Lettrism as Islamic Kabbalah?
Sponsoring Organization(s)
Societas Magica
Organizer Name
Matthew Melvin-Koushki
Organizer Affiliation
Univ. of South Carolina-Columbia
Presider Name
Nicholas G. Harris
Presider Affiliation
Univ. of Pennsylvania
Paper Title 1
Lettrism and Kabbalah, Lines of Flight
Presenter 1 Name
Noah D. Gardiner
Presenter 1 Affiliation
Univ. of South Carolina-Columbia
Paper Title 2
"The whole world is a book and its letters are God's speech": Conceptions of Language in Classical Islamic Mysticism (Ninth-Thirteenth Centuries)
Presenter 2 Name
Michael Ebstein
Presenter 2 Affiliation
Hebrew Univ. of Jerusalem
Paper Title 3
Lettrism as (Jewish/Islamic) Philosophy: The Mystical Linguistics of Ibn al-'Arabi and Sa'adia Gaon
Presenter 3 Name
Elizabeth Sartell
Presenter 3 Affiliation
Univ. of Chicago
Paper Title 4
World as Arabic-Hebrew Text: Reading the Two Books in the Renaissances of Western Early Modernity
Presenter 4 Name
Matthew Melvin-Koushki
Paper Title 5
Kabbala Saracenica: Lettrology in Europe
Presenter 5 Name
Liana Saif
Presenter 5 Affiliation
Warburg Institute
Paper Title 6
Ecologies of/and Knowledge in Early Modern Kabbalah
Presenter 6 Name
Andrew Berns
Presenter 6 Affiliation
Univ. of South Carolina-Columbia
Start Date
12-5-2019 8:30 AM
Session Location
Bernhard 208
Description
The study of Hebrew kabbalah is now an academic industry in its own right, and for good reason: historians of religion and historians of science alike have shown it to be the primary means whereby Jews and then Christians too sought to decode and magically recode the Two Books, scripture and nature, during the medieval and early modern periods. But lettrism—its coeval Arabic twin—has remained almost totally unstudied, exiled from Religion, Science and even Magic itself. To help right this gross imbalance in Western intellectual history, this session explores notions of lettrism as an “Islamic kabbalah” and kabbalah as a “Jewish lettrism” to make a case for their parallel study as a genetically identical and/or historically entangled mainstream Judeo-Islamic-cum-Christian mystico-magico-philosophical discourse going forward, and indeed the apotheosis of Hellenic-Abrahamic science. For both pivot equally on the relationship between the divine word and the manifest world—and on the human ability to rewrite reality through the theurgic or mathematical harnessing of the same. Matthew Melvin-Koushki
Lettrism as Islamic Kabbalah?
Bernhard 208
The study of Hebrew kabbalah is now an academic industry in its own right, and for good reason: historians of religion and historians of science alike have shown it to be the primary means whereby Jews and then Christians too sought to decode and magically recode the Two Books, scripture and nature, during the medieval and early modern periods. But lettrism—its coeval Arabic twin—has remained almost totally unstudied, exiled from Religion, Science and even Magic itself. To help right this gross imbalance in Western intellectual history, this session explores notions of lettrism as an “Islamic kabbalah” and kabbalah as a “Jewish lettrism” to make a case for their parallel study as a genetically identical and/or historically entangled mainstream Judeo-Islamic-cum-Christian mystico-magico-philosophical discourse going forward, and indeed the apotheosis of Hellenic-Abrahamic science. For both pivot equally on the relationship between the divine word and the manifest world—and on the human ability to rewrite reality through the theurgic or mathematical harnessing of the same. Matthew Melvin-Koushki