Just as the Body is not able to persist without the
sustenance of the Soul through which it lives, similarly Knowledge is rootless
when Astrology is absent from it; and the Science of Images is the highest and
most valuable Astrology.
Thabit Ibn Qurra was the most famous of the
Harranian Sabians, heirs of the high pagan civilizations
of the Near East and Mediterrean. He was born in A.D. 836 in Harran, though he
subsequently came to fame after traveling to Baghhad. In modern times he
is best known for his contributions to science, particularly in the
field of
mathematics. While his "scientific" achievements are lauded, even by the
above website maintained by my alter mater, the University of St Andrews, they
prefer to keep silent about Thabit Ibn Qurra's contributions in the area of
occult or esoteric studies, regarding these as a regretable abberation.
In fact, Thabit Ibn Qurra's skill in many arts and
sciences had its root in his knowledge of Arabic, Greek and the local vernacular of
Syriac. The early Abbasid caliphs were avid for the wisdom of their predecessors,
particularly the Greeks and Romans and living as they did in a vast and newly
conquered empire, newly united in a great free trade zone bound together culturally
by the use of Arabic, they were able to drawn on the many disparate and cosmopolitan
cultures of the new Islamic empire.
The establishment of the Bayt al Hikam, the House
of Wisdom, in the new capital, Baghdad, was the concrete manifestation of this desire
for the amassing and advancement of knowledge. Here Thabit Ibn Qurra's faculty for
languages helped materially to advance the great translations projects of the Abbasid
Caliphs, bringing the arts and sciences of many previous cultures into the new
lingua franca of Arabic.
Thabit Ibn Qurra not only translated many texts, including
Ptolemy's Almagest and Euclid's Elements, and such mathematical works as
Archimedes' Measurement of the Circle, but a large number of own works on
mathematics, astronomy, ethics, music, medicine, physics, philosophy in
addition to commentaries on such philosophers as Aristotle, Ptolemy and Euclid.
However, Thabit Ibn Qurra, in common with his
contemporaries, saw no contradiction in studying these exoteric sciences while
simultaneously explicating the occult sciences of astrology and magic. Since
among the Harranians, Hermes Trismegistus
was esteemed as a prophet and sage, the Hermetic view of the Cosmos as one, great
unified Being, guided Thabit Ibn Qurra to a mastery of all arts and sciences.
Thabit Ibn Qurra's best known esoteric work is
De Imaginibus "On Images" a key text of
astrological magic cited as a source in Picatrix and
widely consulted in the Middle Ages and Renaissance by such esoteric masters as
Albertus Magnus, Marsilio Ficino and
Cornelius Agrippa. De Imaginibus represents
the most sophisticated form of astrological magic, relying not simply on
planetary talismans, but using the highly advanced traditional astrology of the
Harranian Sabians.
We can see an actual example of a set of astrological
Wealth Talismans from De Imaginibus utilizing
the extremely sophisticated astrological technique characteristic of the Harranian
Sabians. This particular set of talismans is tuned to the birth chart of the user
and then linked astrologically and magically to the expected donor.
Renaissance Astrology is proud to present the
first English translation of De Imaginibus with
a commentary by Christopher Warnock, a leading contemporary practitioner of
traditional astrological magic. Thabit Ibn Qurra
and the Harranian Sabians made a key contribution in preserving and advancing
the Neoplatonic and Hermetic esoteric tradition, the fruits of which are newly
available to us in De Imaginibus.
