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Kabbalists, Sufis, and Solomon’s Magic Ring: Magic Healing Amulets as Historical Artifacts of Judeo-Islamic Exchange in Morocco
Abstract by Dr. Ellen Amster On Session IV-12  (Occult Bodywork)

On Friday, December 2 at 11:00 am

2022 Annual Meeting

Abstract
This paper analyzes Islamic magical healing amulets collected by French anthropologists and doctors from 1890s to the 1940s, Arabic-language talismans used to cure and prevent sickness, impotence, injury, and sterility, but also to influence others, with love or distress. Islamic theologians often frowned on healing amulets as an instrumentalization of religion and colonial-era anthropologists used these amulets as evidence that Morocco was primitive, prelogical, and incapable of both science and self-government. I suggest that these amulets—and the symbols in them—might be read as a kind of material archive, as circumstantial evidence of a past Kabbalist-Sufi theological exchange. Perhaps we can treat amulets as an archeological dig site where a theological process has left traces. Islamic healing amulets have been studied from the perspective of science, as interventions arising from a premodern cosmological model of the universe, or as vernacular religion, an attempt by believers to channel divine power into objects that one can eat, or drink or wear. This paper embraces both views but adds a historical dimension, how we might use magic amulets as artifacts of a lost history of popular exchange between everyday Muslims and Jews in Morocco. Muslim and Jewish theologians wrote about their borrowings from one other, less is known about how ordinary people lived Muslim-Jewish proximity, especially in mysticism. Theology-adjacent vernacular cultural forms like amulets and the oral traditions One Thousand and One Nights together suggest how religious ideas might have been digested in everyday life. Healing may be the motor of this Judeo-Islamic exchange. Kabbalah and Sufism share the concept of a righteous person who can be a door between the material and divine worlds, the wali in Islam and the tzaddik in Judaism. In practice, Jewish and Muslim Moroccans visited the graves of these persons for prayer and relief from sickness, infertility and psychiatric disorders. Sometimes Jews and Muslims visited the same holy grave. Healing practices may thus be one vector through which healers, patients and pilgrims abstracted symbolism from theology to create magical amulets.
Discipline
History
Geographic Area
Morocco
Sub Area
19th-21st Centuries