Anachronism

Anachronism: an act of attributing a custom, event, or object to a period to which it does not belong (Oxford Languages). I had to look up that word online after reading it in Witchcraft: A Short Introduction. This word does a great job of encapsulating our efforts as a class in terms of our analysis of witchcraft from a 21st century perspective. Our goal is to study some of the seemingly crazy events from the past without reducing its validity from a given time period. I find it remarkably easy to apply our modern research and ideologies to the texts we have read; therefore, I have been making significant mental efforts to refrain from this practice of anachronism. Overall, it is difficult to not accidentally engage in anachronism. After all, how thoroughly can one constantly monitor their thoughts as they happen, while also digesting the text itself. However, it would be foolish to pretend like these types of relatively nonsensical stories / legends do not occur in society to this day (on smaller, lower-stake levels, at least). We have examined many sources of modern-day / residual witchcraft-related beliefs in this class, including eBay offerings of special items, for one. Just today I was scrolling through my feed of TikTok, when I stumbled upon a 2-minute post about a cursed Arabic book. In the first 30 seconds, I thought the video must be a joke or lead into something else, as the internet often behaves. However, I eventually realized that the narrator in the clip was dead serious, and made the viewer believe not only in what he was saying, but also that he was genuinely warning the public not to read this specific book. Given the fact that this post has 6.5 million views and 900 thousand likes, I think it is safe to say that a decent amount of people believe this man’s story, or were at least captivated by its premise. The narrator immediately grabs the viewer’s attention and establishes some level of credibility by prefacing the content with “True Horrifying Story,” “Warning: This is not a joke”; then his opening statement: “this book is life-threatening” and “this is the most dangerous book ever.” Throughout the video, he mentions several times that this book is easily accessible online, as if to use reverse psychology to tempt the viewers into reading the content. Shams al Ma’arif is the name of the book, and it was written in the 13^th century by a man named Ahmad bin Al Buni. Apparently, Ahmad practiced black magic and was in close contact with jinn entities. The book provides detailed instructions on how to interact with jinn, marry a jinn, and the sacrifices required in the name of the devil himself. Similarly, I read on page 103 of our text how in the year 1645, some teenager named Rebecca West apparently had sex with and married the devil. I am curious as to the fascination with literally marrying demonic entities; where does that come from and what does marriage have to do with anything? I suppose marrying the devil fits the implications of how far a witch would go to commit herself to evil, but in any case, does this mean people thought the devil was married to hundreds of witches? People thought Satan had a whole harem of evil women? Sometimes when I ask these questions, I fear I am accidentally engaging in anachronism due to my 21^st century perspective on things. Anyways, I found it interesting how in the video I saw online, it was a man who accidentally married a female jinn, contrary to the typical, sexist prejudice against females in regard to participating in demonic practices.

Here is the link to the video I referenced: https://vm.tiktok.com/TTPd5FnT9N/?k=1