Commentary on “Akbar’s ‘Jesus’ and Marlowe’s ‘Tamburlaine,’” by Azfar Moin

Abstract: This commentary briefly reviews the scholarship on the magus figure within European Renaissance studies in order to show how Azfar Moin’s research reinvigorates those foundational debates by placing them within a much wider historical, cultural and geographic context that provincializes Europe. Moin suggests that it is twentieth-century scholars who have failed to recognize what the early modern playwright Christopher Marlowe could easily imagine: namely, that the magus figure had reached its fullest development in the East, where it was instantiated by leaders like the historical Timur and his descendent Akbar. It may be that the late sixteenth-century audience of Marlowe’s Tamburlaine would have been more likely to view the play’s protagonist as a Machiavellian prince than a magus. Whether early modern Europeans—Marlowe included—could actually conceive of the magus and the prince combined in one person is the question Moin raises through his new interpretation of the enigmatic Tamburlaine.

In “Akbar’s ‘Jesus’ and Marlowe’s ‘Tamburlaine’: Strange Parallels of Early Modern Sacredness,” Azfar Moin makes a new and compelling case for a “strange parallel” between the sacred kingship performed by the Mughal emperor Akbar and his ancestor Timur on the one hand, and on the other, the figure of the magus in Renaissance Europe, as popularized on the Elizabethan stage by Christopher Marlowe. Rather than a parallel, a term derived from the title of the second volume of Victor Lieberman’s magisterial Eurasian history, perhaps we might think of Moin’s paired concepts as a chiasmus—that is, as a more or less synchronous crossing of ideas from east to west and vice versa. Before turning to Moin’s comparison in my comments, I shall clarify the stakes of Moin’s globalizing argument as I understand them, together with the import of that argument for scholars of the English and European Renaissance.

Drawing on a wide variety of academic discourses, as well as an unusually broad constellation of skills both linguistic and cultural, Moin reinvigorates a century-long tradition of scholarship conducted primarily in Europe and the United States that was devoted to the study of esoteric philosophies of the Renaissance. Scholars such as Lynn Thorndike, Erwin Panofsky, Fritz Saxl, Ernst Cassirer, Paul Oscar Kristeller, Frances Yates, and D. P. Walker—to name only a few of the outstanding scholars in this field—developed compelling accounts of magical and occult philosophies in Western Europe, especially of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and of the sages, sometimes called magi, who espoused those ideas and who attempted to capitalize on them in various ways. Interest in those philosophers on the part of twentieth-century scholars often went hand in hand with a celebration of the so-called “Renaissance Man”—that paragon of intellectual curiosity, urbanity, and brilliance whose appearance on the stage of Western history signaled the end of the “Dark Ages” and prefigured the Enlightenment and the Scientific Revolution. The figure of the magus valorized within this scholarly tradition was not merely an object of academic interest, but was also in certain ways aspirational; implicitly or explicitly, this tradition often relied on a triumphalist interpretation of European civilization and values. Ironically the magus tradition within Renaissance studies reached its apex during and after the great wars of the twentieth century, before being relegated to a greatly diminished role within the discipline, as New Historicist, feminist, postcolonial and other modes of cultural analysis frequently critical of those values began to take hold by the 1980s.

By resituating the magus in Central and South Asia, Moin revives the aforementioned tradition within Renaissance studies, somewhat in hiatus for several decades. He does so in order to present a fresh challenge to the older, Eurocentric interpretation of early modernity that was central to the magus tradition in Renaissance studies, and also to reengage that historiography. Moin makes it possible to reimagine the figure of the magus in a wider historical, geographic and cultural context, extending from Central and South Asia to the remote western periphery of Eurasia—i.e., Britain.

It is important to note that the Western concept of the magus at the time of the European Renaissance was always already oriented toward the East—a fact quite relevant to Moin’s argument. Ultimately deriving from the Old Persian word maguš, and passing into ancient Greek as µάγος, the Latin magus denoted the priestly caste of Persia, and by extension, priests and sages of other nations.[1] In medieval Europe, the Latin plural magi most often referred to the three wise men of the East who presented gifts to the infant Jesus (for the biblical account of these magi, see Matthew 2: 1–12). The term was also associated with another biblical figure, the Samarian sorcerer Simon Magus (Acts 8: 9–24), and more generally, with Eastern practitioners of astrology and magic. The term could have a positive or negative valence depending on the context.

In the fifteenth century, the Florentine philosopher Marsilio Ficino translated recently recovered texts that were thought to have been written by an ancient Egyptian magus named Hermes Trismegistus (Thrice-Great Hermes). Drawing on these so-called hermetica and on other esoteric writings, Ficino and others sought to demonstrate the validity of a prisca theologia, an originary theology at the core of all religions, in order to enable a synthesis of seemingly disparate and incompatible forms of belief. Although their utopian project was not greatly appreciated by the Catholic Church, or ultimately by most Protestant reformers a few generations later, Ficino, Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, and other European esoteric philosophers of that era considered Eastern texts and knowledges to be crucial ingredients of their recipes for religious and philosophical syncretism.

Given the purportedly Eastern provenance of much of the esoteric philosophy of the European Renaissance, especially in its earliest phases, it is interesting to note, as Moin does, that there is relatively little recent scholarship on the hermetic tradition in the East—i.e., in Persia, India, and other regions of Asia. Moin remarks that only one book-length study on this subject has appeared thus far: Kevin Thomas Van Bladel’s 2009 The Arabic Hermes. Thus Moin’s essay represents an important intervention with the potential to incite further study of the hermetic traditions in medieval and early modern Persia and India, both independent of and in relation to their European counterpart.

In the Akbarnama, Abul Fazl incorporated hermetic lore in his account of the Emperor’s divine origins. Alanquva, Akbar’s ancestor and the mother of the dynasty, “conceived her son [Timur] through a light which came into her from the upper part of a door, and ‘it assumed for her the likeness of a perfect man.’” Here Abul Fazl quotes and incorporates the Quranic verse 19:17, concerning the impregnation of Mary, mother of Jesus, by an angel. Akbar himself was not only descended from this messianic embodiment of divine light; he was its embodiment, the the Insan-i Kamil, a perfect being who, according to Sufi metaphysics, “maintained the balance of the cosmos.”

“Indeed,” Moin writes,

Moin argues, in effect, that Marlowe was able to imagine the Perfect Man through his character Tamburlaine and project that fantasy into public consciousness. Here Moin takes up an argument proposed by James Howe in his 1976 book Marlowe, Tamburlaine and Magic. Howe asserted that if Dr. Faustus represented for Marlowe and his audience the more demonic and negative aspects of the magus figure, then Marlowe’s Tamburlaine was, in fact, its positive counterpart. Yes, Tamburlaine killed friends and family, as well as enemies; yes, he slaughtered the virgins of Damascus; yes, he taunted God and the heavens by burning the Quran. “Although cruel beyond imagination and blasphemous beyond belief, Tamburlaine is immensely attractive, a sublime figure,” Moin contends. I agree completely that Marlowe created a character that most members of his audience found hugely appealing, not in spite of, but because of Tamburlaine’s transgressive actions. For Howe, the popularity of Tamburlaine and his return to the stage in a sequel suggests another side of the magus that, until the time of Howe’s writing, had essentially gone unrecognized.

Howe, who published his book at the tail end of the decades-long conversation dedicated to the Renaissance magus—or at least that phase of it, because we are now entering a new, more globalizing phase—offered a quasi-Nietzschean interpretation that was plausible, but was nevertheless poorly received. The reasons for that reception history are complicated, but perhaps the main one was that Howe provided a theory of the magus that was fundamentally at odds with previous conceptions thereof. Most examples of Renaissance magi seem to have been cut from different cloth. They were philosophers, men like Christopher Marlowe’s contemporary Giordano Bruno (Howe’s primary example of a magus) purporting to have esoteric knowledge worthy of the highest patronage. They were men in the service of the powerful, or they were seekers of such patronage.

In his late play The Tempest, Shakespeare created a magus character named Prospero, in response to Marlowe’s Faustus and possibly Tamburlaine. Formerly the Duke of Milan, Prospero has lost his dukedom to a conniving brother who usurped his power. “Being transported / and rapt in secret studies” (I.ii.175–76)—that is, having devoted his time and energy to the study of magic—Prospero was completely unprepared for the familial and political betrayals that awaited him. Earthly sovereignty and magical power are, in balance, not compatible in The Tempest; Prospero can choose one, but not both forms of power. And so it was with Renaissance magi in general, both real and imagined.

It may be, however, as Howe and Moin have argued, that Marlowe possessed a unique creative vision that enabled him to imagine the role of the magus differently—i.e., as a warrior king, rather than an esoteric philosopher, intellectual, sorcerer, or dabbler in magic and alchemy. Yet during the Renaissance there would have been, and arguably still remains, considerable resistance to this argument, possibly for the very reason that Moin provides, following the theories of Victor Lieberman. Simply put, in the protected zones at the periphery of Eurasia, the forms of kingship that developed were weaker than those in the exposed zones. These kings were “hemmed in by the Church and by the rising mercantile classes.”

Rather than perceiving Marlowe’s Tamburlaine as a magus, I suspect that Elizabethan audiences would have been more inclined to think of Tamburlaine as an instantiation of Machiavelli’s prince, a leader of extraordinary strength, ruthlessness, and cunning (though not necessarily perfection), who is able to dominate fortune, or fate, as if it were a woman beaten into submission (Machiavelli’s image), and thus exert control over it. Frequently perceived as an atheist, Machiavelli’s prince ignores the laws of God and man. Even so, fortune may get the best of the prince.

A similarly transgressive figure, Marlowe’s Tamburlaine wreaks havoc on stage, rupturing or violating almost every convention of good behavior, and he is never punished for doing so. Instead, Tamburlaine thrills his audiences by performing ever more outrageous acts of violence and mayhem with almost comical panache. However, it remains difficult to think of Tamburlaine as a magus, precisely because the conception of power entailed by such an interpretation militates against the historical forms and concepts of power that were in fact realizable in the peripheral, protected zones, as described by Lieberman and Moin.

A closer analogue to the sovereign/magus was Timur’s descendant Akbar, who was himself rapt in secret studies at Fatehpur Sikri, yet who remained one of the most brilliant military leaders and political strategists of all time—a prince in Machiavelli’s sense, and also a magus in his esoteric fashioning of self and cult of sovereignty. It is possible that Marlowe was aware of Akbar, as well as of Timur; the book-burning episode in Tamburlaine raises the question of Marlowe’s possible knowledge of the Jesuit missionaries’ similar experience with Akbar.

By the early seventeenth century, news of Akbar and his empire had circulated widely in Europe, thanks to Jesuit historians such as Pierre du Jarric, who compiled information culled from Jesuit letters from the Eastern mission. Du Jarric reported in his Histoire des choses plus memorables advenues. . . . En l’establissement & progrez de la foy Chrestienne & Catholique (1610–1616) that Akbar was a prideful atheist who refused to accept the truth of Christianity when the missionaries presented it to him.[3]

A somewhat different portrait emerged in Samuel Purchas’s 1613 Purchas his Pilgrimage. Purchas was a Protestant cleric, a commentator on religions, and a compiler of travel narratives. Of Akbar he wrote:

Purchas’s Akbar was no atheist, but a believer whose creed, though usefully monotheistic, remained hard to pin down. His purported religious similarity to his ancestor Tamerlane (Timur) would no doubt have struck a chord with that portion of the English audience familiar with Marlowe’s mayhem-inducing stage character from a generation earlier. Still more provocatively and sensationally Purchas added:

In this last passage Purchas describes, albeit skeptically, Akbar’s performance of divine kingship—the sovereign as magus. The emperor not only had religious disciples, Purchas notes, but also was popularly regarded as a miracle-worker.

Purchas helped to circulate a view of Akbar that was, in fact, founded on a concept of sacred sovereignty. Akbar, like Timur, existed outside the system of organized power governing the political regimes of Renaissance Europe: largely Christian, schismatic, and anticipating a still greater divide between Church and state to be realized a few centuries later. Though skeptical, Purchas nevertheless perceived that conjunction of sovereignty and sacrality that was not enacted or fully imaginable in early seventeenth-century Europe. A sense of the elsewhere emerges from his description, as it does from Marlowe’s Tamburlaine and Thomas More’s Utopia, written nearly a hundred years earlier. Similarly, Akbar’s engagements with the Jesuits and with Christian mythology demonstrate a fascination with the elsewhere. Over the span of a century, the West moved closer to the East, and vice versa. Distance too, in all its senses, could be a creative force for those seeking to imagine or invent other worlds of possibilities. The magus figure was one sign of those ambitious times, a boundless will to know, to act, and to become.

Notes

1. This etymology appears in the online Oxford English Dictionary.

2. Azfar Moin, “Akbar’s ‘Jesus’ and Marlowe’s ‘Tamburlaine’: Strange Parallels of Early Modern Sacredness,” Fragments 3–4: 1–21, 10.

3. Sir E. Dinison Ross and Eileen Power, eds., Akbar and the Jesuits: An Account of the Jesuit Missions to the Court of Akbar by Father Pierre du Jarric, S.J., trans. C. H. Payne (New Delhi: Tulsi Publishing House, 1979), 29.

4. Purchas His Pilgrimage (London: 1613), 405–06. Sabin Americana.

5. Ibid., 406.