The copy of the Book of Theriac conserved in Paris is decorated with a number of paintings, including a remarkable frontispiece divided into two facing full-page miniatures (fo36vo, fo37r). Each folio is composed of two rectangular cartouches, with the upper and lower parts delimiting a square that contains an identical iconographic composition. The calligraphy in the four cartouches gives the name of the scribe: “The humblest of God’s servants – Glory be to Him! Muhammad ibn al-Sa‘īd Abū’l Fath, son of the well guided imam, Abū’l-Hasan, son of the beneficent imam”. Each miniature illustrates a central, hieratic figure, haloed and crowned like a ruler, seated cross-legged and holding in front of him a large openwork, gilded circle that tapers towards the top and resembles a crescent. The central figure, dressed in a robe that is green on the right and bluish on the left, stands out against an orange ground; on either side of him are two small figures inscribed in a circle formed by the bodies of a counter-rampant double dragon in turn framed by four winged beings in the corners that resemble angels.

At first glance the two compositions seem identical but they are differentiated by several minor details: the colour of the clothes (in tones of orangey-yellow, green, blue and pink), the hairstyles, the decoration on the crowns, and the positions of the peripheral figures. Since the early studies by Bishr Farès and Guitty Azarpay, the central figure has been identified as the Moon seated in majesty, surrounded by courtiers and angels. The different known representations of the moon on metal in Islamic art – the Artukid Mirroir of 1153 in the State Hermitage Museum or the late twelfth-century Vaso Vescovali in the British Museum – show us the planet associated with its crescent phase in an identical manner, which was to become the canonical representation of the Moon in the Orient. Of course, it is the Sun, Shamash, which is customarily associated with power in the redistribution of tasks to the children of the planets, which followed on from Hellenistic astrology.

Nevertheless, in certain cosmologies, for example, that of the Ikhwān al-Hafā’, the Moon occupies a privileged position and can be considered a sort of rival to the Sun, a vizier but also a claimant to the throne and challenger to the legal power. The Moon is described as being accompanied by angels and wrapped in a white cloak. For others the presence of a crown is indicative, in the Muslim world, of the temporal power of the sultans and troops in the pay of the caliph, attributes that the Seljuks and Ghaznavids trace back to their wish to imitate the old dynasty of the Sassanids. Although the colophon gives no exact indication of the work’s place of origin, the art of the miniature was common to Upper Mesopotamia and northern Iran during the rule of the Seljuks of Anatolia and Iran, which has been studied by the art historians Souren A. Mélikian-Chirvani, Rachel Ward, Oleg Grabar, and many more. The figures wear floral robes, golden armbands and haloes, and their similar full, rounded faces bring to mind that one of the canons of beauty during the Seljuk and later Mongol era was the mahrū, or face of the moon...

This promotion of the Moon, which is illustrated twice in the frontispiece, is [logically gives us] the place where it was painted (probably in Mesopotamia), where for centuries the Moon was venerated under the name of Sīn, but also later promoted to the rank of tutelary heavenly body in accordance with the theory of astrological geography. Indeed, according to the theory of the Hermetic analogies taken up and developed by the astrologers Abū Ma‘shar in the ninth century and al-Bīrūnī in the eleventh, the celestial bodies each affect one of the seven divisions of the Earth with their influence and characteristics. Whether intentionally or not, the frontispiece of the Book of Theria_ takes us into a very distant past that dates back to the mythic founders of royalty in the Orient, to an epoch when the gods invested and consecrated kings. In the Sumerian pantheon, the god Sīn–Nanna(r), the son of Enlil (the sky), was one of Mesopotamia’s most important divinities, and was in turn the father of more gods: Shamash (the Sun) and Ishtar (Venus). His cult, which was referred to in the eighth and seventh centuries BC, was of Aramean or proto-Aramean origin.

It is thought to have been introduced to Syria and Mesopotamia by southern Arabs, and subsequently enjoyed an era of splendour before falling into decline during the Sumerian-Akkadian period. His most glorious period was during the ninth century BC under Shalmaneser III (829-24 BC), during which the crescent moon triumphed as an emblem. Ashurbanipal was the last great neo-Assyrian sovereign (668-27 BC) to worship Sīn at Harrān as the “guardian of [his] royal tiara”. His cult was later supplanted by that of Bēl Mardūk, a Uranian divinity and the principal god of Babylon, until it experienced a phase of renewal during the reigns of the last king of Babylon, Nabū Nā’id (555-39 BC), assisted by his mother the high priestess of Sīn. The king, Nabū Nā’id, who has been particularly well studied by Pierre-André Beaulieu, distinguished himself by his activity as a builder at the service of Sīn and restored the sanctuary of the Moon at Harrān, which was known in Sumerian by the name E.ḪUL.ḪUL, and in Akkadian as Shubat Khidāti, or “house of joy”.

This fact was mentioned during the reign of Sargon. Sīn demoted the great god Mardūk until the Persian invasion of Cyrus and Cambyses, when the places of the ancient gods were restored. The Moon god Sīn was venerated as the one who dispensed the essence of royalty because he was attributed with the capacity of bestowing it and withdrawing it from kings. He was also attributed with the power to judge and arbitrate on Earth as in the Heavens, as the Ode to Hammurabi shows. The crescent and royalty are therefore associated in a symbolic sharing of power, in the manner illustrated by the frontispiece of the manuscript. Upper Mesopotamia (northern Iraq) maintained a particular attachment to this divinity: as Tamara Green has demonstrated, the city of Harrān, situated to the north-east of Edessa, was for several centuries “the city of the Moon god”, and was visited by followers of the night star who came to worship it from all around, including the Roman emperors Julian and Caracalla. Harrān, whose inhabitants had refused to convert to Christianity, and later to Islam, played – as David Pingree has shown – an important role in the transmission of astral magic and the survival of the planetary cults to which the city’s population was given. The residents called themselves Sabians in order to escape the conversion to Islam that was being forced upon them in the ninth century by Caliph al-Ma’mūn.

The survival of the rituals dedicated to planetary worship is attested, however, in the calendar of festivals in the book Fihrist written in the ninth century by Ibn al-Nadīm. In the tenth century, in his Meadows of Gold, the encyclopaedist Mas‘ūdī referred to the disappearance of the planet cult, to the presence of ruins on the sites of their temples, and to the survival of geometric pedestals (which resemble those in Indian temples) that had previously supported the planetary idols. Even so, during the same period the Ikhwān al-Hafā’, or “Brothers of Purity”, an Ismaili sect from Basra, described some of the Sabian magical practices in their chapters on astrology and magic, with the purpose of building a neo-Platonian type of cosmology that had eschatological and messianic aims. And although planetary worship seemed to have disappeared, the cosmographer al-Dismashqī was perfectly aware of it in the thirteenth century, which is suggestive of either a perfect local memory of them or a conserved description.

Furthermore, Book III of a compendium of astral magic compiled in al-Andalous in the eleventh century, with the title Ġōyat al-Hakīm (The Aim of the Sage), on which great importance is placed by the scholar David Pingree and orientalists David Plessner and Hellmut Ritter, presents us with very precise elements of ceremonial magic that focus on the cults of the Harranians. However, in this book the place of the Moon is identical to that of the other planets. Nevertheless, one of the central contributions to these planetary cults remains the iconography of the planets, of which the frontispiece to the Book of Theriac provides one of the best examples, with its immortalisation of the Moon as the bearer of a crescent. The iconography of the god Sīn was known in the second millennium on the stele of Ur-Nammu, the founder of the third dynasty of Ur (2150 BC), where he is seen as a male divinity with a long beard, his head surmounted by a crescent, handing the baton and sceptre to the king. It also exists on neo-Assyrian stelae, for example, the one found at Asagi Yarimca. The symbol originally came from Failaka, an island off the coast of Kuwait. It is thought to have been introduced to southern Mesopotamia during the second millennium, and to have appeared at Harrān in the first millennium.

Thanks to the Assyrians and Arameans, the crescent spread in all directions between the ninth and seventh centuries BC. The cult radiated throughout the region up to 150 km from Harrān. Its crescent-shaped emblems at the top of a pillar represented the new moon that had defeated darkness, and spread between the eighth and fifth centuries BC. It was this same crescent that the Muslim world was to take as one of its most important emblems: it was displayed on monuments, equipment and royal attributes, and was to remain strongly linked to the lunar calendar that Islam adopted.

Text by Anna Caiozzo

In collaboration with: www.abocamuseum.it