The New Brethren of Purity

The Brethren of Purity are rightly acclaimed the most influential Pythagorean thinkers of pre-Mongol Islam; their Epistles were crucial to the development of a wide and weird range of western and eastern forms of occultism, Sufism and Neoplatonic philosophy, as current research has shown. What has yet to be mapped is the extent to which their post-Mongol Persianate heirs – the self-styled New Brethren of Purity – exerted an even wider and weirder sociopolitical effect. From metaphysics to physics, empire to empiricism, painting to architecture, astronomy to historiography, poetry to magic, their radical reformulations of lettrism ( ʿilm al-ḥurūf) as universal science and theurgic technology became a primary driver of early modern Pythagoreanism and Platonism across the Afro-Eurasian ecumene – indeed a key to the category of early modernity itself. (And perhaps postmodernity too.) This article sketches the outlines of such a map by charting the legacy of Ibn Turka of Isfahan (d. 1432), foremost member of the New Brethren in the Timurid east and their philosophical powerhouse, who was most responsible for rewriting lettrism as Pythagoreanism and Pythagoreanism as mathesis and mathesis as total transhumanist empire. A Muslim Iamblichus and Cusanus and Bruno and Pico and Dee combined, Doctor Littleturk’s example enforces a larger, less doggedly Eurocentric and classicocentric framework for investigating how the mathematizing Greater Western tradition, past and present, might be written and might write otherwise

Empire · Islam · Logos Bible Software · Metaphysics · Modernity · Poetry · Sufism · Western thought · Eurasian Exchange Networks · Historical Astronomy and Related Studies · Medieval and Classical Philosophy