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

The Muslims
Iranian Magic as the Ancients Saw It

While the Greeks and Romans were adversaries of the Iranians for centuries, the Jews and Christians were their protégés, and the Chinese their trading partners, the Arabs were also involved in trading relations with the Iranians long before the seventh-century CE rise of Islam. In various respects, the original practices and beliefs of Mohammed were inspired by Persian models. After Iran was absorbed into the Islamic world, the flood of Persian ideas, which influenced Islamic culture, was so strong that the religion was recast in a Persian image to a significant degree. Zoroastrians in Iran were expressly allowed to continue their worship under Islam, although over the centuries there were periods when they were severely persecuted and harassed.

The Arabs refer to Zarathustra as the “founder of magicians” (Ar. majusya). They called Zoroastrians majus, and this term was later used by Arabic writers to describe all Indo-European pagans—including the Norse Vikings! The Qur’an states that Allah will decide on their salvation, implying that no human judgment should condemn them as infidels. Reflections of two Amesha Spentas, Haurvatat and Ameretat, are found in the names of two angels, Harut and Marut, who are said to have taught magic in Babylon (Qur’an 2:102).

Once the language of the learned class in Iran became Arabic for a time, a good deal of Persian cultural elements found their way into Arabic texts. In the early Islamic world, the language of Arabic played a similar role to that of Latin during the Middle Ages in Europe. People of many ethnicities composed texts in the language, although their own native language was not Arabic. The first works of predictive astrology were written in Arabic by Eastern Iranians. One major text is the Kitab al-Mawalid wa Ahkamiha (Book of Nativities and Their Judgments), which is said to have been translated from Pahlavi into Arabic in 750 CE by Mahankard. Tradition holds that the original text was composed by Zarathustra himself and was written in the Din Dabrih, the “religious alphabet.” Other major Iranian astrologers who transmitted features of pre-Islamic Magian astrology into Islamic usage include Al-Biruni, Al-Birjandi, Qutb al-Din al-Shirazi, and Abd al-Rahman al-Sufi. There is even a Perso-Jewish writer named Masha’allah ibn Athari. For centuries elements of Persian and Arabic culture and ideology mixed with one another and cross-fertilized. The astrological dimension was integral to the Iranian system, whereas it has always been considered a foreign influence in Islam, and is considered haram (Arabic “prohibited”) in the orthodox Muslim faith. In the eastern part of the Iranian world there arose various schools of Sufism, some of which contain barely disguised Zoroastrian concepts. Figures such as Rumi, Suhrawardi, Mansur al-Hallaj, Nurbakhsh, and even Omar Khayyam all convey essentially Iranian mystical thoughts in Islamic guise, often expressing themselves in their own Persian language rather than Arabic.

The ancients always remarked on the Iranians as being advanced in all sorts of spiritual, magical, and scientific knowledge, but rarely did they understand the doctrines of the Magians in any deep or thorough way. This tendency continued throughout the history of inquiry into things magical. Various modern investigators of magic, such as Eliphas Levi and Colin Wilson, have acknowledged the debt owed to Zarathustra, but few, if any, have ever pursued his technology. In his landmark work The Occult (1971), Colin Wilson wrote, “Man must develop positive consciousness. . . . I know of only one religion that made this recognition its foundation: Zoroastrianism, the religion of the ancient Persians.”⁶ He goes on to say a few misleading things but never really takes up a serious inquiry into the actual nature of the Magian way. He is not alone in this trend. Many such general assessments of the originality and effectiveness of Magian methods are found throughout history. The prevalence of these observations certainly suggests that the methods of the Magians deserve some serious work of individual study and experimentation. This is the aim of the rest of this book. It remains a mystery as to why this door has been left sealed for so many centuries. Now is the time to open it.