Liana Saif

Liana Saif is a prominent contemporary historian specializing in Arabic occult sciences and Islamic esotericism.

The Arabic Roots of Western Magic

Saif's scholarship is crucial for correcting the Eurocentric bias of the "Yates Paradigm," which often treated Renaissance magic as a sudden rediscovery of Greek texts. Saif demonstrates the profound dependence of Latin magic on Arabic transmission. Through studies of texts like the Picatrix (Ghayat al-Hakim) and the Epistles of the Brethren of Purity, she illustrates how Islamic scholars successfully synthesized late antique Hermeticism with Aristotelian physics, providing the robust theoretical framework that allowed figures like Ficino and Agrippa to practice astral magic.