Chapter 4 - Spiritual mediations: Shiʿa demonology and telegraphy

Summary

Abstract

In this chapter, a dream serves as the absurdist object. The dreaming subject is Eʿteḍād al-Salṭane, the minister of science and telegraphy at the time. The content of this dream provokes further inquiries into Shiʿa demonologies and its relationship to the then new medium of telegraphy. I specifically investigate the discourses in which thinking about and experiences with the beyond featured in the Iranian demonological imagination, by which I mean ideas about and beliefs in spiritual beings, jenn-related activities, and psychic phenomena. Examining my sources, I sketch out the sensorial logic at work in imagining encounters with jenn and spirits in nineteenth-century Shiʿa culture. Drawing on the concept of haptics, which I elaborate by recourse to philosophy, art history and experimental psychology, I argue that haptics formed the principle sensory mode in Shiʿa psycho-social affairs with the beyond. Understood as the multisensory experience with the proximate space, based on the sense of touch, haptics forms an indispensable mode in Iranians’ relation to Islamic demons.

Keywords: Shiʿ demonology, communication with the beyond, haptics, Spiritism, telegraphy

In the month of Moḥarram of 1859, ʿAli Qoli Mirzā, better known as Eʿteḍād al-Salṭane, the minister of science and telegraphy at the time, had a visionary dream. As recounted by his son many years later, the minister was impatiently waiting for an overdue cargo of telegraph wire in the city of Qazvin. Having waited for a long time in the city for the large delivery of around two tons of copper wire from Russia, one night, Eʿteḍād al-Salṭane dreams of blood flowing from his body. When he wakes up, in an oneiromantic epiphany, the science minister concludes that an amount equal to the abjad numerological value of the word blood (khun), that is 656 man, will arrive at Qazvin the next day. Absolutely convinced of the veracity of this interpretation, Eʿteḍād al-Salṭane dispatches a telegraph from a town near Qazvin to Tehran and informs the court that the promised Russian cargo has already been received. When he returns after dispatching the telegram to Qazvin the day after, he finds that the cargo, with an exact amount of 656 man has already been delivered.