The Sirat Sayf bin Dhi Yazan, an Arabic popular epic put to paper in 14th century Mamluk Cairo, presents an ontological spectrum of human and non-human characters, many of which occupy not simply the poles of this spectrum, but the spaces in between. Notably, human characters who engage in occult practices and possess magical/scientific (here termed occult) capabilities interact with their world in patterns more akin to their non-human counterparts. This is especially true of women in the sira: human women, women who practice the occult sciences, and non-human women demonstrate differing relationships to power and gender over the course of the epic. As such, this paper explores two sets of human/non-human differentiations made in the Sirat Sayf. The first is between human women engaged in occult sciences and practices, such as the sorceress ‘Aqila, and non-human women, including the jinn ‘Aqisa and ghoul Ghula. The second differentiation is between human women who do not participate in occult practices, including a number of the titular King Sayf’s wives, and the human women who do. It is argued that the engagement of human women with the occult sciences creates a change in their ontological status, granting them an access to power more akin to that of their non-human counterparts and remarkably different from other human women. The result of the presence of this ontological spectrum is an implied spectrum of gendered relationships in the text and a fluidity of social roles: gender, as is the case with humanity, is presented not as a binary system, but as a complex and fluid social phenomenon. Methodologically, this close reading makes use of intra-text comparisons between the female characters located on different points of a spectrum between human and non-human. This comparative enterprise highlights how the text constructs and reifies categories of gender, humanity, and power along what is termed ‘pivoting axises’ of ontologies. This style of reading demonstrates the interaction and mutual construction of the categories of gender and the occult within the epic, which can produce and support insight into the dynamic imagination of gender in the Mamluk era. Methodological attention is given not only to work on magic and the occult sciences in medieval literature, but also to feminist scholarship regarding identity formation and women in the popular epics, including that of Nadia El-Cheikh, Remke Kruk, and Amanda Steinberg.