Licit Magic Working Paper №7: Writing the Imagination in Medieval Persian Astrology,
with translations from Tanklūshā
Medieval Persian poets, Khāqānī Shirvānī (d. circa 1190) and Niẓāmī Ganjavī (d. 1209), have mentioned Tanklūshā in their poems as the culmination of human imagination. Tanklūshā (or Tanklūshā, as the word comes to name both a book and its author) is book of natal astrology. Natal astrology connects one’s fate or character to certain positioning of stars in the sky at one’s exact time and place of birth on earth. Legends obscure the true origins of the work. Seventeenth century Persian dictionaries, Farhang-i jahāngīrī and Majmaʿ al-furs, identify Tanklūshā as the book (tang) of a Roman sage named Lūshā. The book was believed to have contained superb examples of art in the West (mulk-i Rūm) and was comparable in visual splendour to its Eastern counterpart, Mani’s book of images, Arzhang. Nineteenth century orientalist scholarship discerned in the name Tanklūshā, a varied form of the name Teukros (also spelled Teucer) of Babylon, the ancient Egyptian astrologer who was cited by the major astrologers, such as Antiochus of Athens, Rhetorius, and Abū Maʿshar al-Balkhī. The book we read today in the name of Tanklūshā in Arabic and Persian versions is pseudepigraphic — most likely an imaginary reconstruction of an astrological work by Teukros, rich with images of everyday life appearing in supernatural tints as constellations on the vast screen of the night sky. Each of the twelve zodiac signs contains depictions, of varying lengths, of thirty sets of triptych images.
But what does a book of horoscopic astrology, with doubtful origins, have to do with literary studies today? For those interested in Islamic theories of imagination (khayāl), Tanklūshā offers highly visualised texts and fantastic combinations of images. For those interested in Islamic sciences and practices of divination and prognostication, Tanklūshā presents a vivid map of the constantly changing sky — variously rendered as charkh, gardūn, falak, all meaning “turning,” and all representing fate in classical Persian literature — with its aleatory faces. Falak (sphere), which was described by Khāqānī Shirvānī as a “blank dice [kaʿbatayn-i bī-naqsh],” turns, in Tanklūshā, into a dice with 360 sides each inscribed by its dream-like patchworks of arbitrary images.
If you’re interested in reading more about Tanklūshā, read Licit Magic — GlobalLit Working Papers 7, with an excerpt translated into English from Reza-zadeh Malek’s edition (Tehran: Miras-e maktub, 2005), containing the accounts of the entire thirty degrees of the sign Aries (burj-i ḥamal) in Tanklūshā.
link to the full paper here.
To read more from Global Literary Theory Project,
