As Islamicate magic texts were adopted in new climates, practitioners attempted to maintain the correspondence between plants and the heavenly powers that governed them. Early-modern Arabic talismanic texts such as the Ghayāt al-Hakīm of Maslama al-Qurtubī arose from earlier talismanic magic texts from India, Persia, and Chaldea and reference many plants and spices that originate in these lands. Subsequently, talismanic practice migrated into early modern Europe via texts of astral magic including the Picatrix, a Castilian translation of the Ghayāt for Alfonso X in 1256. In a kind of astrocartography, the Picatrix insists that “One must know the cities and their latitudes since the planetary powers are different among them. We see this in things that are produced at one latitude that are not found in another, such as minerals, stones, metals, trees, and plants” (141). In magic as in medicine, practitioners either imported the ingredients or substituted indigenous plants and herbs, encouraged in some cases by the Picatrix’s listing of general properties of plants that correspond to planets and stars. Practitioners hybridize imported plant knowledge with local healing and apotropaic plant practices. Paracelsus in his 1589 Herbarius wrote that Germans “want to prepare medicines from across the seas while there are better remedies to be found in front of their noses in their own gardens” (Moran, 1993). Culpepper (1653) similarly was proud to base his astrological plant healing on indigenous English plants, even saffron. What seems to be consistent is the requirement that astrally implicated “virtues” (as distinct from qualities) are retained in the substitute plant. Research will demonstrate whether an interest in the abstract system of astral magic distinguishes elite from popular practices. Following a path initiated by scholars such as David Pingree, this paper will trace plants across texts. Through comparative studies of recipes with similar intended effects in books of magic and medicine, lists of materia medica, and cargo and trade routes, and by researching the cultivation of indigenous and imported plants, I will track the habitats and journeys of a few plants mentioned frequently in texts of astrological magic from the thirteenth to seventeenth centuries, such as myrobalan, spikenard, saffron, and hellebore, the “sullen herb of Saturn.” Partial bibliography Amar, Zohar, and Efraim Lev. 2017. Arabian Drugs in Early Medieval Mediterranean Medicine. Pingree, David. 1980. “Some of the Sources of the Ghayāt al-Hakīm.” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 43: 1-5.

This presentation considers the interconnected ancient cosmologies between China and the Muslim world, via the herbal pathways of cinnamon, which featured prominently in the Silk Road herbal drug trade of the Golden Age of Islam (8th to 13th century CE) and the early Tang Dynasty. For example, the synergies between Islamic medicine and ancient Chinese medicine can best be seen in Hui medicine, which synthesizes traditional Islamic Arabia medicine and philosophy with Traditional Chinese medicine (TCM). I am particularly interested in the pungent spice cinnamon, which is referenced across ancient Chinese and Islamic medical traditions to balance elemental deficiencies of the body, whether to dispel the coldness, promote warm circulation in the gut, or to promote and induce menstruation in women. Today, we see the adaptation of Chinese-Islamic cosmological and metaphysical ancient thought in astrological magic, for example, the use of cinnamon in Venusian oils and talismans by modern-day Picatrix practitioners like Sphere + Sundry. Extending the possibilities of such an herbal pathway into the realm of art and culture, I wish to propose the possibilities of an anti-inflammatory cinna-matic aesthetics that “warms the heart yang” and promotes loving circulation. Drawing from Nathaniel Dorksy’s suggestion of a metabolic cinema in Devotional Cinema, Elizabeth A. Wilson’s consideration of bile in “gut feminism,” as well as ancient medical texts, this paper explores the possibilities of a Chinese-Islamic cosmological cinema through transnational analyses of "A First Farewell" (Lina Wang, 2018), a film about Uyghur children and their ailing parents, and Kelly Reichardt’s "First Cow" (2019), in which cinnamon appears as way to signify the troubled gains of Chinese racialized settlement in the new frontier of the American Pacific northwest. In both cases, I suggest that cinnamon appears even where Islam or Islamic knowledge does not/cannot. Bibliography: Buell, Paul. "Food, medicine and the silk road: The Mongol era exchanges." Silk Road 5.2 (2007): 22-35. Dorsky, Nathaniel. Devotional Cinema (University of Berkeley Press, 2014 third edition). Kotyk, Jeffrey. “Buddhist Astrology and Astral Magic in the Tang Dynasty,” PhD Dissertation (Leiden University, 2017). Wilson, Elizabeth A. Gut Feminism (Duke University Press, 2020 second edition). Yoeli-Tlalim, Ronit. ReOrienting Histories of Medicine: Encounters Along the Silk Roads (New York: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2021).

The pre-Islamic Persian psychoactive potion called mang was used as a technology to induce a visionary voyage to the world beyond, in such Zoroastrian apocalyptic texts as Ardā Wīrāz-nāmag. I will discuss the debates surrounding its ingredients and its possible relations to the ancient Iranian haoma or hom plant. I will propose that the visionary use of mang, also known as bang (from the Avestan banha/bangha and Arabicized as banj), associated with such apocalyptic Iranian texts is later transmitted into early Islamicate magic (Picatrix), Sufism, and to European otherworldly journeys such as Dante’s Commedia (without reference to the psychoactive substance). The aural and visionary experience effectuated by mang/bang may be seen as a sort of pre-cinematic experience, a cinema of inner space, as it were. Although there is a substantial body of film theoretical literature on film spectatorship from middle of the 20th century onwards, certain experiences of early or silent film spectatorship have not received the theoretical attention that they rightly deserve. In an essay called The Horrors of Film written in 1926, the Japanese writer of crime and mystery fiction, as well as gothic and weird tales, Edogawa Rampo writes of his cinematic experience: “I am terrified of moving pictures. They are the dreams of an opium addict.” Indeed, in the literature of early film spectators (in both East and West), especially within certain avant-garde circles (e.g., Surrealism), the visual and aural experience of the cinema is correlated to an opium dream, to ecstatic visions, hallucinations, delirium, or trance, whereby the cinematic experience itself is related to altered states of consciousness. This paper will propose a correlation between the aural and visual sensorium of early cinema spectators and the ecstatic state conjured by mang/bang. Thus, this early plant-based media technology can be seen as an origin story for cinema as an opium dream. Bibliography Matthee, Rudi. 2005. The Pursuit of Pleasure: Drugs and Stimulants in Iranian History (1500-1900). Princeton: Princeton University Press. Picatrix: A Medieval Treatise on Astral Magic. 2019. Trans. and with an introduction by Dan Attrell and David Porreca. University Park, PA: Penn State University Press. Rosenthal, Franz. 2015. “The Herb: Hashish versus Medieval Muslim Society.” In Man versus Society in Medieval Islam. Leiden: Brill. 131–334. Vahman, Fereydun. 1986. Ardā Wirāz Nāmag: The Iranian ‘Divina Commedia.’” London and Malmö: Scandinavian Institue of Asian Studies Monograph Series no. 53, Curzon Press.

The paper reflects on the current state of knowledge on the use of plants in Polish-Tatar magic practices. As scholar Michał Łyszczarz points out, the knowledge on this topic is scarce, even though the Podlasie region where the Tatars settled in the seventeenth century abounds in primeval forests and vast meadows, whose resources were used in local folk magic practices. Memories of magical practices were suppressed under communism. Plants were primarily used in curative magic, or contact magic (in the latter case, plants could derive their magic power from a contact with the grave of Ewlija Kontuś, a shepherd who became Tatar saint). In turn, Tatar talismanic magic revolved around the formulae derived from Quaranic literature. The paper will frame the problematic of plant magic within a larger continuum of Tatar artefacts and practices which blend Islamic aniconism with local materials and regional contexts. Special attention will be accorded to the intermedial, and cosmological, operativity of Tatar talismans which include protective prayer scrolls (hramotka, nuska, daławar) and muhir decorative boards, as well as timber mosques. Bibliography Drozd, Andrzej, Marek M. Dziekan, Tadeusz Majda. 2000. Piśmiennictwo i muhiry Tatarów [Tatar Literature and Muhirs]. Res Publica Multiethnica: Warsaw. Dziekan, Marek M. 2011. “History and Culture of Polish Tatars.” In: Muslims in Poland and Eastern Europe: Widening the European Discourse on Islam, edited by Katarzyna Górak-Sosnowska, Uniwersytet Warszawski Instytut Orientalistyczny: Warsaw Łyszczarz, Michał. 2021. Siufkacze i fałdżeje. Tatarska magia ludowa [Sorcerers. Tatar Folk Magic]. Muzułmański Związek Religijny RP, Najwyższe Kolegium Muzułmańskie: Białystok. Slavs and Tatars. 2011. Friendship of Nations: Polish Shi'ite Showbiz. Book Works and Sharjah Art Foundation in association with Raster, Warsaw.