The science of talismans today

Abstract

The science of talismans was cultivated in Arabic, Greek, and Latin in the first millennium AD and entered European vernaculars in the seventeenth century. Its primary concern is the ability of images to produce effects in the world, even at a distance. In the eighteenth century, European intellectual discourse rejected the talisman on physical, moral, and aesthetic grounds. Today, it has returned and forms the object of distinctive and mutually complementary programs of study in art history, anthropology, and media studies. Its primary interest lies in its account of visual form as an intelligible cause and thereby as a mediator between distinct domains of experience.