Moreover, they maintain that the agent that brings about extraordinary phenomena is either a psychic power or a bodily power. If the power is bodily, it is either elemental or celestial. Thus, the marvels produced through psychic influences, in their view, include miracles, saintly wonders (karāmāt), and sorcery. Those that arise from elemental forces—such as the attraction of a magnet—are what they call nīrangiyyāt, while those that stem from celestial forces are talismans. Celestial powers, however, do not generate a supernatural effect unless they are joined to receptive elemental forces or to active earthly psychic forces; that conjunction is what constitutes a talisman.

Among the thinkers most eager to affirm the reality of extraordinary events is Ibn Sīnā (Avicenna). He reduces their causes to four points. First is the ability to forgo food for a time: the soul becomes absorbed in what befalls it of knowledge, love, fear, and the like, so that it does not feel hunger, because the digestive faculties are preoccupied and cease to break down food. Second is the capacity to perform arduous acts—for instance, when a gnostic can carry out an action or movement that normally exceeds the power of someone like him. Just as the soul, when seized by anger, joy, or a certain exhilaration produced by moderate intoxication and the like, acquires a strength it did not previously possess, so too does it gain power when it experiences the spiritual states of the gnostics. Third is the ability to disclose matters of the unseen, the purport of which is that