My presentation addresses the question of traumatic transmission, and what Algerian psychoanalyst Karima Lazali formulated as “the colonial unconscious:” a psychic state, both individual and collective, characterized by a disabling intrusion of violence and a related psychotic foreclosure of the past, which she also described as a being-suspended in the mode of (spirit) “possession.” The paper is grounded in my own ethnographic work on madness and spiritual cures in contemporary Morocco, in particular the liturgy of the ruqya, centered on the recitation of the Qur?an, and the visible materialization of its effects, and affects, on the soul and the body of the person, and in the case of demonic possession on the elusive ontological being that is the jinn. The stage of the liturgy becomes a space of manifestation of the Invisible, a stage of the soul, of its torments and battles, attacks and counterattacks, in the shadow of the Qur?an’s. Through a parallel engagement between the time-space of the Quranic liturgy, the temporality of the unconscious in psychoanalysis, and the unconscious of history in the thought of Ibn Khaldun, I propose a different reading of both “transmission”, and “possession.” In the theological context of the spiritual cures of the “vertigo” of history the point is to make possible a passage, a leap to another time, learning to read illness and the time of calamity as at once a historical condition of our time, and a “sign” and a “passage” (the double sense of the Arabic concept of ?ibra, pl. ?ibar) in the tapestry of a larger cosmic history, a sign one is called to ponder and learn from. Healing is introducing a pedagogy that implies the ability to read signs in a cosmological sense, to reinstitute the open-endedness of the world. This is what Ibn Khaldun considered the ethical task of the historian, at once bearing witness to the forms of social and political life that succeeded one another on the revolving scene of the human world, as seized from the historical time of catastrophe, and reading the events and their unfolding as signs and lessons (?ibar), disclosures of nonhuman time; disclosures of the temporality of the hereafter, which opene visibility and insight into the human world.