Abu Rayhan Biruni

Abu Rayan Muammad ibn Amad Biruni, often known as Alberonius in Latin, but also Al Beruni, Al Bayrooni or variants, (born 5 September 973 in Kath, Khwarezm, died 13 December 1048 in Ghazni) was a Persian Muslim scholar and polymath of the 11th century. "A Persian by birth, Biruni produced his writings in Arabic, though he knew, besides Persian, no less than four other languages. " "A Persian by birth, a rationalist in disposition, this contemporary of Avicenna and Alhazen not only studied history, philosophy, and geography in depth, but wrote one of the most comprehensive of Muslim astronomical treatises, the Qanun Al-Masu'di. "; L. Massignon, "Al-Biruni et la valuer internationale de la science arabe" in Al-Biruni Commemoration Volume, (Calcutta, 1951). pp 217-219. " In a celebrated preface to the book of Drugs, Biruni says: And if it is true that in all nations one likes to adorn oneself by using the language to which one has remained loyal, having become accustomed to using it with friends and companions according to need, I must judge for myself that in my native Chorasmian, science has as much as chance of becoming perpetuated as a camel has of facing Kaaba. "; Gotthard Strohmaier, "Biruni" in Josef W. Meri, Jere L. Bacharach, "Medieval Islamic Civilization: A-K, index:Volume 1 of Medieval Islamic Civilization: An Encyclopedia", Taylor & Francis, 2006. excerpt from page 112:"Although his native Khwarezmian was also an Iranian language, he rejected the emerging neo-Persian literature of his time (Firdawsi), preferring Arabic instead as the only adequate medium of science. "; Biruni was a polymath with an interest in various practical and scholarly fields that relate to what nowadays is described as physics, anthropology, comparative sociology, astronomy, astrology, chemistry, history, geography, mathematics, medicine, psychology, philosophy, and theology. He was the first Muslim scholar to study India and the Brahminical tradition, and has been described as the founder of Indology, and "the first anthropologist". He was one of the first exponents of an experimental method of investigation, introducing this method into mechanics and what is nowadays called mineralogy, psychology, and astronomy. Biruni has for example been described as "one of the very greatest scientists of [the Islamic world], and, all considered, one of the greatest of all times. ", or as "one of the great scientific minds in all history. " The crater Al-Biruni on the Moon is named after him. Tashkent Technical University (formerly Tashkent Polytechnic Institute) is also named after Abu Rayhan al-Biruni and a university founded by Ahmad Shah Massoud in Kapisa is named after him.

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How To Stock A Home Lab

How To Stock A Home Lab

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Alchemy Blinds And Innovation

One of the ideas that still gets discussed in the magical community is the idea of "blinds." According to advocates of this concept, supposedly some accounts of magical practices were published in a deliberately incorrect form in order to mislead anyone who wanted to study the tradition based on those particular texts. The way that this usually gets brought up is that some individual will claim to have identified the blind and will then publish what they claim to be the correct information. I'm of the opinion that these sorts of blinds are rare in the magical tradition if they exist at all. Usually when someone publishes a set of corrected material and claims to have discovered it, what they really mean is that they invented it.

This is not to say that magical practitioners have always been forthcoming in their writings. Alchemists famously wrote about their practical techniques in allegorical forms that academics have spent years deciphering and also may have veiled their spiritual practices in the language of primitive chemistry. Much of this was due to ongoing persecution by the Church and this is not the sort of blind that I'm talking about. A blind in an alchemical procedure would be something like writing out an explicit procedure but giving the instruction to heat a mixture over a flame when what you're really supposed to do is freeze it. That way anyone who tried to follow the procedure would fail to produce the desired result.

Unlike veiling one's work in allegory, there is little point in promulgating such a blind. If you publish an explicit procedure there is no utility in deliberately getting it wrong. If you don't want people to know how you do your work you either shouldn't publish it or you should write about it symbolically and omit practical details. Magick was generally kept secret for much of human history rather than being published at all and the grimoires we have are likely texts that were copied from master to student for centuries. There likely were additional oral teachings that accompanied those texts, but it seems to me that this would most likely be additional material not mentioned in the text rather than something like "you need to remember that the attributions on pages 22, 34, and 57 are reversed."

The appeal of the "blind" model is that it lends a sense of historical legitimacy to original work. A lot of people still have this idea that magick was once more "pure" and worked better for the ancients, kind of like New Agers who talk about a historical Atlantis with interstellar space travel and medical technology far in advance of our own. In fact, there are various archaeological sites that may have been the inspiration for Atlantis, and while what we know about those sites tells us that they had very advanced technology for the time period in which they were inhabited, we have yet to find any ancient space cruisers, ancient circuit boards, or even a piece of ancient plastic. Any historical Atlantis was almost certainly not even an industrial age civilization, let alone the information or space age one that some imagine.

In magick innovation is often seen as suspect by people with such beliefs, but calling a new discovery the unveiling of a deliberate blind implies that the new technique is not a product of invention or original work but the rediscovery of an ancient truth. The problem here is with people who expect ancient magick to work better, not with the new techniques. If a new technique is accompanied by empirical research demonstrating its effectiveness it should be accepted and adopted as an effective new piece of technology just like any other scientific advance. But as in scientific research, the burden does fall on the experimenter to show that the new technique works better than the technique it is intended to replace. Claiming that a new technique is the correction of a blind muddles this process, and hopefully any such claim is the result of a genuine misunderstanding rather than a simple desire to avoid doing any empirical work.

So the next time you see someone talk about a marvelous ancient magical technique revealed by his or her research make sure you find out what empirical results the new technique has produced. Just because a revised model or schema sounds logical or corrects an apparent inconsistency in the existing material doesn't mean it's better. In fact, the inconsistency might have been added to the original material precisely because some magician centuries ago found that their results turned out better that way despite it.

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August Strindberg

Johan August Strindberg (22 January 1849 - 14 May 1912) was a Swedish playwright, novelist, and essayist. A prolific writer who often drew directly on his personal experience, Strindberg's career spanned four decades, during which time wrote over 60 plays and more than 30 works of fiction, autobiography, history, cultural analysis, and politics. A bold experimenter and iconoclast throughout, he explored a wide range of dramatic methods and purposes, from naturalistic tragedy, monodrama, and history plays, to his anticipations of expressionist and surrealist dramatic techniques. From his earliest work, Strindberg developed forms of dramatic action, language, and visual composition so innovative that many were to become technically possible to stage only with the advent of film. He is considered the "father" of modern Swedish literature and his The Red Room (1879) has frequently been described as the first modern Swedish novel. The Royal Theatre rejected his first major play, Master Olof, in 1872; it was not until 1881, at the age of 32, that its premi`ere at the New Theatre gave him his theatrical breakthrough. In his plays The Father (1887), Miss Julie (1888), and Creditors (1889), he created naturalistic dramas that-building on the established accomplishments of Henrik Ibsen's prose problem plays while rejecting their use of the structure of the well-made play-responded to the call-to-arms of 'Emile Zola's manifesto "Naturalism in the Theatre" (1881) and the example set by Andr'e Antoine's newly-established Th'e^atre Libre (opened 1887). In Miss Julie, characterisation replaces plot as the predominant dramatic element (in contrast to melodrama and the well-made play) and the determining role of heredity and the environment on the "vacillating, disintegrated" characters is emphasised. Strindberg modelled his short-lived Scandinavian Experimental Theatre (1889) in Copenhagen on Antoine's theatre and he explored the theory of Naturalism in his essays "On Psychic Murder" (1887), "On Modern Drama and the Modern Theatre" (1889), and a preface to Miss Julie, the last of which is probably the best-known statement of the principles of the theatrical movement. During the 1890s he spent significant time abroad engaged in scientific experiments and studies of the occult. A series of psychotic attacks between 1894 to 1896 (referred to as his "Inferno crisis") led to his hospitalisation and return to Sweden. Under the influence of the ideas of Emanuel Swedenborg, he resolved after his recovery to become "the Zola of the Occult. " In 1898 he returned to playwriting with To Damascus, which, like The Great Highway (1909), is a dream-play of spiritual pilgrimage. His A Dream Play (1902)-with its radical attempt to dramatise the workings of the unconscious by means of an abolition of conventional dramatic time and space and the splitting, doubling, merging, and multiplication of its characters-was an important precursor to both expressionism and surrealism. He also returned to writing historical drama, the genre with which he had begun his playwriting career. He helped to run the Intimate Theatre from 1907, a small-scale theatre, modelled on Max Reinhardt's Kammerspielhaus, that staged his chamber plays.

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