Moorish scientific Hermeticism

One night, in the plausibly near future of the verse, an Andalusian observatory will discover the planet that we know by the name of Pluto.

A few nights later, a bunch of astronomers will gather in their jamia, bringing with them an enormous set of odd paraphernalia. They will bring with them bottles of wine, and bottles of cider, and bottles of other liquors, and plenty of water for tea and chocolate. They will bring whatever it is that they smoke, and whatever it is that they need to smoke it with. They will bring stacks of books - maps of the night sky, and biographies, mostly.

They will sit down and plot out, over glasses of drinks, important questions, like "What was Pluto doing when all these people were born? What college was it in? What was it occluding? Where was it relatively to all else?" And they will work this out, and account for this in the horoscopes of the great men of history. (And some great women too.)

And when they have established this, they will then ask the ensuing question: "What are the differences between what the original uncorrected horoscope would suggest, and what actually happened?" And they will observe this, and record it for the record.

And over the course of many such questions, they will ask a third question: "All of these horoscopes, across centuries and continents - what trends do we observe about the ways the horoscopes failed to account for the lives that fell under them? What is constant when Pluto is on the cusp of this, or occluding that?"

Bit by bit, scouring the archives of the world, they will theorize the astrological significance of Pluto to a very high standard of rigor. And if you tell them that what they're doing isn't science at all, they'll stare blankly.

And then put their cigars out in your eye.

Luciferianism and the Black Death

Moorish Spain has a rather occult modernity.

IRL, there was a Hermetic Reformation in the early 1500s: Pico della Mirandola, Giordano Bruno, Paracelsus, and a few others that come to mind. It didn't go anywhere really big in Europe, for the perfectly valid reason that Europe at the time was having a much bigger shakeup in the form of the Protestant Reformation. Seville, however, isn't going to have that kind of shakeup. I don't see any new madhhab arising from its Malikism (although maybe a few tariqas from its late Sufism?) Everything about the flow of history points to the fact that the world-shaking events of the 1500s are simply going to reinforce their attitudes of (Maliki, Moorish) Islam as universal empire.

In that context, seizing on Bruno and della Mirandola would be a way to shake things up, emphasizing that Moorish Islam is a very different beast from the Turkish juggernaut that dominates the rest of Islamic Eurasia - and letting them enter modernity as the weird uncle of Europe rather than having modernity happen to them.

The problem is historiography.

Things don't just happen. In most universes, people assume that the way things happened for them are the only way it could have. They also perceive this as part of a continuity of progression from the past, especially with something (like Hermeticism) that draws its authority from its antiquity. Andalusada is going to write its own history, and given Moorish Hermeticism, they're going to wonder "Where was the occultism that Moorish Hermeticism came from in the past?"

I have an idea. It involves the Black Death.