Fabulous, this is, this is, you know, a wonderful venue. I’m really looking forward to the conversation. The terms, I like to take a sort of scatter-shot approach to the terms, so the terminology, since we have very little data, the largest context for understanding the way I use some of these terms is simply this: I work in the early modern Islamic world, the Persianates, Asia, it’s the great Persian Empires after the Mongols. We’re talking about two-thirds of the human race, so there’s a great variety and diversity of uses of terms and so on.

I work also on the elites, courtly Elites, because they’re simply much easier to work on, but we’re talking about a huge, huge, huge archive. Hundreds of thousands of occults, you know, of grimoires alone remain to be studied, much less published or translated. So most of our data is not in yet, it exists in the archives, despite the depredations of colonialism and reformism and nationalism. Archives are being destroyed as we speak in India and other areas. Timbuktu recently had a massive scare around the manuscript archive. So we’re basically I’m working on everything from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean as it relates to the occult, as we can use that as a broad term.

My term, my Elite folks, are philosophers and scientists at court, so they write very clearly and very beautifully, and the manuscripts, are often numbered in the hundreds of copies, right, unlike the Latin early modern Latinist context where you might only have, you know, a couple of manuscripts. I have the luxury of just a massive, luxurious archive at my disposal, which, however, has yet to be worked on, almost entirely, especially in the Persian, Persianate context. So in the dozens and dozens of grimoires or occult scientific manuals that I’ve examined, I’ve sort of extracted common usages over the 14th to 19th centuries, which is why I gravitate toward occultism. I like the term occultism, even though it obviously is a French 19th-century French occultisme, but I like it. It sounds natural in English, and through teaching my students, they like it as well. They tend to associate occultism with magic and esotericism with secrecy, so one is more epistemological or practical, and the other is more sociological.

Again, I teach in a large state institution in the American South, so it might be different elsewhere, but generally speaking, occult, I use occult as an epistemological term following my sources, and esoteric as a sociological one, also following my sources. Occult appears everywhere in my sources. The most natural way of translating various terms of Arabic and Persian and other Islamic languages is occult. Hidden – right, but again, not in a social sociological sense, but in the epistemological one. We’re talking about Sciences, standard natural mathematical Sciences where you extrapolate from visible to non-visible data. So, physics, astrophysics, psychology, and modernism disciplines like this would be classified by my actors, in the 16th century, as occult Sciences. It doesn’t have any sort of negative connotation whatsoever. Ours is more counter-cultural, even though it’s ubiquitous and there’s, of course, occulture. We can’t speak of occulture in the early modern Persianate world simply because it’s, I mean, it is ubiquitous, but it’s just elites. It’s completely integrated into science and Empire in a way that modern occulture is not. We don’t have Departments of Occulture, you know. It’s usually relegated to Religious Studies or Anthropology. We don’t, we do not have Departments of Occulture, you know. It’s usually relegated to Religious Studies or Anthropology. But in my context, it’s just, it’s Silicon Valley sociologically. My actors from the 14th to 19th century are Silicon Valley types. They are receiving a lot of money, and a lot of prestige. They are massively influential in society. Many of them are high-ranking officials in the governments, judges, and so on.

So occult here is an emic term, but it also works quite well etically as long as we understand that it’s not socially marginalized in any way, shape, or form. That’s what I use esoteric for, sort of esotericizing practices used by occultists, as I will call them, occult scientists through the 13th into the 14th centuries, where you get a massive sea change, a cultural sea change after the Mongol conquest in the mid-13th century. And occult sciences, as it’s called, the occult scientific revolution, simply became mainstream at every level of society.

So where earlier occultists would be at pains to be very esoteric in their works, you know, insisting on an initiatic approach, right, very closed to non-initiates, and their textual practices are very esoteric in the sense that they are illegible to non-initiates. This goes away almost completely and radically from the Mongol era onwards. So, I like to, I need to speak about the de-esotericization of occultism or of occult science, and so I use it in that sense.

There is no emic term for esoteric. You can, I mean, you could make the argument, it certainly, but again, for my purposes, it just, in how it works in English, I need an easily legible way of saying, ‘Look, the occult sciences are everywhere. They’re not secrets in any way. They’re elites, but also very popular, and the popularity becomes much more as we get through the 16th and 17th centuries, a sort of democratization of the occult is a huge feature of early modernity in the Islamic world, as in the Latinate, right, with printing. But it’s equally or I would say even more important in the early modern Persian world, again, a third of the human race with all of the money and all of the resources, again, Silicon Valley.

So, the book production, it vastly outstrips book production in Arabic and Latin. Arabic and Persian book production vastly outstrips any production in Latin or vernacular languages, vastly. You know, it’s the libraries. We’re talking about two orders of magnitude, so you might have 150 geometric manuscripts in Latin. I have a hundred thousand in Iran alone, just in Iran, not in just one area. So there’s just no comparison. It’s massively disproportionate. And yet, the Latin sources are studied, you know, much work remains to be done, and the Persian sources have been entirely ignored, not just, you know, here and there, looked at. We’re talking about almost a complete erasure of the bulk of Western, you know, history of science and technology and empire. And I do insist on the Western parts in my sources because my actors do. They are all Platonists, Pythagoreans. They say this very explicitly. They’re Avicennists. They’re Ficinians. If a Western Christian, Latin Christian scholar says, ‘I’m a follower of Plato or of Aristotle,’ we say, ‘Well, he must be Western. Why can’t we give the same respect to Muslim actors?’

And this is all to do with the narrative, you know, the colonialist narrative of Islam as the eternal other, eternally medieval, eternally superstitious, and internally non-West. This is nonsense, right? So Plato and Pythagoras occur more often, the names Plato and Pythagoras and Solomon and other Western names occur more often in Arabic and Persian than in Latin and Greek, period, right? We simply have a huge, huge archive. So based on this archive, what I’ve noticed is stable terms, many different regional variations, but the most stable terms for the occult sciences, literally occult sciences, hidden sciences, but in an epistemological sense. And by the early modern period, one term seems to win out over them all, which is Ilm al-Ghayb – the weird sciences, which is to say the paranormal sciences, the rare sciences, the difficult sciences, the elite sciences.

Verib[?] in Arabic and Persian has a wide semantic range, but again, the most common glosses are elite, weird, and, you know, just difficult. Right? You have to master all the other sciences natural and mathematical sciences to be capable of practising occult science. And their occult sciences are, you know, the big five: astronomy, astrology, alchemy, geomancy, Lettrism—I can talk more about Lettrism, basically Islamic Kabbalah—they both come from the Western Mediterranean around the same time in Islamic Spain and then spread everywhere. And physiognomy and other types of classic occult sciences like that, talismanry, is all part of that too.

So, yeah, whatever we might now identify as an occult science, these are the sciences identified as occult sciences in my sources, in encyclopedias of the sciences produced in Arabic and Persian from the 14th century to the 19th century. So the term is a very stable, remarkably stable term. These are the weird sciences. But why we don’t have such a stable term in Latin or European vernaculars, I think partly because it’s just much less populous, cosmopolitan, economically powerful. It must be remembered that the Islamic world is much vaster and people travel much, much more. The scholarly ethos is travel. You gain knowledge through, your education through travel, which is not the case certainly in Western Europe. So we’re talking about scholars in communication from North Africa to Indonesia effectively or, you know, India, right? So if we’re talking about Iberia to India, scholars are speaking the same language over a much vaster area. So, it does make sense that there is a certain sort of consensus on what terms are being used. And in the Islamic world, the concept of wonder ta’ajjub and weirdness is central to not just the occult sciences but really, you know, literature, poetry, law, even sometimes. It’s a concept that permeates early modern Persian culture to just a wondrous, weird degree.

So when you say these are the weird sciences, we can understand them in modern terms, right? As well, art sciences are about getting to the weird, right? The things that you do not expect. Getting, you know, Nobel Prize-winning breakthroughs in science through your dreams. Like the DNA double helix came through a dream, right? That’s weird. And this is exactly what is being valorized by my early modern actors as philosophers, as scientists, prying into the secrets of reality and trying to find the weird. And they’re constantly remarking that this proper science must cause wonder, proper poetry must cause wonder too. And this is what makes poetry magic. And we can talk about magic later as another term that’s used in a very positive sense by, you know, by occultists but everyone else as well, right? So if poetry is magic because it changes your perception of reality, it changes the mind-body connection in some way, you know, occult science is better termed weird science. And weird studies, of course, is a fabulous new field. Weird studies is a fabulous new field. And it intersects with, obviously, Jeff Kripal’s super humanities but also the psychedelic renaissance we’re undergoing now, right? The weirdness is what we’re after. Right? So poetry is psychedelic for my early modern actors, which is to say, it’s magic, it’s mind-manifesting. In that sense, they don’t have the term psychedelic, but, you know, it’s a Greek term for mind-manifesting, which is how my sources describe what they are doing. They’re interested in mind-matter and mind-mind connections, which is what makes occult science, science in terms that we too define as science, mathematical and natural science, bodies and mathematical descriptions of reality.

So, again, something like geomancy is a mathematical science. It’s binary. It’s based on, you know, the evens and odds, in the same way that the I Ching is in China. But geomancy is spread over a much, much vaster area. It comes from North Africa. It is an African Islamic science excluded almost entirely from the history of science just simply because, you know, Islam and Africa don’t exist, and should not exist in the history of science. Yet, you know, two-thirds of the human race is using this science through the early modern through the modern period. And it’s undergoing a revival now, especially among the Druids. But yeah, we’re talking about Leibniz being inspired by geomancy to create modern computing, again, African-Islamic science. So we can’t get away from any of these occult sciences when we’re talking about the rise of the West or the rise of the mathematization of the cosmos, the Scientific Revolution.

But yeah, so to come back to the main terminology point, just to finish, I like occult science the Ulum al-Ghayb. Occult sciences are actually more technically, properly translated as the weird sciences. But it’s glossed as also ‘the weird is occult.’ So they’re the occult sciences, the weird sciences, the sciences of the paranormal, however, we want to call them. But it’s not—we must be very careful to understand that we’re talking about Silicon Valley, rather than parapsychology, although of course, Dean Radin is in Silicon Valley, and I signed his ‘Real Magic’ book every class. But the idea is that we’re talking about a massively prestigious scientific community, philosophical community, that gets grants for building the most important observatories in the early modern Western context, right? The star tables that my folks are producing are being used in London in the 19th century. Right? In15th-century Iran, the occultists that I work on, their tables that are used in London in the 19th century. Right? So this, the global history of science, is certainly part of history, of Western science. And we need to understand much more about the concept of weird to decolonize the history of science, which remains incredibly colonialist, and incredibly racist actually. I get in, again, in fights with ChatGPT before every class in my history of science and tech class. And it’s just—it is the most racist colonial narrative you can imagine. And yet it is an accurate reflection of the state of the field with respect to Islam, in particular. So I use occult science with an emphasis on science to reincorporate it into the history of science. Occult sciences is simply an emic term, so it’s not problematic.

AP: By the way emic, for those of you who don’t know, is the perspective of people that practice and etic term is the perspective of the scholar. So that it’s better to explain terms for people that might not know.

MMK: Right yeah, sorry.

So yeah, you know, effectively, there is no term for occultism in Arabic or Persian. You can, it just grammatically doesn’t work. But occultists are everywhere, right? So if you’re an occultist, someone doing the sciences, the strange sciences, it’s most natural in English to call these people occultists. Again, esoteric is useful, but there’s no… There are a number of technical terms, but none of them really translate well into English. So I tend toward using it again sociologically. But yeah, I mean, it’s not secrecy, it’s about initiation, which is very useful, certainly, but not in my period because I’m working on elites rather than initiatic secret societies. I don’t deal with them at all. I deal with the mainstream. So esoteric is perfectly relevant, just not to my sources. And again, I’m talking about hundreds of grimoires in the Western tradition that have never been studied simply because they’re in Arabic and Persian and simply because they’re post-classical, which is to say Latin Christians had no awareness or interest in them, and therefore they do not exist. Byzantine scholars, by contrast, were aware and were translating from Persian into Greek, geometric treatises, for manuals, for example.

AP: By the way emic, for those of you who don’t know, is the perspective of people that practice and etic term is the perspective of the scholar. Ao that it’s better to explain terms for people that might not know.

MMK: Right yeah, sorry.

So yeah, you know, effectively, there is no term for occultism in Arabic or Persian. You can, it just grammatically doesn’t work. But occultists are everywhere, right? So if you’re an occultist, someone doing the sciences, the strange sciences, it’s most natural in English to call these people occultists. Again, esoteric is useful, but there’s no… There are a number of technical terms, but none of them really translate well into English. So I tend toward using it again sociologically. But yeah, I mean, it’s not secrecy, it’s about initiation, which is very useful, certainly, but not in my period because I’m working on elites rather than initiatic secret societies. I don’t deal with them at all. I deal with the mainstream. So esoteric is perfectly relevant, just not to my sources. And again, I’m talking about hundreds of grimoires in the Western tradition that have never been studied simply because they’re in Arabic and Persian and simply because they’re post-classical, which is to say Latin Christians had no awareness or interest in them, and therefore they do not exist. Byzantine scholars, by contrast, were aware and were translating from Persian into Greek, geometric treatises, for manuals, for example.

But Latin scholars being so isolated in the Far West, as they call it, had no interest, and therefore modern historiography has no interest, right? Hence the colonial, you know, the need to fight against the colonial narrative. And then magic finally is in massively, you know, is the most problematic term in my field, especially since it is constantly repeated that there is no magic in Islam. But it’s a very specific term, right? Which is, you can translate as magic if it’s legal or sorcery if it’s illegal. There is no witch-hunting in Islam. There is no church. There is no inquisition, so no one dies because of magic until you get to the modern nation-state of Saudi Arabia, where people are executed weekly as witches. However, you can try to get someone fired if they are dabbling in magic. This happens, you know, trying to damage someone’s reputation. So in reaction to these anti-occultist polemicists, which modern histories but are completely, you know, marginal in their own time and place for the last thousand years, modern historiography adores anti-occult polemicists and ignores completely the people they are complaining about. In reaction, my folks, who are again, the leading architects of empire in their respective states, as philosophers but as statesmen as well, think of Francis Bacon, another occultist, as a scientist, as a philosopher, and as a statesman. This is the rule that my figures combine as well. So they simply say, magic is fine. If it’s not illegal, magic is just another natural science. This is Avicenna’s position, is that magic, set out of the specific term, is simply a natural science.

Now, if you use it illegally, then it’s illegal. You can use anything illegally, right? If you use magic to get an unfair advantage, to harm someone else, to kill someone, to mind control someone, especially with love magic or like there’s tons of sex magic, tons of war magic, assassination magic is very popular, then it’s illegal. But it depends on a larger ethical framework in Islamic law. So they simply say, and these are judges and jurists talking, there is magic is perfectly fine as long as you don’t use it illegally, like any other natural science. So they valorize the term magic against their opponents. But this is not the main term they use for themselves. They use occult science. That’s their thing. Well, weird science, rather, right? So magic is useful in modern scholarship because of the fixation on – there’s no magic in Islam because of this one term that is used. And yet the Quran itself is a form of anti-magic magic. This is how it’s used in the early modern period, especially. You have very conservative, anti-occultist polemicists actually saying there is no magic in Islam because it went extinct because Islam is magic, right? There is no magic in Islam because Islam itself is magic or is it a more powerful magic?

So everyone is using talismans, Quranic talismans. And this is why there’s no magic in Islam because everyone is using talismans all the time. By our standards, right? It sounds nonsensical to say there is no magic in Islam because Islam is magic, but this is certainly the best way to translate it for a modern scholarly audience. It just doesn’t… It doesn’t work, right? So magic was… A few anti-occultist polemicists in the 14th century attempted to dismiss all occult sciences as Platonism, as Pythagoreanism, as magic, and they completely failed. No one paid them any attention. They were laughed out of the room, and everyone simply embraced these terms in a positive sense, you know, going forward. And weirdly enough, magic became associated with India, in particular. Not weirdly, the best magic comes from India. The best astral magic comes from India for many of my early modern actors.

So magic is an Oriental, you know, the best magic is still from the Orient, but it’s valorized rather than demonized. And again, we need to get used to the sense that occult sciences and esoteric practices are valorized and almost never demonized, which makes it an extremely instructive case study or comparative parallel study to all of the historiography on Western esotericism. Simply put, Western esotericism as a field is, to date, focused on maybe 10% of the Western tradition. So I argue that we need to bring the other 90% back to the table so we can have a more balanced conversation. But in the 100 years of basic labour, so we’ll use whatever terms work for us but I personally use you know weird Sciences occult Sciences occultism for sort of the scholarly ethos that I work on. Esotericism as a sociological thing and Magic as a decolonial term, since it offends everyone – especially my fellow historians. So yeah, magic is a problem but it also makes people think.

AP: Yeah it’s good, magic makes everybody angry, so it’s something that unites us all.

And thank you Vocatus for your donation, he says it is astonishing how much of Western occult practices came from the Islamic world. So we will talk about that as well and thank you to Rob for becoming a new member and Howard and Electra for your support. And also thank you to Andrew and João for moderating the chat, that’s very appreciated. So in terms of this question, I hadn’t thought about but Vocatus just brought it to my attention. So is there something that comes to mind, well because I imagine that there are many, many things that come from the Islamic world and have been extremely influential in Western esotericism but what are the main things that you feel have been the most influential?

Right, so yeah, again, this is a general sense of historiography that things come to the West from Islam, but again, I really insist on, we’re talking about West Africa. It was West, like Timbuktu is west of Paris, right? So are we using a geographical description that doesn’t work because Australia is Western, right? So when we talk about Western, again, I’m, it’s talking about identification with the Hellenic-Abrahamic dialectic where Plato and Solomon are simply mentioned everywhere, right? Or Pythagoras and Abraham or, you know, Jesus and Ali or whoever, right? There’s a huge Jesus, let me put it this way, Jesus is a major imperial figure in the early modern Persianate world, right? There’s Jesus everywhere, but does that make this Islam West or, you know, Jesus obviously is not a European gentleman? So what does it mean to be Western? You know, if we want to, if for intellectual historical purposes, West Africa is at least as Western as Paris or London, and in fact, there are way, way, way more mentions, many more books, much larger libraries in Timbuktu, right? Or in West Africa, predicated on Plato, Aristotle, Pythagoras, Solomon, Abraham, etc. The Quran itself sees itself as an appendix to the Bible, right?

So if you understand this continuity of traditions, when I say Islam is the West, this is not my invention, this is Garth Fowden, Dick Pulitz. We accept Judeo-Christian, but we don’t accept Islamo-Judeo-Christian as the basis of Western culture, but we simply need to do that, which makes a lot more work for us. Again, it massively increases our archive. So the narrative of Islam as an influence on the West is purely a colonialist, missionary, Christian missionary one. It’s not historically true in any way, but it comes from the European Renaissance, humanist obsession with making Islam as other as possible, not Islam, Arabic as other as possible. You have to create a pure Greekness, a pure European-ness which simply does not exist, right? In the era of the Renaissance, it certainly now does exist in historiography. So we, as modern historians, have bought into the lies effectively of humanists who did not know much of what they were talking about. They’re radically uncurious and unaware and ignorant as to what is happening in the rest of the Western Afro-Eurasian ecumeme, such that even when you have Venetian envoys or scholars going to Damascus or, you know, wherever, they have no interest in anything that was not already translated into Latin.

They have no curiosity. Their language skills are not that great anyway, necessarily. So we need to get away from the idea of Western Islam as an influence on the West. We have to get rid of it completely. It is racist. It is colonialist. It is, I mean, it’s, you know, it’s not anyone’s fault either. This is just how the historiography has presented it for the last 200 years. So we need to get away from it. But in terms of specific lines of influence, are we to bring Byzantium back into the discussion of the West? No, Byzantium is the Orient already, right? So it’s already rejected the West in terms of, you know, of Woulter Hanegraaff’s rejected knowledge paradigm. Byzantium, Christianity, half of Christianity is already non-West. So Islam, which is actually an African religion just as much as anything else, so geographically, is Western, is also excluded. Much in the way that Africa itself is a continent is the Dark Continent that just never appears in the history of science. It just doesn’t appear. It disappears. One of the largest continents, the second-largest continent on Earth, simply does not exist in the historiography of science in any way approaching to obviously a few handfuls, a few Western European countries.

So the narrative is sustained through the Arabic to Latin translation movement of the 12th and 13th centuries where basically a handful of North African mainly texts, occult scientific texts in particular, the Ghāyat al-Ḥakīm, the Picatrix, the Goal of the Sage, which is extremely influential in Latin and other vernaculars as the Picatrix. We’ve all heard of the Picatrix. But you know, this is the basis for much of natural philosophy. It’s fundamentally Arabic. It’s, you know, Hellenic Arabic. It’s the synthesis and apotheosis of Hellenic Ptolemaic astral magic. It’s just, it’s the culmination. It’s the high watermark around the 10th or 11th century, just as Ibn Sīnā, Avicenna was the ultimate culmination of Western philosophy. So too is the Picatrix in Latin reception, this sort of culmination of Hellenic Ptolemaic astral magic. It’s not particularly Islamic. It’s easy to translate into Latin. You don’t have to de-Islamicize it too much. One of the reasons why we have hundreds of grammars in the Western tradition, maybe thousands potentially in Arabic and Persian, that have completely been excluded is that they’re too Islamic. By the early modern period, you have a transformation, post-Mongol period from the 13th century onward, you have a radical Islamicization, if you will, of magic whereby it is impossible to translate into Christian terms. We already know the rise of Christian Kabbalah with Pico della Mirandola in Italy. But he’s the father of Christian Kabbalah in order to polemicize against Judaism. Christian Kabbalah proves the invalidity of Judaism. The cognates in the Islamic context, Lettrism, you know, yeah, letters, letters and numbers, isopsephy, it comes from the Hellenic isopsephy tradition, but it’s much, much more developed. It becomes the default cosmology, the background cosmology, just as we have, you know, rejectionist materialism as our default background cosmology, which determines funding for science and technology.

So too was Lettrism and astrology, as I have shown, the default cosmology for the great, you know, early modern empires which have a lot of money to spend on such projects. So the Lettris stuff is tied to the Quran, the Quran as the matrix of reality, just as the Bible is the matrix of reality for Jewish and Christian Kabbalists. So too is the Quran the matrix of reality, and you just can’t translate that into Latin. It just doesn’t work, right? You can’t swap out all the Quranic verses with Bible verses. It just doesn’t happen. So with the rise to, and this is my hypothesis, much more work needs to be done, but with the rise to hegemony of this new Lettrist, Kabbalist cosmology, and astrological cosmology, it just becomes much more difficult to translate. Whereas in the Byzantine context, you see this actually as a really interesting test case. They avoid the Lettrist magic, you know, which is just too Quranic, but they love geomancy because geomancy is non-Quranic, it’s non-Islamic, right? It’s secular in some way, even though you have all the proof texts coming from the Quran, coming from Pythagoras. It is a Pythagorean science, so it’s easy to de-Islamicize geomancy, not other occult sciences as much. So this is a hypothesis, you know, why you have a total disinterest among Latin Christian scholars, more of an interest among Greek Christian scholars, but generally speaking, almost total ignorance of what’s happening. I could mention, I could give you a list of, you know, that does, you know, dozens of titles right now, and, you know, no one would have ever heard of them because no one’s ever translated them or edited them. I’m working on, you know, maybe ten right now. So yeah….

AP: Yeah, that’s definitely, that’s definitely a great point. And I wanted to ask you, what are the main texts in Islamic occultism that you think people should be aware of, people that are interested in esotericism, even if they have no prior knowledge of Islamic occultism? What would be the text that you’d recommend they go after?

MMK: Yeah, no, that’s a fabulous question. Check back with me in like 30 years, so I can give something to your audience. But no, effectively, I’m focusing on the bestsellers, just because that’s, you know, I have, it’s just really easy to work on them. We have hundreds and hundreds of manuscripts for all of them, so it’s just so easy. Unlike the earlier medieval texts where you might only have a few manuscripts and they’re quite divergent and have complicated reception histories, my texts, because they are so best selling, for imperial audience, and like copied from the Mediterranean to Southeast Asia, right, or, you know, certainly to India, it’s easier to tell a larger story. So one of them, for example, the most important grimoire, well, manual of lettrist magic of the 16th century, is the “Amulets of Protection from the Trials of Time,” the, you know, by this Timurid, you know, 15th to 16th century Sufi occultist author, a preacher in Herat, in what is now Afghanistan. He writes the most comprehensive grimoire for expressly imperial use. It’s never been used, but it’s copied constantly. There’s lithographs all over India. Everyone is very interested in this grimoire, because it’s extremely accessible, and it’s expressly aimed at bureaucrats for controlling these crazy warlord tyrants running around. There’s all these terrific warlords, so it’s quite, you know, a very important, it’s about, you know, 150 folios, which is, you know, probably, in a modern English translation, which would be about, yeah, 400 pages. So, you know, it’s about the size of the Picatrix, maybe a bit larger, but it’s a total synthesis of the entire letterist tradition as it comes, as it applies to technology of empire.

So it’s for bureaucrats to control the states. So again, like accuracy, maybe, but, you know, this is really interesting, and it’s something that really resonates with the invention of printing in, you know, Western Europe. But printing in Western Europe is not, it has a different function sociologically and politically, especially in the context of these early modern empires. These are manuals of empire, and empires that actually do exist. So, you know, it’s just easier to study them. So this is one, “Amulets of Protection from the Trials of Time,” specifically empowering bureaucrats against rulers. Mind control is a huge theme in this, you know, modern democracy. We obviously have real democracy now, mind control is never used at all in our political system,? No, of course, mind control is a huge part of politics at all times, and even more so now, you can argue. I mean, it was, you know, Egil Asprem’s, you know, fabulous article on the rise of Trump, as a form of magic, this is, you know, this is something that can be productively studied.

AP: I haven’t come across that book, I have to read it.

MMK: Yeah, no, it’s great, like, this is like relevance, right? These are humans, these are rational human actors. They’re, they’re saying, look, you know, here’s my lab data. They say they’re empirical. And so to get past, you know, these colonial racist narratives, we have to take our actors at their word, and, you know, reproduce their experiments. They are making empirical claims. They’re doing, you know, rigorous lab experiments, not just in alchemy, but in other occult sciences as well, like geomancy and Lettrism. And they’re giving us whole records that we can, we can falsify, we can, we can do that. So that’s one. Another extremely important one is the classmian secrets. A little bit has been worked. Maria Satelli in Toronto has worked on that a bit. The father of the author of the grimoire I just mentioned, Husayn Vaᶜiz-i Kashifi, also a Naqshbandi Sufi and preacher in Herat. This was expanded in the late 16th century to an omnibus who’s who of all the occultists ever, like in the attrition. So it’s incredibly useful for, you know, sociology of science, a history of science, but like the sociology of science. These are all the leading philosophers. So every, I mean, more than these major grimoires, I find interesting minor grimoires, actually. Every major early modern Muslim philosopher has at least two or three grimoires to their name. That is amazing, right? And it really does allow for imperative study with early modern history of science in general.

You know, Kepler, Newton, Bacon, all these guys, all these guys are raving occultists. But so are the major philosophers contemporary to them in Iran, in Central Asia, and in India. They’re all not raving occultists. It’s simply occult science is what you do as a philosopher. It is how you live Islamic philosophy. So I’m working on a few accessible grimoires in Persian and Arabic, but I find the smaller grimoires more revealing in some ways. Everyone is doing this at all times, and there are more popular grimoires as well, written by scholars whose Arabic comprehension is not very good, especially in the Ottoman context. I’ve worked a bit on those, for geomancy in particular, and they really show you what people are doing, what they’re thinking, what they’re feeling. The occult sciences, you can hate magic all you want, but the occult sciences, the grimoires, are one of the most valuable sources for doing early modern social history and political history. That’s one.

But in terms of geomancy, the most important manual of geomancy of the 16th century, “Methods of Guidance Working for the Mughal Empire,” the greatest, most powerful sovereign of the 16th century in the Afro-Eurasian ecumeme, to celebrate his inauguration, writes the most comprehensive manual of geomancy ever penned, incorporating the Western, Eastern, Northern, and Southern traditions as they have developed over the last 500 years. It is a North African tradition, but then it just spreads like wildfire, including to Europe, where it is very poorly received. It’s very truncated, like many other translations from Arabic to Latin. The translators didn’t do a great job necessarily. The Picatrix itself has a lot of weird additions, kind of gross editions. A lot of the gross magic is added by the Spanish and Latin translators. So you get this situation where the poorest reception of an occult science is the most studied version of that science as it comes from the Islamic world.

But no, if you simply look at this one manual of geomancy from, what is it, 1582, it’s like a one-stop shop for the entire Western geomantic tradition. And yet, of course, it’s never been studied. I mean, I’m working on it, and I’m working to translate it for a practitioner audience because geomancy is coming back into vogue, like I said, among Druids and others. John Michael Greer, his manual. I use it all the time in my classes. He assures me that there is a market for it. If it’s in Persian, just translate it for a popular audience, and I can make some good money.

AP: Yeah, I think that’s a nice segue because I wanted to ask you about the main, probably my idea of main, it could be oversimplistic, but what are the main magic practices that you find in the Islamic world?

MMK: The main magic practices in terms of numbers of manuscripts. And actually, I forgot to answer your previous question. Islamic versus Islamicates. Islamicate is coined by Marshall Hodgson in the ’60s, ’70s, to emphasize that we’re talking about two-thirds of the human race, not all of whom are Muslim. The greatest empires, Muslim empires of the early modern era, are majority non-Muslim. In India, the Ottoman Empire is majority Christian. The Ottomans identify as European and Christian Empire, New Rome. This is what they call themselves. Whereas, actually, a majority of Muslims of the early modern era lived outside of the big empires, in various parts of Africa or Southeast Asia or wherever. In the Balkans, in Southeast Europe. No, that’s the Ottomans. But yeah, effectively, you have Islamicate being used to describe the situation where it’s just the Islamic empires are the strongest. You know, the America of empires. But you don’t have to be American or Christians to live in the United States. So, too, are you have a sort of a radical ecumenism in many cases. The Mughal Empire in India, which is a full fifth of the human race in the 16th century, is the first empire that we know of to have equal rights before the law between all religions. Right. So, as soon as like Proto-modern or something. No, no, this project is, as I’ve shown and other colleagues have shown, this is coming through an occult alchemical understanding of reality and society. Right. You create an alchemical society, a medically sustainable society through legal equality and so on. Anyway, I digress.

So, Islamicate refers to these radically pluralistic societies where everyone is using Arabic and Persian. These are the two most used scholarly languages from Spain to Indonesia. Like in the early modern period, everyone uses them. You can use Arabic and especially Persian from the Mediterranean to China. And this is how you get Persian as the main language of translation from Sanskrit to Persian or from Chinese to Persian of the Upanishads or Daoist classics. So, yeah, not into Arabic, but actually into Persian. So we always have to do Arabic and Persian together as equal partners in this sort of Afro-Eurasian spanning society. For real societies. Much as Latin, you know, in a much smaller area, but much as English today, right? So when you think of Persian, think of English today as a common language of science, especially occult science. So that’s Islamicate versus Islamic. I use Islamic, you know, it’s not a huge deal. I mean, Islamic is fine, especially since I work almost entirely with Muslim practitioners. So Islamic is fine. But if we’re talking about non-Muslims doing Arabic and Persian science, then we can say Islamicate. So sorry, what was your… I forgot the question.

AP: The question was about the main magic practices that you find in the Islamicate world.

MMK: Right. So if you go by the existing archives, the surviving archives, we could get a general proportion of interest. One note of caution, though, colonialism, orientalism, and nationalism have massively perverted and destroyed much of these archives. In the Soviet context, for example, all the stuff, all these elite practices, were dismissed as shamanism and categorized accordingly. So astronomy is good, and astrology is shamanism, which is just nonsense. But yet, our historiography reflects exactly this colonial move. The French, the British did exactly the same thing.

So, this is why European collections are so useful, but also so dangerous to rely on. Russian collections as well, because it gives the impression of Islam as almost entirely scripture, law, Sufism, and poetry. That’s it. A little bit of science and a little bit of magic, but that’s not important, right? Because there is no magic in Islam. This is all [expletive]. It’s complete and utter [expletive]. It is a racist colonialist artefact, obsessed with Islam as animism, as Shamanism, even again in the Soviet Central Asian context. And the shape of our archives reflects that, still. At the same time, it is astonishing how much of the occult material has survived. It’s huge. It’s just massive. Like I said, I have hundreds of thousands of these texts just sitting there in Iran, India, Turkey, Egypt, in Timbuktu. I don’t know about Jakarta, not much has been done on that, but in Malaysia, the Malay Peninsula, I mean, the stuff is everywhere. So, it’s astonishing. The archive was actually much bigger, the occult archive was actually much bigger, but what has even survived is immense. So, like I said, the best sellers that I work on, we’re talking about an average of 100 manuscripts, where in their contemporary Latin context, you might have five.

So, we’re talking about true best sellers, even after all the depredations of colonialism. And in the Iranian archives, have been the most thoroughly mapped, which is interesting because it was not subject to direct colonialism. It was indirect colonialism by the Soviets and the British, which shaped the archives. But generally speaking, it is the most well-documented and studied archive. In the Iranian drives, we have a union catalogue which is quite usable and searchable. 10%, sorry, 20% of the total Arabic and Persian existing archives, surviving archives, is dedicated to the natural and mathematical sciences. Including astronomy, agriculture, medicine, and astrology obviously as well. All the occult sciences included. So, 20% of the surviving millions of manuscripts, we don’t know how many millions, but like up to 20 million perhaps, 10 to 20 million, who knows? So, 20% of that is science, in Iran. Of that 20%, half is occult formally speaking, astrology, alchemy, medicine, which is usually classed in the occult sciences, geomancy, Lettrism, physiognomy, and so on. So, in terms of that, we’re talking about the occult sciences as 10% of a massive archive in which the top sciences are, as I said, the most popular. I would rank them as Lettrism because it’s part of the background cosmology, coupled up with astrology. Geomancy, alchemy is very high up there, but alchemy is much less accessible because you have to be rich. It’s very expensive. But geomancy is free.

Astrology is actually expensive as well in that you have to have a robust education and get a great job to be a decent astrologer. It is complicated, but geomancy is much more accessible, so much more widespread in that sense, because you have geomancers on every street corner effectively. But yeah, I would say that physiognomy is extremely important as well for early modern imperial practice and governmental practice. So hiring, it’s a form of like lie detecting and hiring procedures – HR basically. Physiognomy right, telling someone’s nature from their face or their bodily characteristics it’s in you know the whole Alexandrian tradition. This is what Alexander the Great does on the advice of Aristotle to found this world, East-West Empire. So, physiognomy is great. Everyone has to be vetted by physiognomy to be hired in the Ottoman State, everyone, right? So, it depends on what you’re focusing on, but yeah, those are the top six, I would say.

AP: I know that you are particularly interested in geomancy, and you also teach that to your students, so how does it work? Tell us something about geomancy.

MML: Yeah, geomancy, that was my favorite, it’s my daily driver as a scholar-practitioner myself. I mean, I use talismans and stuff, but obviously, I don’t make talismans myself. They’re extremely, you know, picky technology. They’re difficult to make, so definitely not something to play with at home necessarily by yourself. Or for my other occult scientific needs, especially talismans, tarot. I can’t make tarot work, you know, to save my life. So yeah, I outsource much like my historical actors. They tended to focus on one or two of the occult sciences, you know, as their specialty. Some had a broader range, but like you have specialists that emerge. So, I always, like they did, recommend using professionals always. But for the geomancy, I do practice it myself daily simply because it’s the best way of getting into the mind of our early modern actors as scientists, as natural philosophers. And this includes Francis Bacon. I’ve only become a practitioner through the process of teaching that as a historian, but especially as a teacher. And I found that it’s just way more effective. It cuts through all the insane racism and colonialist narratives that are in our textbooks. A history of science textbooks to this day are like Islam doesn’t exist, two-thirds of the human race does not exist, Africa does not exist, right? So the best way to decolonize this history of science and technology is to let’s go back and see what happens. So, Francis Bacon is a classic example. Got into it through Francis Bacon. Sorry.

AP: Yes, sorry if I interrupt, but people are asking whether you could expand a bit more on geomancy and what it is and how it works.

MMK: Oh sure, yeah, sorry. Yeah, just the Francis Bacon’s definition is really useful, actually. So the father, grandfather of the scientific method, modern scientific method, he says geomancy is a form of artificial divination, which is different from natural divination, which is to say it’s a mathematical form. So it’s numbers, it’s zeros and ones, evens and odds. If you know anything about the I Ching, it’s basically Arabic. The Afro-Islamic I Ching, but again, much more popular over Afro-Eurasia than the I Ching, and also comes through the African diaspora, comes through the Western Hemisphere. But yeah, you basically, you know, you throw the coin 16 times or some bones or draw some lines in the sand. Geomancy literally means science in the sand. It was based on a sort of North African practice of drawing random lines in the sand and then counting whether they are even or odd to create the 16 tetragrams, the figures of four lines each, creating four mothers, creating four daughters, four nieces, and then you have a courtroom scene. I mean, I’ve written about it. It’s in my Academia page for like a quick primer. Also check out “TheDigital Ambler,” Sam Block’s manual is freely available online as well.

But yeah, basically, you’re creating these 16 figures which are all related to the astrological… They’re all astrologically related, but also alchemically related. So, each figure, each tetragram has four lines representing fire, air, water, and earth, right? It’s totally alchemical and that’s all terrestrial. It’s called terrestrial astrology for that reason. And all the correspondences that come from that, whether physical or elemental or natural, they’re all in there. So, you can really use geomancy to predict the past, present, and future of any entity in the sublunar realm. And again, predicting the past is a very important or the present, a very important application of geomancy. It is used socially, as I’ve argued. It fills the same social niche as Googling, social media, lie detection, radar, and treasure-hunter dowsing. But yeah, especially Googling, social media, you know, surveillance, a very, very popular use for this. If you’re away on a business trip, you want to know what’s happening back home, or you know, has your house been robbed, you use geomancy as your first line of technological pursuit. So, geomancy is very simple to do, you see. It’s people, you know, scholars, doctors, judges, just scribbling in the margins of their daybooks. They quickly dash off a geomantic reading chart for a court case or to diagnose a patient, for example, right? So, it’s not the only thing you use because it’s just so easy and so direct, but you have to have a full education in astrology and alchemy as well. Not a full education in alchemy, but you need to know extremely well the medical and astrological correspondences to use it effectively.

But yeah, so geomancy is not a great term in English because it’s often confused with Feng Shui, the Chinese, you know, sort of topomancy, which is a better translation. The geomancy, again, the sort of Earth divination. So again, its popularity among the Druid Revival is, you know, it makes a lot of sense. It is, you know, I certainly use it as a form of, you know, Mother Earth worship myself. You know, it is about the flux patterns of terrestrial reality, right? The four elements, according to all their classic correspondences. But you can use it in new ways. Again, this manual I mentioned, Methods of Guidance, from 1582 or 1583 if we get it, allows you to tell things as specific, and this is lost completely in the Latin reception. You have all these stories in my sources. Someone breaks into your house and steals your things, right? You can tell the person’s name, location, and telephone number. If you cannot tell a thief’s telephone number and get the police to locate them, you’re not doing geomancy correctly. It’s extremely technical, it’s extremely, well, again, predicated on a mathematical understanding of reality that even a telephone number is something that is embedded somehow into reality, right? Hence Leibniz’s excitement about it, right? And hence his, you know, he was inspired to create modern binary computing on its basis because it’s just so obviously useful, predicated on this early modern understanding of this mathematical matrix in which we live. Sorry, again, it’s easier to see if you look at them to explain. So yeah, definitely check out some of my posts on Academia.

AP: And I guess it’s a final question. I would ask for practitioners, the practitioners that are listening to us and they are not particularly familiar with Islamic occultism. What would you recommend? I mean, what kind of practices? Well, you mentioned already the books that you would sort of recommend or the books that have been particularly influential, but I was wondering what elements or what practices of Islamic occultism you think might be particularly interesting for practitioners that are trying to get their feet wet in the field and maybe they are not particularly familiar with Islamic occultism?

MMK: Great, the obvious one is the Picatrix. It’s available in a couple translations. The most recent one is Dan Attrell and David Porreca’s translation from a couple of years ago. That’s great, I mean,

AP: Hi Dan, if he’s here, because he also has a YouTube channel.

MMK: That’s great, something that is very accessible and it’s, you know, reliable. Again, it’s Latin, it’s based on the Latin translation of the Arabic, and Arabic is the difference. But yeah, that’s a good place always to start. But yeah, always with the proviso that this does not represent the greatest bestseller in the Islamic world, right? So it’s great for, you know, the Arabic to Latin reception, and it’s massively influential, but because it’s so early and it’s not particularly Islamic, like anyone can use it, which is great, but like there’s just much more important manuals in the Islamic later early modern period, in Arabic, and Persian, and Turkish, and Urdu, and Malay, and Swahili, and all over the place, but none of that stuff has been made available in translation, I’m afraid. Or if it has, it’s just, you know, they’re not usable, they’re not reliable, and you might blow yourself up, as my sources caution. They always caution us. I got a bad manuscript of this one manual, I tried it out, and I accidentally killed my parents, right? So like there’s people reporting mishaps in the lab,

AP: Mishaps! Yes, love my family, yeah, exactly, right?

MMK: So yeah, we want to, you have to be careful. This is technology, as we all know, so we have to be careful with these technologies.

So we need to wait, basically decades or, you know, centuries for a lot of this material to be made accessible, and this is certainly what I’m devoting my career to. So, you know, hopefully, by the end of my career, I’ll have a couple dozen more of these things out in circulation, smaller or larger editions and translations for scholars and practitioners. I think especially with geomancy, which is the most accessible, but yeah, for actual magic or core magic, you want the ‘Greater Son of Gnosis,’ which is a 16th-century omnibus compendium of Islamic talismanic magic based on, you know, again, Lettrism or in general Kabbalah. So it’s Lettrism and astro-lettrous magic in the form of love talismans and mantras and so on and so forth. It is a 16th-century compendium that is drawing on authentic 13th-century sources, primarily those of Ahmed Al Buni in what is now Tunisia, right, in Central North Africa. These boom, these become standard, this is just how you are a good Muslim. So yeah, you’ve probably seen this around the internet. Amina Inloes recently translated some of this, so you can check out her translation of the ‘Greater Sun of Gnosis’ called the ‘Shams al-Ma’arif.’

AP: Is this the one that is dubbed as the most dangerous book in the world?

MMK: Yeah, yeah, it’s like, which is nonsense because everyone is using it all the time, right? So it’s only dangerous in the sort of post-colonial sense, I would suppose. Lana Safi is working on a new translation from the Arabic, which has never been translated from the Arabic, so that’s great. So for that, but yeah, I mean, basically, it is the ultimate bestseller, so hopefully someone will do the full ‘Shams al-Ma’arif’ soon in the next 20 years. That is actually being used by Chris Warnock, Renaissance Astrology. His talismans, he’s a master talismanist in Pakistan, makes talismans from this major grimoire. So if you want direct access, check out the Shams al-Ma’arif Buniyan talismans offered by Chris Warnock, but that’s certainly what I always recommend for those who are interested.

In terms of early modern stuff. Again, I’m working as much as I can on the geomancy, and it is unlike any geomancy in the Latin tradition. We’re talking about a much more useful, much more hard-hitting, in a way, a cool science that is simply dropped out of the West because of our radically racist, colonized version, understanding of the West. But it’s amazing like I said, Google, it’s occult Googling for anything you might want to know on this planet. So that’s, I would definitely recommend that. I will try to get, you know, clear off my plate, the million things, but obviously, we do not get credit for this as academics, certainly not in the American context. Editions and translations count for virtually nothing. But they are what changes the narrative over time, right? So I get reviews constantly in the history of science journals I send my stuff to, saying, claiming that the same point blank to me, that my sources shouldn’t exist, therefore do not exist, right? Simply put. So the only way to counter that narrative is to, well, publish the sources, which are in inaccessible libraries or archives, all massively politicized. The occult sciences are extremely politicized in Iran, India, Egypt, and Turkey, my main sources. So I have a very difficult time getting access to what I need. At the same time, I have enough for, you know, five lifetimes of work on my hard drive. So I will push, I’m making that a priority. I now have tenure, so I can do what I want, even though I get no credit for it, for especially the practitioner audience, of which I am one.

In the case of geomancy, it is safe, reliable, and effective technology. I have my students do it. They love it. Francis Bacon loves it. He says this is what he means by the scientific method. So it’s a really good way of not just enriching your own life technologically and safely, but also decolonizing our minds in that sense. But yeah, my students love it. I make them do it to get into these early modern headspaces. But you know, I give the option of doing a term paper or a geomantic diary, and most of the class every semester chooses the geomantic diary and has a lot of fun with it.

AP: Thank you, Matt. So is there anything that you would want to say before we wrap up this conversation? I think that you have a new MA that you said you wanted to talk about, right?

MMK: Yeah. So speaking of scholar-practitioner approaches, oops,.

AP: By the way, he’s tenured. That’s why I’m telling people he’s a practitioner.

MMK: Do not do not do this pre-tenure, absolutely. But like I said, I got into it through teaching, right? And when I mean through my experience, negative often – very positive, sometimes, but often very negative experience with peer review process, which is simply extremely conservative in my field among Islamists. So, but it’s more through teaching that I found related to decolonize, right? My students are very receptive to it. They have fun with it. They’re very hungry for the weird because life is [ __ ] weird. Oh my God, like the world is reality is weird. This is what science is about, sort of plumbing the weird. So yeah, it’s a, it’s like an ethical imperative, right? Not just about your own empowerments or historical interests, it’s an ethical imperative to actually practice these things, to prove to yourself and not to our colleagues necessarily, but prove to yourself that these people are not irrational natives, right?

Do you necessarily, I’m sure some of them are, you know, charlatans. But for the folks I study, I mean, I was convinced by their argument, so I tried them out, and it worked. And so I was even more impressed by their intelligence, you know, much more intelligent people than I am. So the practitioners, if we don’t actually test these truth claims ourselves, then we run the risk of being patronizing toward our sources. The historiography is – it’s incredibly patronizing. It has the view from nowhere, the God’s eye view of the precious little natives in the past. This is what must stop, and the best way I found teaching pedagogically is to actually humble ourselves a little bit, get down in the dirt, literally with geomancy, and, you know, test these truth claims. And if they work, then we have to revise our narrative.

Yeah, our new MA. We’ve announced it’s on Schweppe recently. It is going to be a joint MA in Magic and Occult Science with the University of Exeter, helmed by Emily Selove and Sajjad Rizvi. There, you will have access to a stable of about 22 historians, anthropologists, and specialists in some form of magic or occult science, including the Drama Department at Exeter, at USC, the University of South Carolina. It is a history MA, and you will have the option to do either global history or history of science, technology, and the environment track. It doesn’t really matter. You can do whatever you want.

Our incoming cohort, we have nine people in an incoming cohort who are working on everything from tarot, shamanic drumming, tarot to Kabbalah. You know, medieval Arabic and Persian, Arabic, and Hebrew Kabbalah in the Mediterranean, to early modern European witchcraft trials. You know, classic. But yeah, we’re happy to work with you on anything, especially in our department. We have the six-seven faculty with strengths in the Islamic World, obviously, South Asia, the medieval Mediterranean, early modern Europe, the African diaspora, Latin America, and the American South. But yeah, you can combine, mix and match, you know, whatever you find is a good fit with us on your research.

But going forward, as of next year, the Exeter program is launching. You will have access as advisors to the Exeter folks too, you know, as a co-advisor, right? And by 2025, we’re thinking of, we’re hoping to have a full joint program where you can do a year in Exeter and a year in South Carolina, and with Summer symposia to bring everyone together as a magic cohort. And again, half practitioner or half non-practitioner is really up to you. We do insist on scholarly rigour, obviously, philological rigour. You don’t need any languages to come in, but yeah, it is a full-on history MA degree that you can use for anything. If you’d like to go on to Amsterdam for the PhD, we strongly encourage that or anywhere else, Rice. Effectively, where we see it as a larger Amsterdam-Exeter-USC-Rice Continuum.

So yeah, we’re all good friends. But yeah, it’s for living, right? Life is weird. These are technologies for living, and we encourage personal experience, exploration, and all that good stuff. Empirical, of course.

AP: Yeah, thank you so much, Matt, and the MA program sounds very, very interesting. I hope it’s successful. I’m sure it will be because people are hungry for that kind of knowledge from an academic point of view.

MMK:Oh no, it’s the sign of the changing of the times. We had an unbelievable amount of interest and unprecedented number of applications in the first year when my tweet and my tweets went viral last November and suddenly a program exists where none existed before. ccd

AP: So Andrea, Andrea from RENSEP.

MMK: Andrea, yeah, he’s coming, is the model for us, the Research Network for the study of Esoteric Practices, the scholarly practitioner approach we just talked about, Angela yesterday, but yeah, RENSEP, check out rensep.org. This is also our model and Andrea is joining the team.

AP: Yeah Andrea is one of the trustees and the managing director of RENSEP. So yeah, that’s how I met Matt because we were filming an interview because it’s part of the scientific committee at RENSEP.

MMK: Yeah, so basically, we already have a cohort in place, and it’s a two-year program. So you will be joining the existing cohorts, and we’re looking at about 16 people per year, just on the USC side of things. Exeter, perhaps the same or more, so it’ll be a big happy transatlantic family.

AP: Yes, I definitely hope so. Thank you so much for coming over and doing this interview, Matt. I think it was very interesting and fascinating, and I encourage everybody to look at your work. And of course, RENSEP as well. We’ll talk about that more in upcoming weeks as well. So thank you again. It was a pleasure to have you here.

MMK: No, thank you so much. An honour and pleasure.

AP: Thanks. We are about to end the livestream now, so I hope that you guys had a lot of Academic Fun with us and that you enjoy the conversation. And if you like this interview, please don’t forget to smash the like button, subscribe to the channel if you haven’t already. But probably everybody in the chat has already, but if you’re watching this and you’re not subscribed, do that now, please. And also, activate the notification bell so that you will never miss a new upload from me because YouTube sometimes will just not make my videos appear in your feed. So you might want to hit the notification bell to get that. And share this video around or any of my videos on Angela Symposium. That’s really deeply appreciated. And thank you so much for being here. You’re amazing, and I hope that you stay tuned for all the Academic Fun.

Bye for now.

LINKS AND RECOMMENDED READING:
Emily Selove and my SHWEP interview announcing our new USC and Exeter MAs in Magic and Occult Science: https://shwep.net/2023/06/28/emily-se…

My academia.edu page: https://sc.academia.edu/MatthewMelvin… A short article with a list of some of the Persian grimoires I’m currently working on: https://www.academia.edu/38343009/How…

Another short article with a summary and edition of another short Persian grimoire: https://www.academia.edu/96101312/Qiz…

Emily Selove on her forthcoming translation of a major Arabic Mongol-era grimoire: https://shwep.net/oddcast/emily-selov…

Selected translations from the Bunian Greater Sun of Gnoses: https://www.google.com/books/edition/…

Noah Gardiner on the Bunian corpus: https://sc.academia.edu/NoahGardiner Michael Noble on Fakhr-i Razi’s grimoire The Hidden Secret: https://shwep.net/oddcast/philosophis…

On the Persianate geomantic tradition: https://www.academia.edu/19579995/Per…

On the Latinate geomantic tradition: https://www.google.com/books/edition/… http://www.alexandercummins.com/blog/… https://digitalambler.com/category/ge…

Islamic Occult Studies on the Rise (IOSOTR): https://www.islamicoccult.org/

Research Network for the Study of Esoteric Practices: https://www.rensep.org/

First streamed 2 Jul 2023