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Astrology, Lettrism, Geomancy:

The Occult-Scientific Methods of

Post-Mongol Islamicate Imperialism

Matthew Melvin-Koushki*

In the Persianate world, the formative fourteenth to sixteenth centuries

witnessed an occultist arms race, as it were, for messianic and sacral forms

of political legitimacy, which reached a crescendo with the approach of

the Islamic millennium (1592 CE). As in any arms race, ruling dynasts

eagerly cultivated professional specialists in the relevant eld—to wit,the art and science of walāya, ‘sacral power’. The Mongol destruction

of the reigning, but brittle, caliphal-sultanic-jurisprudential model of

Islamicate societies in the mid-thirteenth century had created a vacuum

of legitimacy into which rushed this Shi‘i-su quicksilver category, farmore exible and adaptable than the model it replaced, and it soon becamehegemonic throughout the Persianate world. Securing access to this sacral

power became a driving concern of ruling and scholarly elites, whether

by way of susm, occultism or Alidism, and often eclectic combinationsof all three.

The Safavids, to a greater degree than their Ottoman, Mughal and

Uzbek rivals, opted for this combinative strategy during the sixteenth

century. The militarised Shi‘i-su messianic fervour of Shah Ismā īl(r. 1501–24)—self-proclaimed reincarnation of Alī and incarnation ofGod—and his fanatical Turkmen Qizilbash horde was indeed responsiblefor creating a conquest state in Iran; but as a political framework it was far

The Medieval History Journal, 19, 1 (2016): 142 – 150

SAGE Publications Los Angeles/London/New Delhi/Singapore/Washington DC/

Melbourne

DOI: 10.1177/0971945815626316

* Department of History, University of South Carolina. E-mail: [email protected]

at UNIVERSITY OF SOUTH CAROLINA on April 27, 2016mhj.sagepub.comDownloaded from

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too volatile to endure. Accordingly, Ismā īl’s successor, Shah Tahmāsb I

(r. 1524–76), sought to routinise his father’s messianic charisma by turningto orthodox Shi‘ism—and by throwing himself into the study of the occultsciences (al-ulūm al-gharība), especially geomancy ( ilm al-raml ).1 The

Venetian diplomat Vincenzo degli Alessandri (d. after 1595) reported,

for instance, that Shah had not left his palace for a decade, so devoted he

was to practicing the science as substantiation for his claim to prophetlikesanctity and vision.2 The close identication of occultism with both susmand Shi‘ism remained in effect through at least the turn of the seventeenth

century, as contemporary scholarship attests. Most telling in this regard is

the schema offered by Abū l-Qāsim Ansārī Kāzirūnī (. 1605), a prominentShirazi scholar in the service of Shah Abbās the Great (r. 1587–1629), inhis Ladder to the Heavens (Sullam al-Samāvāt ), an eclectic work devotedto constructing an intellectual-religious pedigree for his patron that is

simultaneously Twelver Shi‘i, su and occultist. To this end, the Sullam includes a long chapter taxonomising the occult sciences as a subset not

of natural or mathematical philosophy, as they were usually classied, but exclusively of walāya, here presented as su-style sainthood rather

than a Twelver theological category.3 Thus even the early Safavids, whoembraced Shi‘ism precisely as a means of cornering the religio-political

market on walāya, still considered occultism to be central to their imperialclaims, and the most effective means of routinising and harnessing the

messianic su charisma of Ismāīl as divine conqueror.In this they were following the Timurid model to the letter. As Azfar

Moin has discussed, Temür’s (r. 1370–1405) own irresistible charisma

as world conqueror was encapsulated in the title Lord of Conjunction

( sāhib-qirān), a purely astrological designation that entered regular usefrom the thirteenth century onward.4 My research has shown that the same

scholar-occultists who made this title so central to Timurid universalist

imperial ideology relied on lettrism ( ilm al-hurūf ) in equal measure, producing a highly distinctive dual astrological-lettrist platform that was

to remain popular among successor states for centuries as a primary means

1 Geomancy, the divinatory ‘science of the sand’, is Arabic cognate to the I Ching ; its

alternative designation as ‘terrestrial astrology’ refers to its heavy reliance on astrologicalcategories (see Melvin-Koushki, ‘Persianate Geomancy’).

2 Fleicher, ‘Ancient Wisdom, New Sciences’: 241.3 Kāzirūnī, Sullam al-Samāvāt : 81–130.4 Moin, The Millennial Sovereign: 23–55.


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144 Matthew Melvin-Koushki


of signalling their Timurid legitimacy.5 That is to say, Temür, the Starlord,

was equally a Letterlord ( sāhib-hurūf ), his glory inscribed in the text ofthe Qur’an and mathematically encoded in the cosmos itself.6

To understand the full signicance of the latter title, it must be borne inmind that lettrism, by the early fteenth century, was widely consideredto be not only the most Islamic of all the occult sciences, but also the

most Islamic, and the most universal, of all sciences in its status as both

the chiefest branch of the ‘science of divine unity’ ( ilm al-tawhīd ) and

the ‘science of the saints’ ( ilm al-awliyā ) par excellence. So argued the

‘Greatest Master’ Ibn Arabī (d. 1240), foremost theoretician of walāya,

and his argument was rst formalised in Ilkhanid courtly circles by Shamsal-Dīn Āmulī (d. 1352), whose Nafāyis al-Funūn fī Arāyis al- Uyūn, anencyclopaedic Persian classication of the sciences unprecedented inits polish, scope and depth, served as the primary model for subsequentencyclopaedists throughout the Persianate world. Most signicantly,therein Āmulī posits susm as the supreme Islamic science, equal to allthe other religious sciences combined, and lettrism as the supreme sucscience—that is, the science of walāya. At the same time, he largely

adheres to the standard Farabian-Avicennan classication of all occultsciences (including alchemy, letter magic, oneiromancy, physiognomy and

astrology) as derivative natural sciences, with one important exception— geomancy, here reclassied as a mathematical science.7

By the sixteenth century, then, which featured the entrenchment of

millennial cosmocracy as the default form of Islamicate imperialism,

these three occult sciences—lettrism, astrology and geomancy—were promulgated among and eagerly seized upon by ruling elites throughout

the Persianate world as a philosophically-scientically rigorous meansof harnessing walāya.8 Their intellectual cachet and complementarity

is testied to by Safavid-era philosophers like Shams al-Dīn Khafrī

5 This includes the Mughal emperor Shāhjahān (r. 1628–57) most prominently—hisTaj Mahal, a masterpiece of Timurid imperial architecture, being expressly designed as a

giant talisman.6 While the term sāhib-hurūf does not occur as such in the sources, I propose it here as

a heuristic for agging the central importance of lettrist arguments to imperial ideology

construction from the Timurids onward.7 See Melvin-Koushki, ‘Powers of One’.8 By contrast, alchemy ( ilm al-kīmiyā ), while also vigorously pursued by certain scholarly

cadres, especially in the Mamluk and Ottoman contexts, was never de-esotericised and politicised to the same extent (my thanks to Tuna Artun for this observation).




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(d. 1535), the leading planetary theorist of the century, who naturally

authored treatises on geomancy and lettrism both; therein he presentsthem as sciences that allow the practitioner to explore, and intellectuallyascend, the great Chain of Being as proximate cause of all sublunary

and celestial phenomena.9 Likewise, Mīr Dāmād (d. 1630), a foundingmember of the so-called philosophical school of Isfahan and intimate of

Shah Abbās, declared the basis of his metaphysical system as a whole to be emanationist-lettrist neopythagoreanism: world as (Arabic) text.10

What is rarely acknowledged, however, is the fact that such lofty(occult-)philosophising had very immediate political applications. The

greatest thinkers of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Iran, including MīrDāmād and his peers, feature in some contemporary sources as practicingoccultists in service to the Safavid state, master talismanists responsible

for protecting the realm and letter-magically directing its political

course. Most prominently among them, Shaykh Bahā ī (d. 1621), thehugely inuential Safavid shaykh al-islām, master mathematician and

polymath extraordinaire, is remembered to this day as one of the most

powerful occultists and letter mages of his generation. But this function

was simply part and parcel of his larger role as a primary architect ofthe new Safavid imperial culture, in terms material, legal, theological

and magical: as an architect, he helped to design and construct Isfahan

as imperial capital; as a jurist-theologian, he helped to transform theunstable messianic-su framework of the early Safavid state into a stableorthodox Twelver Shi‘i imperial template; as an occultist, he strengthenedthe state by constructing astral-letter-magical devices—talismans (sg.tilasm)—to protect and guide the ruling elite and defend against plague

and invasion.Such were the invaluable services that charismatic scholar-occultists

offered their royal patrons throughout the early modern Persianate world.

Most importantly, it was precisely the neoplatonic-neopythagorean

cosmology these theosised philosophers codified that legitimised

Islamicate hierarchical cosmocracy, this lettrist Ibn Arabian monism that

fuelled henological imperialism.

As sketched above, the Safavids’ patronage of occultism was clearly

enthusiastic; yet by comparison to that of their imperial rivals, it appears

9 See Melvin-Koushki, ‘Persianate Geomancy’.10 See Melvin-Koushki, ‘Powers of One’.




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almost half-hearted. Iranian scholar-occultists were even more in demand

at the neighbouring Mughal and Ottoman courts, both far wealthier andmore cosmopolitan than the Safavid, and many accordingly decamped to

seek their fortunes abroad. One example must here sufce: HidāyatAllāh Munajjim-i Shīrāzī (. 1593), who served as court geomancer tothe Mughal-Timurid emperor Akbar (d. 1556–1605) at the turn of themillennium. This Iranian émigré composed an unusually comprehensive

manual of geomancy, Methods of Guidance (Qavāid al-Hidāya), for his

ambitious royal patron, reporting that he wrote this work in the month ofFarvardīn in year 37 of Akbar’s Divine (ilāhī ) calendar—that is, at the

spring equinox of the year 1001 (March 1593): the moment of dawningof the Islamic millennium over the horizon of Akbar’s sacred body, itselfeffulging forth the talismanic cosmocrator’s eschatological imperium

over all of India. The Qavā id al-Hidāya was thus one of the many

works the Mughal emperor commissioned to celebrate the millennium’sarrival. Immediately striking is the synthesising ‘internationalism’ ofits approach:

Know (God aid you) that this noble science is pursued in every corner of theearth, with four main schools of practice. Indians, Khurasanis, Transoxaniansand easterners generally rely on the ABDH cycle and the methods laid out in

the Shajara [u S amara] in their practice, a school I here term the Geomantic

East. Farsis, Iraqis, Gilanis and the like rely on the Occupation ( sakan)cycle [developed by al-Zanātī] and the procedure laid out in the Mafātīh forderiving their readings, a school I term the Geomantic North. Maghribis,

Egyptians, Syrians and all Arabians favor the BZDH cycle, [established by

Luqmān, who named it for his son,] a school I term the Geomantic West.

There is a further method, extremely recondite, known as the Most Complete(asahh), a school I term the Geomantic South; [it was developed by Tabasī in

particular], and elite practitioners in every region perform divinations (kashf )

and miracles (karāmāt ) [on its basis] … This book, then, which I have titled Methods of Guidance, offers a summary treatment of these four methods, with

some additional material, to enable anyone who reads and achieves a basic

understanding thereof to penetrate people’s innermost thoughts.11

The prologue of the work, moreover, is entirely astrological in its

symbolism, a design feature sure to catch the fancy of Akbar, a card-carrying member of the ahl-i nujūm u tanāsukh, ‘star-worshippers and

11 MS Majlis 12563: 315–16.




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reincarnationists’.12 Indeed, as suggested, Akbar’s imperial identity is

perhaps best described as talismanic: his sacralised body as astral-letter-magical device marrying heaven to earth in order to rule the whole. His

infamous astrocratic court ritual, furthermore, should be understood

in the rst place as an astral-magical operation, using tried and tested procedures to harness celestial powers for specic, constructive ends(and especially for syncretising Indo-Islamo-Chinggisid imperial ends,

as Audrey Truschke establishes in her essay).Hidāyat Allāh’s Methods of Guidance, then, like a host of other

systematising occultist manuals on this and other sciences produced

during the same century, testies to the ambitious internationalismand scholarly universalism that characterised Akbar’s empire-building

project. I therefore posit this outlook as the proper intellectual context forAkbar’s celebrated, radically ecumenical doctrine of sulh-i kull , UniversalHarmony—which, as Daniel Shefeld has shown, was itself derived fromthe Islamo-Zoroastrian Azari doctrine of āmīzish-i farhang , ‘mixing of

cultures’, as developed by—unsurprisingly—another Shirazi occultistwho opted for India over Iran.13

In his pioneering study The Millennial Sovereign, Azfar Moin has proven the dependency of Timurid and Mughal dynasts on occult scientists

for corroboration of their claims to cosmocratic divinity and henological,

eschatological imperialism. My own research suggests that the three most

important sciences in this early modern Islamicate imperial context were

astrology, lettrism and geomancy, which gured as an interdependentintellectual trinity of sorts; they must henceforth be treated as such. Themost pressing task now is to establish the specically Islamicate genealogy

of each science, from their Hellenic-Semitic-Persian-Indic inceptionsto the modern period, as the basis for larger questions as to the natureand functioning of Islamicate societies in general, and High Persianate

societies in particular.

But we must proceed carefully: there be dragons. To close my

argument, I offer this reply to the question posed by Johan Elverskog atthe end of his essay in this dialogue: ‘While the rest of Eurasia fell backinto the ancient patterns of competing local astrological systems of time

and space, was it only the Europeans who followed in the universalizing

12 Dihdār Shīrāzī, ‘Durr al-Yatīm’: 131.13 Shefeld, ‘Lord of the Planetary Court’.




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footsteps of the Mongols?’ Given the rudimentary state of research on

early modern Islamicate intellectual history, it is dangerous to assumethat the Mongols had no true political or scientic heirs in IslamicateEurasia, but only in Christianate Europe. Something transformative did

indeed take place in the far west of the ecumene, eventually—but it isonly because all the potentialities contained within the universalising

Mongol model were so fully actualised by Turko-Mongol Perso-Islamicsocieties as a single cultural continuum, from the Timurids onwards, that

Europeans were nally able to join the era of globalisation inaugurated bythe Mongols in the thirteenth century. By the sixteenth century, Islamicate

empires had succeeded in establishing sovereignty over a full third of

the human race (some 160 million of 500 million souls), while also

presiding over the greatest expansion of Islam in history after the Arab

conquest itself (of the 1.7 billion Muslims alive in 2016, the majority aredescended from people who converted to Islam between 1300 and 1900).

At the same time, the population of the two largest Islamicate empires

of the era, the Mughal and Ottoman, remained majority non-Muslim;more of the world’s Muslims lived beyond their bounds than within

them.14 The expansiveness, syncretism and universalism of early modernIslamicate imperial ideologies—and the occult-scientic discourses thatdrove them—were thus no mere rhetorical conceit, but a direct reectionof unprecedented religio-cultural realities on the ground. True, despite the

symbolically potent, syncretic and exible universalist religio-politicalideologies they developed, none of the early modern Islamicate empires

managed, in the end, to achieve the world domination they sought. Yetthose same ideologies drove them to become in their heyday the most

politically, culturally and economically cosmopolitan and religiouslycomplex societies of the early modern period.

Globalisation, in short, was first prosecuted under the radically

ecumenical Mongol banner—precisely through its marriage to the reigninguniversalist culture of the era, which had long since synthesised the

Hellenic, Semitic, Persian and Indic patrimonies of late antiquity: Islam.With the fusion in western Asia of the rst world religion with the rstworld empire, ‘mixing of cultures’, a principle forcefully championed by

both, became the template for a new dispensation in human intellectual,cultural and economic history—the early modern. In this world-historical

14 For data references see Melvin-Koushki, ‘Early Modern Islamicate Empire’.




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process, Europeans were initially but beneficiaries—economically,

culturally and especially scientically.The mathematisation of the cosmos is here a case in point. This was,as is well known, the central project driving the so-called ScienticRevolution in Europe (more properly a mathematical revolution, being

largely conned to astronomy), and its culmination with Isaac Newton’s(d. 1727) Principia is still routinely taken to be the basis of Europeanscientic modernity. Yet this project was far less sui generis than currentscholarship supposes. It is my contention that Newton—a committedneopythagorean-occultist—must rather be considered an importantmember of the Arabic astronomical tradition generally and an indirect heir

of intellectual developments in Timurid Iran and Transoxania specically,site of an unprecedented mathematical turn in astronomy and simultaneous

neopythagorean turn in metaphysics, with the ascent of lettrism to the

status of universal experimental science emblematising this new quest tomathematise the cosmos.15 The rst argument has recently been advanced

by historians of Islamicate science;16 but the second remains anathema,this due to ingrained scholarly occultophobia, and so virtually none of

the research necessary to substantiate it has been done. Nevertheless, theoverall intellectual genealogy is clear: the quest to mathematise the cosmoswas rst launched by astronomers and lettrists (and astronomer-lettrists)in the employ of Timurid dynasts, who eagerly patronised these men of

(occult) science in conscious emulation of their Ilkhanid predecessors(Ulugh Beg’s Samarkand Observatory being an upgrade of Hülegü’sat Maragha); communicated to European intellectuals via Byzantium

by as yet unknown means; then pursued concurrently but separately in

the Persianate and Latinate worlds during the fteenth and sixteenthcenturies.17

That this quest did not result in ‘scientic modernity’ in the post-Mongol Persian cosmopolis but did in the Latin is hardly a tale of Islamicregress vis-à-vis Christian progress, but simply evidence of different

metaphysical and cultural priorities. Indeed, it is one of the great ironies

of history that European hegemony, heir to Mongol-Islamic radical

15

See Melvin-Koushki, ‘Powers of One’.16 See, for example, Ragep, ‘Copernicus and His Islamic Predecessors’.17 The Ottomans here represent the odd man out—more conservative Ottoman astronomers,

uncomfortable with the purely mathematical astronomy being developed in the Timurid east,

remained committed to Avicennan physics.




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ecumenism and imperial-scientic universalism, nally militated against

the mixing of cultures and the ights of mind that made it possible. Forracist nationalism, one could argue, is not the natural culmination of theearly modern transformation of the world, but its betrayal; and scienticmaterialism is not the necessary upshot of the mathematisation of the

cosmos, but its parody.

References

Dihdār Shīrāzī, Muhammad. 1375 Sh./1996. ‘Durr al-Yatīm’[‘Pearl beyond Compare’], inM. H. A. Sāvī (ed.), Rasā il-i Dihdār [The Treatises of Dihdār ]. Tehran: 119–51.

Fleischer, Cornell H. 2009. ‘Ancient Wisdom and New Sciences: Prophecies at the Ottoman

Court in the Fifteenth and Early Sixteenth Centuries’, in M. Farhad and S. Bagci (eds),

Falnama: The Book of Omens. London: 232–43, 329–30.Kāzirūnī, Abū l-Qāsim Ansārī. 1386 Sh./2007. Sullam al-Samāvāt [ Ladder to the Heavens],

edited by Abd Allāh Nūrānī. Tehran.Melvin-Koushki, Matthew. Forthcoming. ‘Early Modern Islamicate Empire: New Forms

of Religiopolitical Legitimacy’, in Armando Salvatore and Roberto Tottoli (eds), TheWiley-Blackwell History of Islam and Islamic Civilization. Malden, MA.

———. 2017. ‘Powers of One: The Mathematicalization of the Occult Sciences in the HighPersianate Tradition’. Intellectual History of the Islamicate World , vol. 5(1).

———. 2016. ‘Persianate Geomancy from Tūsī to the Millennium: A Preliminary Survey’,in Nader El-Bizri and Eva Orthmann (eds), Occult Sciences in Premodern Islamic

Culture. Beirut.

Moin, A. Azfar. 2012. The Millennial Sovereign: Sacred Kingship and Sainthood in Islam.

New York.Ragep, F. Jamil. 2004. ‘Copernicus and His Islamic Predecessors: Some Historical Remarks’,

Filozofski Vestnik , vol. 25(2): 125–42.

Shefeld, Daniel J. Forthcoming. ‘The Lord of the Planetary Court: Cosmic Aspects of

Millenial Sovereignty in the Thought of Āzˉar Kayvān and His Associates’, Arabica.

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