Noah Gardiner on the Pseudo-Bunian Shams al-maʿārif al-kubrā and the Corpus Bunianum
Oddcast episodes – The Secret History of Western Esotericism Podcast (SHWEP)Show Notes
We discuss arguably the greatest magical book of the Islamicate tradition, the Shams al-maʿārif al-kubrā or Great Sun of Knowledge. Turns out it isn't by al-Būnī as everyone thought, though there is some Būnī in there; but it has so much to tell us about Islamicate culture, Sufism, and the ‘project of forgetting’ of esoteric Islām among both Muslims and scholars.
More from Oddcast episodes – The Secret History of Western Esotericism Podcast (SHWEP)
In this episode we dive into the qualitative time propounded by western astrology. Following the trail of the planetary week, we are led to explore ancient gods, planetary orderings in antiquity, astrolatry, the planetary hours, and more.
We discuss the short life and extraordinary poetry of the American author Sylvia Plath. Dorka Tamás is our guide into the places where Plath's poetry, emerging from the `high disenchantment' of the American cold war era, strays into the magical fields where poets of all ages receive their inspiration. Featuring a cameo appearance from W. B. Yeats.
William Gallois was looking through hundreds of photographs of the city of Qayrawān, in modern-day Tunisia, from the period of French colonial occupation. He started to notice strange paintings in the backgrounds of these pictures ...
In this episode we discuss the figure of the Antichrist as he appears in a number of countercultural movements, notably the Christianities of Böhme and Blake. Krista Muratore is our guide to this troublous figure (who cannot figure out which side he's on) and his long career as a harbinger of the end of troubles. Come for the ancient apocalyptic literature, stay for the B-movies and AI-tycoons.
We are joined by Yousef Casewit to discuss one of the lesser-known spiritual masters of the Andalusian tradition, Ibn Barrajān. We explore his life, times, and writings, his extraordinary spiritual practice of ‘crossing over’ into the unseen, and his disquietingly-accurate prediction of the Muslim reconquest of Jerusalem.