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Matthew Melvin-Koushki

Humans often appear to react irrationally in the face of

disease, as the COVID-19 pandemic has shown. Many cling to
religion or become superstitious. Others become fatalistic. In times
of plague and trauma, we moderns seek to protect ourselves with
prayers, charms, sigils and spells as much as any medieval peasant.
That a surgical mask is hygienic doesn’t make it any less of a
magical symbol.

But perhaps magic – particularly plague magic – isn’t so irrational.

Have humans always pursued the occult arts because they actually
work, at least sometimes?

Despite the often blood-soaked history of the use of the term

‘magic’, we must remember that Western history is filled with
thinkers who have defended its honour as good natural science – a
tried-and-true technology for harnessing interactions between
minds and bodies, human and otherwise. And their empirical
claims were never tested more than during the centuries of plague.

During the previous millennium, the biggest boom in the practice

of magic coincided with the Black Death in the mid-14th century. It
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was the deadliest pandemic in human history, killing as much as

half the population of Asia, Africa and Europe – around 200
million souls. It caused major social and political transformations
in the process: slaves, raiders and mystics became kings, and new
empires were founded on predictions of the end of time. Plague
isn’t merely a medieval curse, either; the bacterium responsible,
Yersinia pestis, is very much still with us, genetically unchanged.

The Islamic world, my own area of focus as a historian of science

and empire, was hit particularly hard by the plague – termed ta‘un
in Arabic, meaning ‘smiter’. There, it helped give rise to what I call
the ‘occult-scientific revolution’, where various occult sciences –
astrology, alchemy, kabbalah, geomancy, dream interpretation –
became an important basis for empire more than ever before. The
ability to predict the future with divination, then change it with
magic, was of obvious political, military and economic interest,
and associated with Alexander the Great in particular. Western
Europe saw a parallel upsurge of occultism – much of it from
Arabic sources – which we now call the Renaissance. The scientific
revolution that followed continued the same trend: historians now
admit that saints of science such as Johannes Kepler, Francis
Bacon, Robert Boyle and Isaac Newton were likewise raving
occultists.

Medicine, too, was often classified and practised as an occult

science among premodern Muslim, Jewish and Christian
physicians. Many considered it alchemy’s sister, both sciences
being predicated on the harnessing of cosmic correspondences and
natural sympathies to restore elemental equilibrium in the human
body – the definition of health. Techniques for life-extension were
also central to the alchemical quest. The sweeping physical and
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sociopolitical imbalances wrought by plague were accordingly

answered by an upsurge in medicine, occult and otherwise.

The Ottoman empire is a prime example of just such a

sociobiological transformation. It controlled increasingly large
areas of Asia, Europe and North Africa between the 14th and 20th
centuries, and plague persisted there for its entire duration. In the
name of public health, the Ottoman state sought to purge cities of
both physical and moral contaminants, including prostitutes,
beggars, illegal immigrants, criminals, bachelors and
bachelorettes. While we haven’t gone so far as to outlaw
bachelorhood, the effect of our own pandemic is comparable: 2020
and 2021 saw a ramping up of state control, too. Not unlike their
modern counterparts in epidemiology and public health, the
authors of the most important Ottoman plague treatises were
leading scholars striving to combat this existential threat to state
and society. They presented plague as a social problem, a disease
of the body politic, just as much as an environmental problem.
Unlike those of today’s experts, however, their manuals were often
emphatically magical.

Wherever the pandemic hit hardest and longest, the

occult arts boomed – as a scientific response

The most sophisticated and extensive of these manuals was the

Treatise on Healing Epidemic Diseases by Taşköprizade Ahmed
(1495-1561). As an imperial judge in Bursa and then Istanbul, as
well as a famed encyclopaedist, historian and astronomer,
Taşköprizade’s approach to this topic was very much cutting edge.
His Arabic masterwork deals with the full range of legal, ethical,
religious and especially medical responses to plague current by the
16th century, with an emphasis on experimentally proven
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methods.

Taşköprizade first offers a strong argument in favour of rational

responses to plague: obviously, one should avoid or flee plague-
stricken areas if possible. Here, he counters earlier Arabic plague
treatises that denied the contagiousness of the disease and
contested the legal permissibility of fleeing it. He also condemns
the fatalistic attitude of some of his contemporaries, singling out
mystics for derision. The correct procedure is to have faith in God
– then protect yourself and others, preferably medically.
Taşköprizade then categorises plague medicine as being either
physical or spiritual. The first type includes standard
pharmaceuticals derived from plants, animals or minerals; the
second includes Quranic prayers and invocations of divine names,
planets, angels or jinn by means of mathematical talismans.

Taşköprizade’s anti-plague talisman featuring a magic square based on the divine

name ‘The Perduring’ (al-Baqi), Istanbul, Süleymaniye Library, MS Aşir Efendi
275/1, f. 53a. Supplied by the author
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As Taşköprizade asserts, however, spiritual medicine is more

potent than physical medicine, though the two should always be
combined to ensure the best health outcome. Likewise, to him,
mental hygiene is at least as important as bodily hygiene for
surviving a pandemic. He devotes a full third of this work to
detailing a range of occult technologies as the most rigorously
empirical means by which one can defend against or cure plague,
giving many historical and contemporary examples of their
success, some of which he witnessed himself. He ends by citing
Plato and the Delian problem – which involves the creation of a
cube double the volume of the first – as ultimate proof of the
effectiveness of Pythagorean mathematical magic in averting the
disease.

Taşköprizade is not unusual in the Western medical tradition in his

emphasis on magic as simply good science. Contemporary Latin
Christian authors of plague treatises did the same, though they
focused more on alchemy than talismanry. But regardless of
religious affiliation, wherever the pandemic hit hardest and
longest, the occult arts boomed – as a rational, scientific response.

A similar sociobiological transformation took place in the 19th

century, when two new pandemics joined plague to ravage much of
the Islamic world: cholera and colonialism. The scholarly response
was much the same: potions and prayer must be combined to
combat them both. Some scholars went further, and declared
European invasion to be cholera’s cause and twin, and likewise best
resisted by magic.
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Under the Qajar dynasty, which ruled Iran from 1785 to 1925, most
cities boasted gold anti-plague talismans that were buried at the
city limits. The manufacture of such devices was an important
service rendered to the state by many early modern philosophers.
However, conniving princes reportedly sold some of these devices
to English diplomats, after which cholera struck those cities. And
both Iranian and Afghan rulers recruited astrologers and
talismanists to help drive out Russian invaders. In Morocco to the
far west, Mawlay al-Hasan I (who reigned 1873-94) took up the
study of alchemy himself in a bid to transform the French into fish
and cast them out to sea.

As these examples suggest, it’s normal for humans to turn to magic

in times of trauma. So war, like plague, is also good for the occult
business. Embattled Muslim philosophers sometimes acted as
assassins-at-a-distance as part of their standard imperial
repertoire. Similarly, the English occultist Dion Fortune led a
Magical Battle of Britain against Nazi German invasion during the
Second World War. And during the Cold War, both the Soviet and
US militaries invested in psychical research and ufology. Reports
of paranormal battlefield experiences are common, too.

By any premodern definition, the placebo effect is simply

a form of magic

Why did, and do, most practitioners of spiritual medicine see it

as a perfectly rational response? Why do premodern physicians
often report its experimental success? Leaving aside the possible
agency of spirits and other nonhuman entities, one factor is
certain: the placebo effect. The term acquired its current English
meaning in the 18th century thanks to Benjamin Franklin, who
took part in a Parisian experiment designed to disprove
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mesmerism (the therapeutic magnetisation of water and metal). It

refers to the clinical effectiveness of inert substitutes in healing
disease, as long as the patient believes them to be a real drug.
Animals and even plants respond similarly in laboratory
experiments.

Despite the often dismissive use of the term, the placebo effect
remains one of the most powerful effects in modern medicine. Its
twin, the nocebo effect, can be equally powerful: if a patient has
been advised to expect a negative side-effect, she could well go on
to experience it. As for overall outcomes, even some of the most
potent drugs have at most a 60 per cent efficacy, while placebos sit
at 35-40 per cent. It’s also not clear to what extent the greater
effectiveness of certain modern drugs is due to their marketing.

Under conditions of mass trauma, combined with sincere belief

and mental focus, the effectiveness of the placebo often goes up
sharply. Individual focus can be equally potent: research has
shown that patients under hypnosis can endure surgery without
anaesthesia and perform other physiological feats, such as
stopping blood loss. Those suffering from dissociative identity
disorder – likely a form of self-hypnosis in response to childhood
trauma – are likewise able to change their physiology at will,
whereby allergic reactions, musculature, body shape, handedness
and vision often differ between personalities.

As it happens, creating extreme psychophysical conditions is also a

prerequisite to the practice of many occult arts: fasting, prayer,
isolation, a vegetarian diet, ritual cleanliness and constant vigil, for
weeks, months or even years on end. Psychedelics might also be
involved, which similarly produce an altered, hypnotic state of
consciousness. The intense mental and physical engagement
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required by magical ritual can be thought of as artificial trauma:

sensory deprivations create medicines that often work. On the
other hand, failure to believe or to perform a ritual with technical
precision normally results in the failure of the operation.

By any premodern definition, then, the placebo effect is simply a

form of magic. Which term we use is unimportant for practical
purposes: either way, the fact is that mind can affect matter under
the right circumstances. The point is to harness these mind-matter
interactions to achieve positive health outcomes.

This powerful, magical effect was recognised and routinely utilised

– on the authority of Plato himself – by premodern Muslim,
Jewish and Christian physicians. Our triumphalist narrative of
scientific progress notwithstanding, and the antibiotic revolution
aside, in many cases premodern treatments worked roughly as well
as modern medicine. Whether you believe in the authority of
celestial spirits or of doctors in white lab coats, the effect is similar:
astonishing reversals (or inducements) of disease can sometimes
be achieved through the power of belief alone – especially when
ritually, traumatically harnessed.

The witch doctor and the medical doctor have more in common
than they might suppose. As such, perhaps we should take a page
from our premodern predecessors and recognise that physical and
mental hygiene are two sides of the same sociobiological coin.
Pandemic diseases, once established in local biomes, can almost
never be eradicated, only controlled and lived with, as human
societies have done for millennia. But fear and paranoia are
equally contagious, and can become pandemics in their own right.
In a time of global traumas, it seems only rational to use the power
of belief as part of our basic hygiene, too.