The Occult Court

The occult-imperial turn that defined the post-Mongol Persianate world saw a proliferation of grimoires as handbooks of court culture – one with Mediterranean roots. Here I contextualise and translate for comparative study a minor Persian manual of illusionism and trickery, Boon for the Khan, by the Herati Naqshbandī Sufi, preacher and occultist ʿAlī Ṣafī (d. 1533), as strategic window onto this turn generally and the politically and militarily fraught Timurid-Safavid, Sunni-Shiʿi transition specifically. Commissioned by a Qizilbash warlord in 1522, it emblematises the wider democratising, Renaissance ethos that is a distinctive feature of early modernities West and East, especially occult-scientifically; it was written to help make Safavid courtly and military life quite literally stage-magical. This wonderfully accessible manual of warlord magic – devoted to boozing and battling (bazm u razm) in a way no known previous grimoire in the Western tradition had been – marries ancient Platonic-Alexandrian occult philosopher-kingship to modern “occult democracy”

Ancient history · Art · Art history · Ethos · Literature · Modernity · Monarchy · Occult · Political science · Ruler · The Renaissance · Eurasian Exchange Networks · Historical, Religious, and Philosophical Studies · History · Islamic Studies and History · Law · Medicine