Thesis

Research Questions

How do hermetic metaphysical concepts—spirit, matter, and lineage—circulate between textual traditions and contemporary healing practices across North Africa and Europe? Which genealogies link temple archives in Egypt to modern therapeutic repertoires in Morocco and Europe, and how are key notions translated, contested, or re‑purposed by practitioners? What does a historically situated account of agency (divine, ancestral, material) add to debates in anthropology of religion and philosophy of mind? The project asks how knowledge claims travel: through manuscripts, oral histories, and embodied ritual expertise; and what these circulations reveal about authority, authenticity, and the ethics of care.

Literature Review

The study engages three strands: (1) hermetic and late‑antique sources with their medieval and Renaissance receptions; (2) anthropological work on healing, transmission, and the social life of texts; and (3) decolonial critiques of canon formation and epistemic extraction. Recent scholarship on esotericism foregrounds textual networks, while medical anthropology centers practice and embodiment. Bridging these, I read manuscript traditions alongside field accounts to track how concepts (e.g., spiritus, pneuma) acquire local semantics. Studies of Islamicate philosophy and Maghrebi healing complicate Eurocentric narratives of Western esotericism and ground the project in multilingual archives (Arabic, French, Italian, English).

Methods

Mixed methods combine (a) archival research in Cairo, Geneva, Florence; (b) semi‑structured interviews and participant observation with healers and scholars in Marrakech, Edinburgh, Amsterdam; and (c) close textual analysis of manuscripts and printed commentaries. Data are organized in a Postgres schema (texts, places, actors, events), with rigorous metadata for provenance. Reflexive fieldnotes and versioned transcripts support reproducibility. Where relevant, simple formal notation (via MathJax/KaTeX in the full stack build) captures conceptual relations or lineage trees as diagrams.

Theoretical Framework

I model hermetic metaphysics‑in‑practice as a moving interface between text and technique. Drawing on practice theory, historical philology, and STS, I treat manuscripts as affordances that mediate ritual action, while communities re‑inscribe meaning through performance and pedagogy. The framework resists essentialist family resemblances by specifying mechanisms of transmission (copying, commentary, apprenticeship) and by analyzing how claims to authenticity and efficacy are adjudicated across time and space.

Ethics & Community Engagement

The project follows WCAG‑aligned public dissemination on the website and adheres to GDPR for handling interview data. Informed consent foregrounds ongoing choice and culturally specific constraints on disclosure. I commit to reciprocity through summary reports in Arabic/French or English (as appropriate), anonymization on request, and co‑review of sensitive passages with participants. Field protocols are reviewed with institutional ethics guidance.

Timeline & Deliverables

Year 1: coursework, literature synthesis, archival scoping; Year 2: Cairo and Marrakech fieldwork; Year 3: European archives (Geneva, Florence) and interviews (Edinburgh, Amsterdam); Year 4: writing, defense preparation. Deliverables: full proposal (month 6), two conference papers (years 23), one journal submission (year 3), public website updates each semester, dataset release (metadata + translations where permissible), and the completed dissertation.