Richard Burton’s Terminal Essay on magic, jinn and occult practices
- Date of account
- 1885–1888
- Location
- London; discussions of Egypt, Arabia and the wider Islamic world
- Source
- model_recalled_reference
- Record updated
- 2026-10-10
Record summary
Richard Francis Burton’s Terminal Essay to his privately issued translation of The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night discusses magic, spirits, possession, divination, sexual ritual, and alleged occult survivals across Islamic societies. It is a useful comparative lead because Burton combines travel experience, philological reading, informant testimony, and speculative anthropology. The work is also notorious for sensationalism, uneven sourcing, and Victorian racial and sexual assumptions. Its descriptions are best treated as a historical document about Orientalist knowledge-making, not as verification of supernatural phenomena.
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