Current debates and emerging trends in the history of science in premodern Islamicate societies.

This roundtable brings together contributions from nine senior, mid-career and junior scholars who work on the history of science in pre-1800 Islamicate societies. The contributions reflect upon some of the challenges that have historically constrained the subfield, how they have sought to overcome them, and what they see as some of the more productive and fruitful turns the field has taken and/or should take in the future. A central trend in all contributions is how they seek to confront the combined weight of colonialism, Orientalism, and the teleological history of science that continues to haunt contemporary discussions in both academia and the general public with regards to science in pre-1800 Islamicate societies. Without diminishing the pioneering achievements of the generations of historians who have preceded us, and upon whose work we continue to rely, this combined weight has tended a) to marginalize the study of occult sciences in Islamicate societies; b) to emphasize investigations of content from an etic perspective of how we got to the present, which is primarily seen as how the scientific content is connected to the rise of modern science in Europe; and c) to concomitantly marginalize the study of science in post-1200 Islamicate societies, particularly those with little to no connection to the rise of "Western" science. The contributions build upon conversations that took place among participants in December 2019 at a workshop at New York University (NYU), Abu Dhabi Institute in New York City, funded by a grant from NYU Abu Dhabi.

O cuidado em saúde promovido pelas religiões afro-brasileiras / Health care promoted by afro-brazilian religions / El cuidado en salud promovido por las religiones afrobrasileñas

No decorrer da história, sempre foram infindáveis os casos em que os sujeitos recorriam a centros espíritas ou terreiros de religiões de matrizes africanas em decorrência de problemas como doenças, desempregos ou amores mal resolvidos, com o objetivo de saná-los. Por conta disso, este artigo visa apresentar os resultados da pesquisa relacionados ao objetivo de mapear os processos de cuidado em saúde ofertados em três terreiros de umbanda de uma cidade do litoral piauiense. Para isso, utilizamos o referencial da Análise Institucional "no papel". Os participantes foram três líderes de terreiros e os respectivos praticantes/consulentes dos seus estabelecimentos religiosos. Identificamos perspectivas de cuidado que se contrapunham às racionalidades biomédicas, positivistas e cartesianas, e faziam referência ao uso de plantas medicinais, ao recebimento de rezas e passes e à consulta oracular. A partir desses resultados, podemos perceber ser cada vez mais necessário, portanto, que os povos de terreiros protagonizem a construção, implementação e avaliação das políticas públicas que lhe sejam específicas.(AU)

In history, there have always been endless cases of people turning to spiritual centers or terreiros of religions of African matrices due to problems such as illnesses, unemployment, or unresolved love affairs. Therefore, this article aims to present the research results related to the objective of mapping the health care processes offered in three Umbanda terreiros of a city on the Piauí Coast. For this, we use the Institutional Analysis reference "on Paper." The participants were three leaders of terreiros and the respective practitioners/consultants of their religious establishments. We identified perspectives of care that contrasted with biomedical, positivist, and Cartesian rationalities and referred to the use of medicinal plants, the prescript of prayers and passes, and oracular consultation. From these results, we can see that it is increasingly necessary, therefore, that the peoples of the terreiros lead the construction, implementation, and evaluation of public policies that are specific to them.(AU)

A lo largo de la historia, siempre hubo casos en los cuales las personas buscan en los centros espíritas o terreros de religiones africanas la cura para sus problemas, como enfermedades, desempleo o amoríos mal resueltos. Por este motivo, este artículo pretende presentar los resultados de la investigación con el objetivo de mapear los procesos de cuidado en salud ofrecidos en tres terreros de umbanda de una ciudad del litoral de Piauí (Brasil). Para ello, se utiliza el referencial del Análisis Institucional "en el Papel". Los participantes fueron tres líderes de terreros y los respectivos practicantes / consultivos de los establecimientos religiosos que los mismos conducían. Se identificaron perspectivas de cuidado que se contraponían a las racionalidades biomédicas, positivistas y cartesianas, y hacían referencia al uso de plantas medicinales, al recibimiento de rezos y pases y a la consulta oracular. Los resultados permiten concluir que es cada vez más necesario que los pueblos de terreros sean agentes protagónicos de la construcción, implementación y evaluación de las políticas públicas destinadas específicamente para ellos.(AU)

O curandeiro charlatão e o messias de Campos: o caso do Professor Mozart, 1924-1939 / Charlatan healer and messiah from Campos: the case of Professor Mozart, 1924-1939

Resumo Em 1924, um personagem despontou na imprensa brasileira: o "Professor Mozart". Seu nome era Mozart Dias Teixeira e, durante as décadas de 1920 e 1930, ele praticou curas em diversas cidades do país, provocando controvérsias entre setores da sociedade. O artigo analisa o caso, dividindo-se em três eixos: introduz o personagem e o debate sobre os seus métodos de cura, mostra como as polêmicas inspiraram produções artísticas que transitaram no seio da população e, por fim, discute a questão do charlatanismo e o problema da liberdade profissional e de culto. O estudo pretende ser uma contribuição à historiografia do espiritismo, do ocultismo e das ciências psíquicas no Brasil.

Abstract In 1924, a new figure appeared on the pages of Brazilian newspapers: "Professor Mozart." In the 1920s and 1930s, Mozart Dias Teixeira practiced healing in several Brazilian cities, sparking controversy among certain segments of society. A threefold analysis of the case is presented: describing the man himself and the debate surrounding his healing methods; showing how the controversies inspired the production and circulation of art among the population; and discussing the issues of charlatanism and professional and religious freedom. The study intends to contribute to the historiography on spiritism, occultism, and psychic sciences in Brazil.

Occultism and playing with the dead: When rituals go wrong.

There have been at least two deaths in Albania linked to ritualistic/satanic practices, which have provoked considerable public concern. Until the 1990s, Albania was strictly atheist. However, since then some religious sects have been establishing themselves. In fact, satanic killings and ritualistic deaths are rare in Albania. We describe two such cases that occurred in 2020 along with consideration of the psychological profiles of perpetrators and victims.The first case involved two deaths: a mother and daughter whose bodies were found near each other, with another daughter in attendance who was diagnosed as clearly psychotic, and legally did not face any charge thereafter. This daughter was witnessing the decomposition of her sister's mummified corpse. She said she was waiting for the "Messiah" to resurrect her. Apparently, while performing ritualistic ceremonies, the daughter and her mother refused food until the mother died from starvation. It was at that point that police broke into the house and discovered the situation.The second case involved a young woman who was found dead, apparently following a trivial infection. Her body (abdomen and dorsum) had written symbols on it, suggesting Satanism and the occult.A detailed analysis of the death scenes and crime scenes provide valuable data for further proceedings, but psychological evaluation of the perpetrators may prove more difficult, and more so where the victims have died.

An addiction to seeking fortune-telling services: a case report.

The paper describes a case report of a 36-years old female patient suffering from an addiction to seeking fortune-telling services, which is a type of behavioral addiction, or non-substance addiction. This condition is characterized by the addiction to various "occult services", fortune tellers and other representatives of nontraditional practices who are usually manipulative and self-serving. The authors reveal that this case report of fortune telling addiction possesses all of six components universal for addictions.In light of the increasing prevalence of various behavioral addictions, clinical psychiatrists should be aware of this phenomenon.

Translation and purification: Ayurvedic psychiatry, allopathic psychiatry, spirits and occult violence in Kerala, South India.

In this paper, the author traces two parallel movements of institutionalized Ayurvedic psychiatry, an emergent field of specialization in Kerala, India: the 'work of purification' and the 'work of translation' that Latour has described as characteristic of the 'modern constitution.' The author delineates these processes in terms of the relationship of Ayurvedic psychiatry to (1) allopathic psychiatry, (2) bhutavidya, a branch of textual Ayurveda dealing with spirits, and (3) occult violence. The aim is to offer a model of these open and hidden processes and of Ayurvedic psychiatry's positioning within a hierarchical mental health field characterized simultaneously by biopsychiatric hegemony and a persistent vernacular healing tradition. Through these processes, Ayurvedic psychiatry emerges as a relevant actor. It demarcates itself from both allopathic and vernacular epistemologies and ontologies while simultaneously drawing upon aspects of each, and, in this way, shows itself to be both deeply modern and highly pragmatic.

Playing God: Testing, Modeling, and Imitating Blood Miracles in Eighteenth-Century Europe.

In the late Middle Ages, rumors began to spread throughout Europe regarding blood miracles associated with the relics of martyrs. Centuries-old blood, pulverized or solidified and black in color, was said to return to its original bright red color, or else to liquefy or bubble under certain circumstances or on certain dates in the liturgical calendar. With the Reformation, in Protestant countries most of these relics were either destroyed or forgotten. In Catholic countries, on the contrary, blood miracles multiplied, reaching a peak between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. This article reconstructs the debate that sprang up in eighteenth-century Europe over the blood of Saint Januarius and the attempts made to disprove its miraculous properties, often not in written works, but by staging highly theatrical demonstrations. It examines the way in which, with phenomena as complex as miracles, the activities of testing alleged facts, creating elucidative models, and staging imitations intertwined over the centuries, often overlapping and becoming confused.

Cult membership: What factors contribute to joining or leaving?

We assumed that, as in the case of addiction disorders, former cult members exhibit vulnerability and protective factors for cult commitment and membership. Thus, the aim of our study was to identify vulnerability factors that are involved in the commitment and in the retention in the group, as well as protective factors that are involved in the departure. We interviewed 31 former cult members, using semi-structured interviews to evaluate their clinical profile, characteristics of the cultic group and their experience in the group. Cult membership and addictive disorders share some characteristics: persistence despite damage, initial psychological relief, occupation of an exclusive place in the thoughts of members, high psychiatric comorbidity prevalence, high accessibility, leading to social precariousness and the importance of familial support when leaving. Three main axes of improvement were highlighted: regulations concerning cults in order to limit their social presence, which appears to be a vulnerability factor for commitment; social and therapeutic follow-up when a member leaves a group so that social precariousness does not become an obstacle to departure; and familial support to maintain a link with the member, as the intervention of a person from outside of the group is an important protective factor for leaving.

Value orientations and social attitudes in the holistic milieu.

Based on a representative population survey for Germany this article investigates whether engagement in holistic activities is associated with privatized lifestyles and lack of social responsibility or with countercultural orientations and base-democratic political commitment. To analyse this question, respondents who are engaged in holistic activities are divided into three groups that are compared with each other as well as with Christians and non-religious people. The findings show that the three holistic groups are characterized by clearly different attitudinal patterns: Respondents engaged in body-mind-spirit activities have an affinity to self-directed ways of life, post-materialism and environmentalism. Holistic Christians try to combine the Christian ideal of altruism and post-materialist orientations. Those who are attracted only to magical-occult practices are primarily concerned with individualistic self-improvement and correspond more to the image of the hedonist consumer at the esoteric marketplace.

Psychicones: Visual Traces of the Soul in Late Nineteenth-Century Fluidic Photography.

The article discusses attempts to visualise the soul on photographic plates at the end of the nineteenth century, as conducted by the French physician Hippolyte Baraduc in Paris. Although Baraduc refers to earlier experiments on fluidic photography in his book on The Human Soul (1896) and is usually mentioned as a precursor to parapsychological thought photography of the twentieth century, his work is presented as a genuine attempt at photographic soul-catching. Rather than producing mimetic representations of thoughts and imaginations, Baraduc claims to present the vital radiation of the psyche itself and therefore calls the images he produces psychicones. The article first discusses the difference between this method of soul photography and other kinds of occult media technologies of the time, emphasising the significance of its non-mimetic, abstract character: since the soul itself was considered an abstract entity, abstract traces seemed all the more convincing to the contemporary audience. Secondly, the article shows how the technological agency of photography allowed Baraduc's psychicones to be tied into related discourses in medicine and psychology. Insofar as the photographic plates displayed actual visual traces, Baraduc and his followers no longer considered hallucinations illusionary and pathological but emphasised the physical reality and normality of imagination. Yet, the greatest influence of soul photography was not on science but on art. As the third part of the paper argues, the abstract shapes on Baraduc's plates provided inspiration for contemporary avant-garde aesthetics, for example, Kandinsky's abstract paintings and the random streams of consciousness in surrealistic literature.

Cirugías fingidas en los Andes. A propósito de un pequeño corpus documental / Shammed surgeries in the Andes: concerning a small documental corpus

Si bien los pueblos andinos contemporáneos muestran un marcado rechazo a las intervenciones quirúrgicas por diversas razones de índole cultural, encontramos en los relatos coloniales de los siglos XVI y XVII descripciones que aluden a la expresión formal de cirugías simbólicas, bajo trance, que persiguen la extracción corporal de los objetos y sustancias que materializan la enfermedad. El artículo analiza varias de estas intervenciones fingidas comparándolas con las actuales estrategias terapéuticas de corte chamánico que realizan los curanderos andinos (AU)

Even when contemporary Andean peoples show a strong rejection to surgical interventions due to cultural reasons, in 16th- and 17th-century colonial sources we find acounts that describe the formal expression of symbolic surgical interventions (carried out while in trance) that aim to extract from the body those objects and substances that materialize the ailment. This article analyzes some of these mock interventions and compares them with current shamanic therapeutical strategies carried out by Andean healers (AU)

A tale of two congresses: the psychological study of psychical, occult, and religious phenomena, 1900-1909.

In so far as researchers viewed psychical, occult, and religious phenomena as both objectively verifiable and resistant to extant scientific explanations, their study posed thorny issues for experimental psychologists. Controversies over the study of psychical and occult phenomena at the Fourth Congress of International Psychology (Paris, 1900) and religious phenomena at the Sixth (Geneva, 1909) raise the question of why the latter was accepted as a legitimate object of study, whereas the former was not. Comparison of the Congresses suggests that those interested in the study of religion were willing to forego the quest for objective evidence and focus on experience, whereas those most invested in psychical research were not. The shift in focus did not overcome many of the methodological difficulties. Sub-specialization formalized distinctions between psychical, religious, and pathological phenomena; obscured similarities; and undercut the nascent comparative study of unusual experiences that had emerged at the early Congresses.

Psychical research in the history and philosophy of science. An introduction and review.

As a prelude to articles published in this special issue, I sketch changing historiographical conventions regarding the 'occult' in recent history of science and medicine scholarship. Next, a review of standard claims regarding psychical research and parapsychology in philosophical discussions of the demarcation problem reveals that these have tended to disregard basic primary sources and instead rely heavily on problematic popular accounts, simplistic notions of scientific practice, and outdated teleological historiographies of progress. I conclude by suggesting that rigorous and sensitively contextualized case studies of past elite heterodox scientists may be potentially useful to enrich historical and philosophical scholarship by highlighting epistemologies that have fallen through the crude meshes of triumphalist and postmodernist historiographical generalizations alike.

Thinking with the saint: the miracle of Saint Januarius of Naples and science in early modern Europe.

The aim of this paper is to reconstruct the way in which early modem science questioned and indirectly influenced (while being in its turn influenced by) the conceptualization of the liquefaction of the blood of Saint Januarius, a phenomenon that has been taking place at regular intervals in Naples since the late Middle Ages. In the seventeenth century, a debate arose that divided Europe between supporters of a theory of divine intervention and believers in the occult properties of the blood. These two theoretical options reflected two different perspectives on the relationship between the natural and the supernatural. While in the seventeenth century, the emphasis was placed on the predictable periodicity of the miraculous event of liquefaction as a manifestation of God in his role as a divine regulator, in the eighteenth century the event came to be described as capricious and unpredictable, in an attempt to differentiate miracles from the workings of nature, which were deemed to be normative. The miracle of the blood of Saint Januarius thus provides a window through which we can catch a glimpse of how the natural order was perceived in early modern Europe at a time when the Continent was culturally fragmented into north and south, Protestantism and Catholicism, learned and ignorant.

Relationship between scientific knowledge and fortune-telling.

This study takes on a relational and situated perspective to understand the relationship between scientific knowledge and fortune-telling. Measures included socio-demographic characteristics, knowledge of scientific facts and methods, and fortune-telling beliefs and practices. A sample of 1863 adults was drawn from a population of Taiwanese citizens using the method of probability proportional to size. The findings showed that knowledge of scientific methods was negatively associated with fortune-telling beliefs. However, knowledge of scientific facts was, by and large, positively associated with engagement in fortune-telling practices, a phenomenon known as cognitive polyphasia. This study does not imply that science communication or education have no effect on promoting scientific knowledge; rather, it hopes to encourage researchers and practitioners to use a culturally sensitive lens to rethink the role of science in society and its relationship with other forms of knowledge and belief.

O índice de um enigma: o inconsciente e o fenômeno da premonição / The index of an enigma: the unconscious and the phenomenon of premonition

Em 1953, Devereux editou uma coletânea de textos de Freud sobre a psicanálise e o ocultismo. Apesar de pouco conhecidos, tais escritos foram fundamentais no debate com a filosofia francesa. Merleau-Ponty, por exemplo, debruçou-se sobre esta questão duas vezes: primeiro, relacionando a premonição com a percepção. Depois, a telepatia ao sentir. Sua conclusão nos leva a repensar o tema central da psicanálise: o inconsciente. Sua proposta é relacioná-lo à indivisão do sentir e à sua reversibilidade: vejo e sou visto(AU)

In 1953, Devereux edited a collection of Freud's texts on psychoanalysis and the occultism. Despite these texts being little known, they were crucial in the debate with the French philosophy. Merleau-Ponty, for instance, addressed this issue twice. At first, relating the premonition with perception. At another time, he links the telepathy with the sense. His conclusion leads us to rethink the focus of psychoanalysis: the unconscious. His proposal is to link it with the unity of the sense and its reversibility: to see and being seen(AU)

O índice de um enigma: o inconsciente e o fenômeno da premonição / The index of an enigma: the unconscious and the phenomenon of premonition

Em 1953, Devereux editou uma coletânea de textos de Freud sobre a psicanálise e o ocultismo. Apesar de pouco conhecidos, tais escritos foram fundamentais no debate com a filosofia francesa. Merleau-Ponty, por exemplo, debruçou-se sobre esta questão duas vezes: primeiro, relacionando a premonição com a percepção. Depois, a telepatia ao sentir. Sua conclusão nos leva a repensar o tema central da psicanálise: o inconsciente. Sua proposta é relacioná-lo à indivisão do sentir e à sua reversibilidade: vejo e sou visto...

In 1953, Devereux edited a collection of Freud's texts on psychoanalysis and the occultism. Despite these texts being little known, they were crucial in the debate with the French philosophy. Merleau-Ponty, for instance, addressed this issue twice. At first, relating the premonition with perception. At another time, he links the telepathy with the sense. His conclusion leads us to rethink the focus of psychoanalysis: the unconscious. His proposal is to link it with the unity of the sense and its reversibility: to see and being seen...

The "Bestie di Satana" murders.

In recent years, satanic groups have been responsible for various types and degrees of crimes. We report the case of a number of murders committed in Italy by a group of young people calling themselves the "Bestie di Satana". Forensic psychiatric assessment of the members of a satanic sect charged with the crime revealed that all the young people had a fragile, immature personality, a very low level of education and were socially disadvantaged. The trial of the members of the "Bestie di Satana" sect was concluded with the verdict of deliberate murder, and all the members were given long jail sentences. This report should lead us to explore social and cultural responses to juvenile satanism, statistically shown to be a relatively rare phenomenon but with a high criminal potential.