Zar spirit possession in Sudan today is grounded in rituals derived from the ranks of the nineteenth-century Ottoman army, based on long-term ethnographic research in Sennar supported by life history data and archival documentation. The practice has accommodated ongoing changes linked to the interplay of Zar with Islam and Christianity. During colonial periods, European Christian Zar spirits were remembered as far more important; today authority has shifted to spirits of foreign Muslims, local holy men, and subaltern Blacks, reflecting concerns of new generations as political and religious landscapes transform.
The introduction to a special issue proposes analyzing Western learned magic as an entangled tradition, calling for an interdisciplinary, transcultural, and transreligious perspective on its history. A working heuristic of seven types of entanglement is offered, with special emphasis on ritual hybridisation—processes where rituals reflect millennia-long textual-ritual transmission across cultural and religious boundaries. The introduction summarizes six contributions from a September 2019 workshop at the University of Bochum's Center for Religious Studies, which explore this entangled history.