## TALISMAN-IMAGES

## Laura U. Marks

Talismans, in medieval and early modern Islamicate and European magical practice, are objects that intervene in the order of the cosmos. As the thirteenth-century Latin Picatrix , a translation of  Maslama al-Qurtubī's  tenth-century  magic  text  the Ghayāt al-Hakīm (Goal of the Sage), puts it, 'The talisman is nothing other than the force of celestial bodies that influence bodies.' 1 Like operational images, talisman-images have their effects not (or not only) by resembling forces but by connecting directly to them. Unlike operational images, talisman-images disdain the meager confines of corporate and institutional networks, instead inviting us to imagine new ways of connecting to the planet and beyond.

Talismanic  magic  developed  in  the  Islamic  Neoplatonist tradition of Yaqūb ibn Ishāq al-Kindī (Basra, 801-873). Al-Kindī's influential ray-based theory of causation in De Radiis 2 argued that the stars and planets send out rays that affect everything in the sublunar world; and each thing affected also sends out rays that affect other things. Al-Kindī built on the Sabean star magic of Thābit ibn Qurrā (d. 901) and on the Great Introduction to Astrology by his colleague Abu Ma'shar al-Balkhi's (d. 886), which argues that events in the terrestrial world are caused by movements in the  celestial  world.  Their  cosmologies  relied  on  the  Islamic Neoplatonist  concept  of  emanation,  whereby  all  of  creation emanates from a unitary entity, converted from the Greek concept of the One to the Muslim God. In an emanated cosmos, every heavenly and sublunar entity maintains a link to the source that brought it into being. Nevertheless, Al-Kindī's cosmos, in which all  entities emit and receive mediating vibrations, harmonizes well with contemporary philosophy and physics.

De  Radiis presents  two  opposing  ideas.  First,  cosmic relationships  determine  everything.  Second,  magicians  are able  to  actively  operate  on  the  cosmos.  Al-Kindī  reconciles these by arguing that magical power works within natural laws. 3 Understanding  these,  through  years  of  study  and  discipline, magicians  can  align  their  powers  with  those  of  the  cosmos. The  magician's  intention,  when  realized  in  speech  or  objects, creates rays by which the practitioner can manage the cosmos in miniature. 4 Talismanic practice spread across Southwest Asia, North Africa, and Persia and, in translation, to the Latin West.

Talismans' effectiveness depends on many factors. First, the cosmologic order of emanation enables magic by correspondence, whereby earthly things like metals, stones, plants, animals, and human powers and professions  correspond  to  certain  planets and constellations and retain the power to influence them. In order  to  manipulate  these  correspondences,  magicians  must be adept in many fields, from astronomy to geology to botany. They must also be literate and be party to secret transmissions of occult knowledge. Magicians must submit their bodies to years of ascetic discipline. In order to align their powers with divine powers, they accompanied each act with prayers and powerful words: directed to God, the heavenly bodies commanded by God, and the angels or jinns who intercede with those heavenly bodies. Finally, effective talismanic magic demands patience and élan, for auspicious timing, and affective investment by both magicians and their clients.

Scholars such as Persis Berlekamp, 5 Nader El-Bizri and Eva Orthmann, 6 Charles Burnett, 7 Matthew Melvin-Koushki, 8 Liana Saif, 9 and Nicolas Weill-Parot 10 examine talismans' historical formation and conditions of efficacy. I contend that the talisman's legacy remains as a minor tendency in our disenchanted times. 11

Here's a talisman: folio 4r from an anonymous, undated but likely  contemporary  copy  of  the  thirteenth-century Daqā'iq al-haqā'iq by  Na ṣ īr  al-Dīn  Mu ḥ ammad  Ibrāhīm  al-Rammāl (pseudonym Nasīr) who lived at the court of the Seljuk ruler Ġīyās ̱ al-Dīn Kay Khusraw III (reign 1264-5) in central Anatolia. 12 Nasīr included several pictures like this in the Daqā'iq al-haqā'iq : shapes with human faces, connected by lines that are inscribed with a combination of Arabic letters and apparently random marks. This is the only picture with house-shaped faces. They are connected by a curving line, like a path, and between them zigzags another line; both are inscribed with letters and marks. Between them are two symbols of lines terminating in circles. These 'lunette sigla'  have  a  deep  lineage  in  Jewish,  Persian,  Arabic  magical texts. 13 Their meanings changed over time and between cultures. Initially they were letters of secret alphabets; later they became associated with Jewish holy names. In Arabic texts from the ninth century onward, they gained an association with the stellar rays of Al-Kindī. A table on folio 43 shows that the symbols correspond to letters; thus a secret alphabet.

The preceding page states that this talisman is to open up a means of attaining «work and livelihood' ( kar va kasb , بسکو راک ) for the client. It lists the names of seven angels who should be invoked in the spell, gives the instructions for making the talisman, and begins  the  series  of  disconnected  marks  the  magician  should inscribe while performing the spell. The title in red reads ةروص تپنيا  لكوم , surat-i  muwakkil  in-ast .  Literally,  that  translates as 'This is the deputy's image or form,' but in this context, the meaning is 'This is the angel's image or form.' 14 Angels, jinns, or personal daïmons, passionately trapped halfway between the heavenly and sublunar worlds, were in a position to intercede with the heavenly bodies for an individual. Elsewhere the book depicts some of these grotesque angels, such as the two-headed pigeon carrying a bowl and a ladle full of fire -the jinn of the passage of the sun from Virgo to Libra. 15

In order to help the magician's client find employment, the magician must carry out the spell indicated above the talisman, appealing to the named angels who can intervene with certain heavenly bodies (more research would determine which ones), and this must be done at an astrologically auspicious moment. It likely requires the magician to first spend a long period in prayer and  asceticism,  then  at  an  astrologically  propitious  moment to  inscribe  the  letters  and  signs  while  reciting  prayers  to  the interceding angel. The magician might also burn plants and other matter, themselves gathered at astrologically propitious moments, that would draw down the powers of the heavenly bodies being supplicated.

Medieval  talismans  worked  (or  if  you  prefer,  'worked') because the practitioners understood how earthly beings were connected  to  the  cosmos,  according  to  Islamic  Neoplatonist cosmology: an enchanted cosmology that is difficult to embrace in our scientific and secular times. Contemporary operational images  work  by  taking  advantage  of  machinic,  digital,  and surveillant  connections. 16 Contemporary  talisman-images discover other connections, more aspirational than the meager ends of operational images and less orderly than those of the Neoplatonists.  In  our  time,  certain  artworks,  performances, and movies, as well as some activist projects, act as talismans by developing connections between earthly bodies and cosmic Bibliothèque nationale de France. Département des Manuscrits. Persan 174

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forces. They may do this by operating as microcosms, managing the cosmos in miniature; for example, art and activist works that connect earthly bodies to the powers of metals, wind, ocean, or stars. Or they may identify connections among things that appear separate in space and time and re-fold these connections in new ways, compelling individual or collective action in the present; for example, some Afrofuturist films operate this way.

Talismanic images continue to function in our time, though now the magician who embodies the encyclopedia knowledge, felicitous  timing,  and  decisive  action  is  likely  to  be  not  an individual adept but a collective. And the interceding angels of our time, mediating between heaven and the sublunar world? They are the cosmic powers in our midst: the life of plants and fungi, animals, metals, stones, elementary particles, electricity,  and other beings that suffuse human creatures yet remain elusively to us.

LAURA U. MARKS works on media art and philosophy with an intercultural focus. Her most recent book is Hanan al-Cinema: Affections for the Moving Image (MIT, 2015). Marks is Grant Strate Professor in the School for the Contemporary Arts at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada.

- 1 Picatrix: Un traité de magie médiévale , trans. and introduction by Béatrice Bakhouche, Frédéric Fauquier, and Brigitte Pérez-Jean (Turnhout: Brepols Publishers, 2003), 120.
- 2 The text survives only in Latin translation.
- 3 Pinella Travaglia, Magic, Causality and Intentionality: The doctrine of rays in al-Kindī (Sismel: Edizione de Galluzzo, 1999).
- 4 Charles Burnett, 'The Theory and Practice of Powerful Words in Medieval Magical Texts,' in The Word in Medieval Logic, Theology and Psychology: Acts of the XIIIth International Colloquium of the Société Internationale pour l'Étude de la Philosophie Médiévale, Kyoto, 27 September-1 October 2005 , eds. Tetsuro Shimizu and Charles Burnett (Turnhout: Brepols Publishers, 2009), 215-31.
- 5 Persis Berlekamp, 'Symmetry, Sympathy, and Sensation: Talismanic Efficacy and Slippery Iconographies in Early Thirteenth-Century Iraq, Syria, and Anatolia' Representations 133 (Winter 2016): 59-109.
- 6 Nader El-Bizri and Eva Orthmann, The Occult Sciences in Pre-Modern Islamic Cultures (Beirut: Orient Institut Beirut, 2018).

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- 7 Charles Burnett, 'T ābit ibn Qurra the H arrānian on Talismans and the Spirits of the Planets,' La corónica , 36: 1 (Fall 2007): 13-40; and 'The Theory and Practice of Powerful Words in Medieval Magical Texts'; and other texts

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- 8 Matthew Melvin-Koushki, 'Introduction: De-Orienting the Study of Islamicate Occultism,' Arabica , 64 (2017): 287-295.
- 9 Liana Saif, The Arabic Influences on Early Modern Occult Philosophy (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015).
- 10 Nicolas Weill-Parot, 'Images corporéiformes et similitude dans le Picatrix et dans le monde Latin médiévale' in Images et magie: Picatrix entre Orient et Occident , eds. Jean-Patrice Boudet, Anna Caiozzo, and Nicolas Weill-Parot (Paris: Champion, 2011), 117-135.
- 11 Laura U. Marks, 'Talisman-images: from the cosmos to your body,' in Deleuze, Guattari and the Arts of Multiplicity , eds. Radek Przedpełski and S. E. Wilmer (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2020), 231-259.
- 12 'Recueil d'œuvres en prose et en vers, probablement toutes dues à Na ṣ īr al-Dīn Mu ḥ . b. Ibrāhīm b. ʿ Abd-ullāh al-Rammāl al-Mu ʿ azzim al-Sā ʿ atī al-Haykalī (cf. f. 32, 51, 79v et 80), dont le ta ẖ allu ṣ est (f. 129v, etc.) Na ṣ īrī ou Na ṣ īr.…', Bibliothèque national de France, accessed May 26, 2021, https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/ btv1b8410888f/f16.item.
- 13 Venetia Porter, Liana Saif, and Emilie Savage-Smith, 'Medieval Islamic Amulets, Talismans, and Magic,' in A Companion to Islamic Art and Architecture , eds. Finbarr Barry Flood and Gülru Necipoğlu (Hoboken: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2017).
- 14 Thanks very much to Farshid Kazemi and Matthew Melvin-Koushki for their kind help with this translation.
- 15 'Recueil d'œuvres en prose et en vers, probablement toutes dues à Na ṣ īr al-Dīn Mu ḥ .'
- 16 See Harun Farocki, 'Phantom Images,' trans. Brian Poole, Public , 29 (2004): 13-22.