Mapping Occult Sciences Across Islamicate Cultures

Objective

“Mapping Occult Sciences Across Islamicate Cultures” (MOSAIC) is the first major project to investigate Islamic and Eastern Christian occult-scientific sources, spanning from late antiquity to the nineteenth century and from Iberia to India, in a vast continuum of languages (Greek, Syriac, Arabic, Persian, Turkish). It is generally acknowledged that occult sciences—alchemy, astrology, geomancy, lettrism, magic and a wide range of other operative and prognosticative disciplines—are integral to any history of science and technology. By including the far larger non-Latinate occult-scientific archive, equally integral to this history, MOSAIC is poised to bring about a paradigm shift. We untangle the term “occult” in all its diversity and test a more expansive definition to account for the specific epistemologies driving its multifarious applications. This dynamic and adaptive heuristic not only opens new avenues in the study of body-mind, nature-culture relationships in the historical construction of natural and mathematical science; it also reveals new paths of dissemination and crosspollination of the occult sciences in Islam and Byzantium, restoring a vast textual and artifactual record largely neglected to date. Retrieving occult science will require an unprecedented degree of synergetic expertise, international collaboration and the training of a new generation of highly qualified scholars. We will (1) identify, investigate, catalogue and interpret a critical mass of highly technical sources, making them available through editions, translations, surveys, studies, exhibitions and conferences; (2) combine, as feasible, the study of scientific theories with their technological practice, including through experimental reconstruction; (3) develop a suite of open-access digital tools of immediate use to specialists and nonspecialists alike, and (4) integrate all our findings in a print and born-digital Master Synthesis as an engine for the field going forward.