From the thirteenth to the fifteenth centuries, a number of historians, jurists, poets, and others writing in Arabic turned their attention to a newly arrived plant, Cannabis indica, noting its psychoactive powers and how it first spread among Sufis. They discuss cannabis’s origins, who uses it and how, and whether or not it should be used. These works range from historical narratives to anecdotal, sometimes humorous, stories to legal remarks, all buttressed by quotations from poetry. Cannabis in Arabic Verse and Prose also includes a famous section from historian al-Maqrīzī’s (1364–1442) influential work on Egypt, excerpts from treatises by lesser-known writers, and the most important text on the subject from this time period by poet al-Badrī (1443–1489). This edition presents the Arabic texts with facing English translations, an Arabic-English glossary, and commentary.

In a text known as the Letter to Melania, or the Great Letter, Christian monastic philosopher Evagrius of Pontus (345–399) delivers a moving meditation on the power of language (spoken and written), the composition of humanity in light of the three persons of God, and the final restoration or apokatastasis when all creatures will be reunited with their creator. Evagrius wrote in Greek, but after his posthumous condemnation in 551, many of his writings, including this letter, survive only in Syriac translation. The first complete edition of the text, which is based on all known Syriac copies, is presented here alongside a new translation, a Syriac-English glossary, and commentary.

Porphyry of Tyre (c. 234–305) was not only the biographer of his teacher Plotinus, and the editor of his Enneads, but an important Platonist philosopher in his own right. On Theology and Theurgy presents two of Porphyry’s texts, preserved in fragments, in which he tries to bring philosophy to bear on religion, and ultimately to align the two. In “Letter to Anebo” and “Philosophy from Oracles,” Porphyry explores questions of reason, revelation, and ritual, of theology and theurgy, of how divination serves divinization. This edition includes the Greek fragments and Latin quotations of both texts with facing English translation, a Greek-English glossary (including Latin equivalents), and a commentary.

What if you were to discover that you were not entirely you, but rather one half of a whole, that you had, in other words, a divine double? In the second and third centuries CE, this idea gripped the religious imagination of the Eastern Mediterranean, providing a distinctive understanding of the self that has survived in various forms throughout the centuries, down to the present. Our Divine Double traces the rise of this ancient idea that each person has a divine counterpart, twin, or alter-ego, and the eventual eclipse of this idea with the rise of Christian conciliar orthodoxy.

Charles Stang marshals an array of ancient sources: from early Christianity, especially texts associated with the apostle Thomas “the twin”; from Manichaeism, a missionary religion based on the teachings of the “apostle of light” that had spread from Mesopotamia to the Mediterranean; and from Neoplatonism, a name given to the renaissance of Platonism associated with the third-century philosopher Plotinus. Each of these traditions offers an understanding of the self as an irreducible unity-in-duality. To encounter one’s divine double is to embark on a path of deification that closes the gap between image and archetype, human and divine.

While the figure of the divine double receded from the history of Christianity with the rise of conciliar orthodoxy, it survives in two important discourses from late antiquity: theodicy, or the problem of evil; and Christology, the exploration of how the Incarnate Christ is both human and divine.

The Pearlsong is an ancient poem that recounts the story of a Parthian prince sent by his parents on a mission to Egypt to retrieve a pearl from the clutches of a giant serpent. Along the way, the prince falls asleep and forgets his identity and mission. A letter from his parents awakens him, gives him a spell to put the serpent to sleep so he can retrieve the pearl, and then guides him home. The poem was originally composed in Syriac, translated into Greek, and later paraphrased in Greek again in a homily. These three texts are all published here with a parallel English translation on facing pages, accompanied by an introduction, commentary, and Syriac and Greek glossaries.