Selenocentrism and Heliocentrism in Early Modern Persianate Imperial Cultures: ʿAlī versus Jesus, with Hermes Presiding

Abstract

Islam, as all moderns know, is the religion of the Moon. Yet it has been experienced as equally Solar (and Venusian) since late antiquity, thanks to its Iranian-Egyptian-Greek-Roman imperial Heliocentrist genetics. By the same genetic token, the Sun-supremacism that is colonialist-Orientalist Eurocentricism merely continues Latin Christian Jesuan Heliocentrism—a theological rite that, painfully ironically, remains the textbook touchstone of modern Western rationality; meanwhile non-Latin Christian but equally Western philosophical, scientific, technological, and imperial genealogies of both Moon and Sun continue to be actively unmapped.

As astro-decolonial remedy, I propose Selenocentrism and Heliocentrism as a primary binary pair whose creative tension helped shape human cultures generally and Islamicate ones specifically, and early modern Persianate imperial cultures above all: for they saw the apotheosis of the peculiarly Islamic embrace of Harranian-Hermetic astral magic as the preferred vehicle of Neoplatonic philosophical-theurgic practice, rejecting the weird Greek insistence on Moon as nonimperial female only in favor of the Harranian devotion to male Moon as Cosmic King and brother to male-female Hermes. The Islamic marriage of Avicennan Moon-ascent to Suhravardian Sun-ascent that defined the post-Mongol era was emblematized by a new, also peculiarly Islamic Trinity—Muḥammad-ʿAlī-Fāṭima as Sun-Moon-Venus—used talismanically by Sunni and Shiʿi alike, as well as the curiously Joycean association of Moon and Mercury in Arabo-Persian grimoires and imperial horoscopes. And as in any Space Race, imperial astro-theurgic politics became pitched with the approach of the Islamic Millennium. Thus was Timurid, Safavid, and ʿAdilshahid Selenocentrism, starring ʿAlī as Moon, countered by Mughal and Ottoman Heliocentrism, starring Jesus as Sun—both on the basis of Ibn ʿArabī’s cosmic-imperial doctrine of sacral power (walāya) and Pythagorean fusion of the Names and the Planets.

This astro-history of Islam, the Greater West, has since been garbled to the point of illegibility. Its political association today solely with the Crescent Moon (per many state and territorial flags) has little to do with the Islamic Lunar calendar, but is rather an artifact of the Latin Christian obsession with the Ottomans—who claimed Jesus as Sun but increasingly also ʿAlī as Moon in their contest with the Safavids and Mughals—as Selenocentric Oriental Saracens, horrified by their self-identification as European Jesuan Heliocentrists too. As such, “the West and the Rest” colonial fable is not merely historicidal and genocidal, but also a weirdly aberrant (gharīb) form of the Moon-Sun Dance ubiquitous across human cultures in its dysfunctional relationship with the Moon. I therefore further propose Islamic Neopaganism as a Hermetic partycrashing trick for showing up the reflexive modern historiographical reduction of Science to strictly male Heliocentrism (think the “Scientific Revolution”) and Religion to strictly female Selenocentrism (think Islam and Wicca). Remarrying active-passive Solar “West” to passive-active Lunar “Not-West” by means of Consort-Warrior Venus and Trickster-Psychopomp Mercury is a more historiographically empirical means of decolonially Drawing Down the Panopticon Moon.