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Boozing and Battling and Democratic Magic: The Qizilbash Sensorium Maps the Timurid-Safavid Transition in a Persian Imperial Grimoire
Abstract
The occult-imperial turn that defined the post-Mongol Persianate world saw a proliferation of grimoires as handbooks of court culture—and invaluable typologies of courtly sensorial experience. I present and contextualize for comparative study a minor Persian manual of illusionism and trickery, Boon for the Khan, by the Herati Naqshbandi 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 emblematizes the wider democratizing, 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” to engage and indeed weaponize all the physical (and a few extraphysical) senses.
Discipline
History
Geographic Area
Iran
Sub Area
None