Original Magic: The Rituals and Initiations of the Persian Magi - Stephen E. Flowers Ph.D. 2017

Muslim Transformations
The History of Iranian Magic

After the Arabic conquest of Persia in the middle of the seventh century CE, there was an increased rate of exchange of ideas on all levels between the Arabic and Iranian worlds. These are cultures that did not sprout from the same root, as Arabic culture is Semitic and Iranian culture is Indo-European. The Arabs brought some new ideas and practices regarding magic to Iran, but at the same time Arabic ideas were fundamentally transformed by intimate contact with the Iranian culture and its own deeply rooted traditions of magical practice.

Orthodox Islamic thought is just as hostile to sorcery as is orthodox Zoroastrianism. But because some of the philosophical basis of the Mazdan way was lost in the transition from Zoroastrianism to Islam in Iran, we see that more sorcerous ideas regarding magic and astrology crept in to common practice among the Muslims. A good idea of what this looked like can be gleaned from the grimoire known as The Picatrix, which is considered by many to be the mother of all medieval magical grimoires. This was translated into Spanish and Latin from Arabic in the thirteenth century. The original Arabic title is Ghâyat al-Hakîm (Goal of the Wise).

One of the biggest innovations brought by the Arabs seems to have been in the area of the creation of magical talismans with inscriptions in the Arabic script. These were usually based on astrological symbolism, and the letter magic owed much to the Hebrew and Greek traditions of alphabetic magic. The power of letters in Islamic magical and Sufistic practice can be seen in the works of Ibn Arabi as shown in Titus Burkhardt’s Mystical Astrology According to Ibn ’Arabi (Fons Vitae, 2001), the system of the Muqatta’at letters outlined by Rudolf von Sebottendorff in Secret Practices of the Sufi Freemasons (Inner Traditions, 2013), and the whole Islamic heresy designated by the term Hurufism (“letterism”).

The Iranians had an elaborate understanding of sounds and their magical qualities, but the letters or visible signs representing these sounds were more akin to scientific notations or abstract designations, with little or no power ascribed to the visible image itself. The writing system invented in Sasanian Iran to represent the sounds of language known as the Din Dabireh (religious alphabet) is perhaps the most accurate phonetic script of antiquity. A similar attitude toward sounds and letters is also met with in India. Iran and India were both heavily dedicated to oral tradition as the primary vehicle for the transmission of secrets and mysteries, and to the corresponding belief that such secrets are in some way profaned by writing them down.

Zoroastrian traditions of magic were almost entirely derived from Iranian models and theories, whereas the Muslim influence was one that drew primarily from the Arab world with heavy admixtures of Iranian, Egyptian, Greek, and other cultural streams as they entered the world of Islam upon the conversion of various populations to the religion of Mohammed.