Hallucinations and Smoke Screens: The Pseudo-Platonic ‘Laws of Nature’ (Nawāmīs) and Their Transmission

If one masters the hidden laws of nature, there is no end to the wonders that these can produce. A particular group of such procedures that prescribe fumigations with dry, incense-like substances circulated in the Arabic mediaeval tradition, probably translated from Greek and eventually received by the Latin Mediaeval tradition. Plato’s pseudo-epigraphic authorial banner provides an authoritative narrative of transmission that presents these materials in connection with the most prestigious ancient Greek knowledge. This chapter explores the transmission of these erratic blocks of text from a longue durée perspective, analysing some specific textual clues disseminated along the tradition, first in the Pseudo-Platonic fragment in MS Paris BnF 2577 and then in the third chapter of al-ʿIrāqī’s Kitāb ʿuyūn al-ḥaqāʾiq wa-īḍāḥ al-ṭarāʾiq (‘The best of true facts and the explanation of their ways’). This study also attempts to explore the possible technical and material reality behind the text, seeking to frame it in the social context in which these practices were embedded and to pin down the performative component that many of them implied.