“Evliya Çelebi, the traveller who toured almost every region of the Ottoman Empire…records stories of spiritual armies made of dead martyrs’ souls, armies of plague made of jinn, sultans whose souls exit their bodies, vampires of the Caucasus who fight in the night skies, and Bulgarian witches who turn into hens.”
-Dr Marinos Sariyannis
For a time, the Ottoman Empire, like Rome before it, was the ultimate hegemon, occupying much of Southern Europe, North Africa, and the Near East. Its influence as a global power was tremendous, and as a transregional state with Istanbul, the grand Mediterranean cosmopolis as its capital, the Empire brought together a broad range of multi-ethnic peoples with equally variegated ideas and traditions. Islam–the religion of the state–flourished, but other beliefs and practices, drawn from all corners of the Empire, thrived as well, and gradually became a part of the rich, ever-expanding tapestry of Ottoman society. Historians have studied and sought to analyse the cultural history of the Ottoman world since pre-modern times, but a new project–launched only recently–aims to shine a light on its perceptions of the supernatural.
Appropriately titled “GHOST” (Geographies and Histories of the Ottoman Supernatural Tradition), the initiative is headed up by Dr Marinos Sariyannis, a research director with the Institute for Mediterranean Studies at the Foundation for Research and Technology Hellas. According to Sariyannis, GHOST was conceived in 2014, “in the course of writing an article on Ottoman vampires.”
We caught up with Sariyannis to learn more about GHOST and its aims.
The Custodian: Why is it that, as you’ve said, we still know very little about the concepts and practices connected with magic or the supernatural in an Ottoman context?
Dr Marinos Sariyannis: Ottoman cultural history is a relatively new field anyway: this is partly due to the heavy emphasis of Ottomanists upon archival sources, which dominated Ottoman studies until quite recently and had led to an overwhelming preponderance of social and economic history. Only since the last decades of the twentieth century did historians begin to tackle issues of culture, and then again no one was really interested in non-scientific, non-religious ways of viewing the world. The difficulty of reading and understanding complex manuals of magic, “letter science” or astrology, as well as the apparent absence of major issues where these concepts and practices influenced political or social life (as was the case with witchcraft in Christian Europe) contributed to this lack of interest. Those studying manuscript libraries tended to focus in literature, political advice, historiography, or geography (or more intriguing curiosities, such as diaries or travel accounts), dismissing manuscripts dealing with occult practices as irrelevant.
Furthermore, historians of Ottoman science tended to concentrate on the advances in astronomy or mathematics and the cultural transfer of European science from the second half of the 17th century onwards, ignoring whatever could be termed as pseudoscience, for instance astrology, physiognomy, or alchemy. Arguably, one might also detect a benign concern not to show the Ottomans as backward-looking irrationalists; still, for historians of European science the role and the close interaction of occultism with scientific production from the Renaissance up to the late seventeenth century at least is now commonplace.
Furthermore, pre-Ottoman Islamic magic and divination have been an object of study for decades, but it has been commonly assumed that (as in other fields of knowledge as well) Ottomans just kept on copying and commenting upon the material they inherited from their predecessors. For all these reasons, even now when there is a growing trend to study and re-estimate Islamic occult sciences, there are very few works studying this kind of practices in an Ottoman context. Suffice to note that the presence of Ottoman culture in more than one major recent collective publication on Islamic magic and occult is next to null! There are active scholars, mostly of the younger generation, whose outstanding research on Ottoman astrology, alchemy or dream interpretation has been path-breaking; still, most students of Islamicate occultism tend to neglect any work on the Ottoman tradition.
C: Could you speak to us more about how the GHOST project was conceived and what it hopes to achieve?
MS: The project was conceived some six years ago, in the course of writing an article on Ottoman vampires (which eventually grew to something somehow wider and longer). It was formulated with the help of a team of excellent partners that grew every time we submitted the proposal to the European Research Council: Feray Coşkun (Özyegin University, Istanbul, Turkey), Güneş Işıksel (Medeniyet University, Istanbul, Turkey), Bekir Harun Küçük (University of Pennsylvania, USA), Ethan Menchinger (Manchester University, UK), Aslı Niyazioğlu (Oxford University, UK), and Ahmet Tunç Şen (Columbia University, USA); Tuna Artun (Rutgers University, USA) also participated in the project but had to retire although, of course, we still collaborate actively.
Actually we were not able to attain a favourable decision until we invented the acronym GHOST (Geographies and Histories of the Ottoman Supernatural Tradition), which seems to have actively made its magic towards getting the funding needed! In the course of this five-year project, which began in 2018 under the program ERC Consolidator Grant 2017 and is hosted at the Institute for Mediterranean Studies (Foundation of Research and Technology – Hellas, Rethymno, Greece), the team was enriched with new members, such as Zeynep Aydoğan (another post-doctoral fellow is to be recruited at this very moment) and has already organised its first international workshop last December in Istanbul. An online open-access journal is set to be launched by the end of October on the project’s website.
The major goals of the project could be set as follows: first, to explore the meaning and content of what the Ottomans (or, more accurately, different social and cultural groups) meant by “marvelous”, “strange” or “extraordinary”, and, vice versa, the correspondent notions that covered what we now describe as “supernatural/preternatural” and “irrational”; second, to specify the Ottoman attitude(s) against beliefs in such phenomena or practice of such methods, both holy (e.g. miracles of dervishes) and suspect (magic, witchcraft); third, to localise these beliefs in the Ottoman Weltanschauung; or rather, in the various Ottoman systems of thought: for instance, to show how different authors might attribute such phenomena to actions by the jinn or, alternatively, to a secret interaction of the cosmic elements; fourth, to analyse the various ways that changes took place from the mid-seventeenth century onwards (for instance, to study whether certain phenomena were pushed from the field of “inexplicable” to the field of “marvelous”; whether we can speak of any trend to “rationalise” the image of the world, and in what terms; in other terms, whether the Weberian notion of “disenchantment” can be applied in an Ottoman context).
Last but not least, we aim to associate these changes with emerging or declining layers of culture and specific social groups (ulema, Sufi brotherhoods, emerging urban strata), in connection with the social changes and especially with the emergence of new levels and forms of a self-conscious artisanal and urban stratum throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. To this aim, the project will trace the semantic shifts in terms denoting nature, miracles, magic and so forth; it will examine miracles, dreams and their configuration, and the various world visions: of the science of letters, of the role of stars, of the homologies and hierarchies of the microcosm and the macrocosm. And if the above concern the field of the “supernatural”, there is also the “preternatural”, i.e. what is deemed natural (not miraculous) but inexplicable (the “paranormal” in modern terms): wonders of the world, hermetic knowledge, the jinn, and of course the shifting ways to interpret natural phenomena.
A second direction of research will study efforts and techniques designed in order to establish human control over such phenomena: in other words, Ottoman occult sciences, such as divination, magic, astrology, alchemy and so forth; their epistemology, their place in the taxonomy of knowledge and the rationale beyond their foundation and use: the limits of possible human influence, the relationship with vernacular practices and so forth. Debates on the illicitness or the reliability of occult sciences (for instance, critics of astrology) are of course highly relevant to the subject.
C: In your research have you found evidence that certain practices, such as witchcraft and divination, were treated more favourably in some areas of the Ottoman Empire than others?
MS: Not really. Actually, the project is mainly oriented toward scholarly culture of the great cities of Anatolia and the Balkans, especially Istanbul, as most sources at hand concern these areas (we also try to encompass the Arab lands, but Ottoman Turkish sources are at the core of our research). One may discern some local peculiarities concerning mostly folk culture: for instance, vampire traditions are usually attested in the Balkans (including Thrace, but also the Aegean islands); sorcerers are perhaps more apparent in Egypt and other Arab areas and they are often supposed to come from the Maghrib; possession by jinn is attested from Anatolian villages to Egypt; and so forth. However, the treatment of such beliefs and practices by the authorities does not seem to vary substantially at a local level, at least at this stage of research. There are some fatwas condemning various sorts of magic, but they usually do not specify the locality of the incident; and there is no such thing as a witch-hunt in Ottoman lands.
This was due to several factors: the relatively minor role of the Devil in Islam was one of them, as one might perform divination or sorcery solely by either manipulating the forces of nature or by conjuring angels and jinn (not evil demons). Thus, magic had nothing inherently evil; true, the Quran condemns sihr which is usually translated as magic or sorcery, but there were numerous forms like talisman-making, letter magic (simya), incantation (rukya) or jinn conjuring that could be considered licit, even under certain conditions. What was persecuted was heresy, usually of the Alevi sect (and this had strong political connotations), but it was seldom associated with sorcery.
C: How did the Ottomans’ understanding of ghosts, jinn, and vampires change over the ages?
MS: Actually, this is one of the basic questions that we hope to answer by the end of this project. As far as it concerns magic, one may perhaps see that earlier emphasis on jinn and their conjuring gave place to magic action through the knowledge and use of secret correspondences among stars, minerals, letters and so forth; in other words, that ritual gave its place to astral magic. This development, which was perhaps contemporaneous with similar tendencies in European Renaissance occultism (one can think of Marcilio Ficino or Pico della Mirandola, for instance), was in fact a rediscovery of twelfth or thirteenth-century Arabic magic, as in Ghayat al-Hakim or Picatrix, or in al-Būnī’s lettrist corpus. The question is whether this was a real turn (a term very much à la mode, but which tends to overestimate the development of a tradition and to somehow hastily name it paradigm change) or rather a moment in the history of (at least Ottoman) magic.
Now moving to ghosts, jinn and vampires, this is a tricky question insofar neither ghosts nor vampires are a steady presence in Ottoman folklore. Vampirism is famously mentioned in a couple of fatwas by Ebū’s-su’ūd Efendi, the famous shaykhulislam of the mid-sixteenth century: Ebū’s-su’ūd admits that “wicked souls” can attach themselves to corpses and make them move and suggests (in a case where the dead is Christian) the well-known traditional practices of nailing the corpse with a stake or cut off its head. But when a similar case is recorded in the early eighteenth century, the local judge is skeptical against Ebū’s-su’ūd’s advice, since, as he states, he could not find such instructions in Arabic books; and a decree issued in a contemporaneous similar occasion instructs the head of the local police to “do whatever is accustomed in order to remove the horror and illusions of the inhabitants”.
Thus, early eighteenth-century authorities seem to be very careful to suggest that these phenomena were illusions, and that customs and traditions should be applied in order to make the local people feel safe, rather than fight actual “wicked souls”. As far as it concerns jinn, we lack a profound study of Ottoman perceptions thereof; one may suspect that, although of course no one denies their existence (the jinn being a regular element of the Quranic world vision), their visibility in everyday life might have waned throughout the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries. However, this is no more than a hypothesis for the moment. In general, I suggest that at least for some segments of Ottoman society the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were a period of gradual disenchantment of the world, to use Max Weber’s formulation. This was due not only to the emergence of a more rationalistic worldview, but also to the vehement “fundamentalist” activism of the Kadızadeli movement, which sought to strip everyday life of the miraculous and wondrous elements invested by their opponents, the sheikhs of some dervish fraternities.
C: What kind of folkloric traditions have we learned about through the seventeenth-century writer, Evliya? How much of Evilya’s work was embellished?
MS: Indeed, Evliya Çelebi, the traveler who toured almost every region of the Ottoman Empire (plus some regions of Iran and the Habsburg Empire), is a veritable mine of information regarding folk beliefs and traditions that pertain to the supernatural. Evliya records stories of spiritual armies made of dead martyrs’ souls, armies of plague made of jinn, sultans whose souls exit their bodies, vampires of the Caucasus who fight in the night skies, Bulgarian witches who turn into hens.
Some of these traditions are corroborated by contemporary or later sources (for instance, the ability of witches to turn into animals and especially hens is attested in Slavic folklore). The problem with Evliya is that one can never be sure of his intentions: his enormous travelogue is full of enormities and manifest errors, because the aim of his writing down his memoirs is both to instruct and to entertain. Occasionally he even admits that he writes tall tales in order to entertain the reader; this is due to the complex relationship of his text with fictional literature, as he is not claiming to compose a scientific geographical survey of the Empire. However, we can in general assume that the beliefs he describes have an actual folklore basis, even if he surely was not an eye-witness to the flight of witches as he claims to have been.
C: What in your opinion is the most interesting and least-understood Ottoman-era magical ritual or event you’ve ever heard of?
MS: There are some stories I particularly love, such as the ghost stories narrated by the late sixteenth-century poet Cinānī or the description of a “witches’ Sabbath” of sorts in Daghestan by Evliya Çelebi, which by the way reinforces Carlo Ginzburg’s hypothesis that such descriptions were based on a real Eurasian folklore tradition (rather than being nothing but the product of the Inquisitors’ questions). But if we move to magic proper (with the meaning we ascribe nowadays to the term), the most common form in Ottoman times, as in other areas of the Islamicate world after the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, was letter magic.
Since the Qur’an was considered (universally after the end of the ninth-century debate with the Mu’tazilites) as written in the heavens, i.e. as an uncreated property (not just the word) of God, co-eternal with Him, each letter of each sura would be part of this property, and thus incorporated in the hierarchies and correspondences of heaven and earth. In scholarly literature, such theories had begun to emerge with the Jabirian corpus of alchemical works, but they really flourished with Ibn Arabī and al-Būnī’s works, popularised in the Ottoman world through Abdürrahman al-Bistāmī (d. 1454).
Thus, although there are also treatises instructing the novice to conjure jinn and angels through astral correspondences, most Ottoman magic manuscripts contain talismanic uses of the magic squares (vefk) and calculations of the outcome of various events based on the names of the participants, i.e. on the numerical value of their letters. There were even long texts calculating the names and deeds of future sultans and viziers based on the letters of the first suras of the Qur’an, such as İlyas b. İsa Saruhanī’s (d. 1559) Rumûz-ı künûz (“Treasures of ciphers”), which contains a series of predictions concerning sultans, viziers, other high officials, judges and sheikhs, as well as events to come until the Hijri year 3000.
Saruhanī’s text was so popular that at least some manuscripts (the first dated copy comes from 1655) contain “predictions” that had already been fulfilled, in order to strengthen the prophetic power of the author. A large section “predicts” the introduction of coffee and tobacco and the repercussions that ensued, as well as the appearance of Kadızade Mehmed, the famous revivalist preacher. Even if the lettrist systems seem to have waned in scholarly literature after the mid-seventeenth century, they persisted in vernacular texts such as diaries or miscellanies for a very long time.
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