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Mystical Astrology According to Ibn 'Arabi
A unique work, providing the underlying spiritual principles (from the point of view of one of the greatest Sufi masters who ever lived) lacking in most modern books of astrology. It will complement and deepen anyone's personal library or collection of works on astrology. It is accompanied by 12 color plates of a 16th-century Persian manuscript.
64 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1950
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About the author
Titus Burckhardt
72 books104 followersTitus Burckhardt (Ibrahim Izz al-Din after his Islamic name), a German Swiss, was born in Florence, Italy in 1908 and died in Lausanne, Switzerland in 1984.He devoted all his life to the study and exposition of the different aspects of Wisdom tradition.
He was an eminent member of the "Traditionalist School" of twentieth-century authors. He was a frequent contributor to the journal Studies in Comparative Religion along with other prominent members of the school.
Burckhardt was the scion of a patrician family of Basel. He was the great-nephew of the art-historian Jacob Burckhardt and the son of the sculptor Carl Burckhardt. Titus Burckhardt was a contemporary of Frithjof Schuon – leading exponent of traditionalist thought in the twentieth century – and the two spent their early school days together in Basel around the time of the First World War. This was the beginning of an intimate friendship and harmonious intellectual and spiritual relationship that was to last a lifetime.
Burckhardt was, as his grandfather, a connoisseur of Islamic art, architecture and civilisation. He compiled and published work from the Sufi masters: Ibn Arabi (1165–1240), Abd-al-karim Jili (1365–1424) and Muhammad al-Arabi al-Darqawi (1760–1823).
He was an eminent member of the "Traditionalist School" of twentieth-century authors. He was a frequent contributor to the journal Studies in Comparative Religion along with other prominent members of the school.
Burckhardt was the scion of a patrician family of Basel. He was the great-nephew of the art-historian Jacob Burckhardt and the son of the sculptor Carl Burckhardt. Titus Burckhardt was a contemporary of Frithjof Schuon – leading exponent of traditionalist thought in the twentieth century – and the two spent their early school days together in Basel around the time of the First World War. This was the beginning of an intimate friendship and harmonious intellectual and spiritual relationship that was to last a lifetime.
Burckhardt was, as his grandfather, a connoisseur of Islamic art, architecture and civilisation. He compiled and published work from the Sufi masters: Ibn Arabi (1165–1240), Abd-al-karim Jili (1365–1424) and Muhammad al-Arabi al-Darqawi (1760–1823).
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Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
December 2, 2018
This text had some great nuggets of wisdom and did help me enliven my thinking of astrology with connections to mystical symbolism, but largely I found the writing difficult to follow and murky. For how short the book is, I still felt like I got something out of it for the time I invested, but a large portion of my experience was confusion and lack of clarity.
January 4, 2019
I was actually quite disappointed in this book for a couple of reasons. First of all I think that for a book dealing with the tradition of the heart (sufism) the language is insufferable. I realise this has to do with the kind of writing of the traditional metaphysics movement but I simply don't get it. People who are so obsessed with beauty as part of a spiritual path could try and be a little less boring when writing. Ibn Arabi himself, like many other esoteric masters, has a very poetic style. A good example of a 20th century academic who writes on Ibn Arabi in such a style is Henry Corbin. Burckhardt sounds a little like a mystic trying to plagiarize a scientific style.
My second beef is that traditional metaphysics is very much obsessed with the divine, but seems to fail in connecting the divine with the human. Again, Ibn Arabi, Ficino or Plato make one painfully aware of the personal stakes in metaphysics. Burckhardt fails to do this although he clearly believes in such stakes. He himself recognizes that astrology has the human as observational center, but there is little discussion of the consequences of that on a tropological level.
It was hard for me to make a distinction between what is Ibn Arabi's position on many of these subjects and what is Burckhardt's. His desire to syncretize different religious traditions, while valuable, makes it hard to understand when he is introducing something specific to his movement and when he is describing Ibn Arabi's position. This could have been solved with references to further writings by Ibn Arabi but if I remember correctly only one book is mentioned by name during the entire work. There's no sort of referencing to guide the reader who is interested in Ibn Arabi *specifically* because of his astrological thought.
Other than that it's a nice book, with the minimum recquirements for a book on astrology and metaphysics, explaining the underlying spiritual principles behind the structure of the horoscope, but I honestely expected a lot more.
My second beef is that traditional metaphysics is very much obsessed with the divine, but seems to fail in connecting the divine with the human. Again, Ibn Arabi, Ficino or Plato make one painfully aware of the personal stakes in metaphysics. Burckhardt fails to do this although he clearly believes in such stakes. He himself recognizes that astrology has the human as observational center, but there is little discussion of the consequences of that on a tropological level.
It was hard for me to make a distinction between what is Ibn Arabi's position on many of these subjects and what is Burckhardt's. His desire to syncretize different religious traditions, while valuable, makes it hard to understand when he is introducing something specific to his movement and when he is describing Ibn Arabi's position. This could have been solved with references to further writings by Ibn Arabi but if I remember correctly only one book is mentioned by name during the entire work. There's no sort of referencing to guide the reader who is interested in Ibn Arabi *specifically* because of his astrological thought.
Other than that it's a nice book, with the minimum recquirements for a book on astrology and metaphysics, explaining the underlying spiritual principles behind the structure of the horoscope, but I honestely expected a lot more.
July 26, 2014
Probably a good book, but unreadable if you havent spent years studying Sufism from the authors particular viewpoint.
July 8, 2019
The rating was based on my delight at having the privilege of finding and reading such a relatively rare book.
February 25, 2022
A complex wordy book that asks more questions that it answers.
April 3, 2025
Occultist.
April 15, 2025
“Ne Güneş Aya yetişebilir, ne de gece gündüzün önüne geçebilir. Her biri bir felekte yüzüp gitmektedir. ~ sf 68
January 8, 2024
A complex and esoteric subject made unnecessarily hard to grasp because of abysmally poor translation. Burckhardt writes in a convoluted way and likes jargon but the one who translated him into English was so confused he made no sense at all.
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews