Sorcery in Sacred Texts, Textual Historiography, and Psychosocial Analysis:A Comprehensive Integrative Critique of Evidence and Inference Frameworks
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.63939/JSS.2026-Vol10.N41.244-285Keywords:
Magical thinking, textual tradition, Shams al-Ma‘arif al-Kubra, Ahmad al-Buni, Al-Muqtataf, cognitive suggestion, nocebo, sleep paralysis, textual criticism, historical philology, MIZAN Matrix, Safe-Decision ProtocolAbstract
This study develops a critical interdisciplinary framework for distinguishing five domains that are frequently conflated in discussions of magic: religious discourse, textual tradition and historical philology, cognitive-psychological mechanisms, performance magic as engineered illusion, and the social domain of charlatanry and exploitation. It is designed as an integrative critical review with philological, textual-historical, and psycho-social dimensions. The corpus includes religious and exegetical texts, printed works and reports attributed to Shams al-Ma‘arif, manuscript scholarship on Ahmad al-Buni, four archival articles from the scientific journal Al-Muqtataf (1879–1916), and peer-reviewed research on perception, magical thinking, nocebo effects, sleep paralysis, and social context. Sources are compared according to their relevance, traceability, methodological transparency, and evidential limits. The findings indicate that the commonly printed Shams al-Ma‘arif al-Kubra is best understood as a composite textual tradition shaped by layered processes of compilation, transmission, and reception, rather than as a straightforward authorial work. Psychological and social evidence further suggests that attention, expectation, cognitive suggestion, loss of control, nocebo effects, and sleep paralysis can account for some experiences popularly attributed to magic without reducing all cases to a single mechanism. The study concludes by proposing the MIZAN Matrix for assessing source fitness and the Safe-Decision Protocol as an applied framework whose reliability and effectiveness require independent future validation
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