Morocco
Article
Morocco is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 5 times across 5 issues between May 24, 2021 and June 18, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as “Nights stretches from Morocco to China, across at least four centuries”; “Usually practiced by sorcerers, whose natural habitat is Morocco”; “natural habitat is Morocco (I don’t know where this stereotype comes from)“. It most often appears alongside China, Congress, India.
Metadata
- Category: Places
- Mention count: 5
- Issue count: 5
- First seen: May 24, 2021
- Last seen: June 18, 2025
Appears In
- Book Review: Arabian Nights
- ACX Grants: Project Updates
- My Presidential Platform
- Fake Tradition Is Traditional
- ACX Grants 1-3 Year Updates
Related Pages
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- China (3 shared issues)
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- Congress (3 shared issues)
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- India (3 shared issues)
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- Scott (3 shared issues)
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- 1DaySooner (2 shared issues)
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- acanthamoeba keratitis (2 shared issues)
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- ACX (2 shared issues)
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- African Swine Fever (2 shared issues)
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- Alice Evans (2 shared issues)
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- ALLFED (2 shared issues)
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- Australia (2 shared issues)
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- ClearerThinking.org (2 shared issues)
External Links
Source Context
Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.
Nights stretches from Morocco to China, across at least four centuries - and throughout that whole panoply of times and places, your wife is always cheating on you with a black man (if you're black, don't worry; she is cheating on you with a different black man). It's a weird constant. Maybe it's the author's fetish. I realize that Nights includes folktales written over centuries by dozens of different people - from legends passed along in caravanserais, to stories getting collected and written down, to manuscripts brought to Europe, to Richard Burton writing the classic English translation, to the abridged and updated version of Burton I read. But somewhere in that process, probably multiple places, someone had a fetish about their wife cheating on them with a black man, and boy did they insert it into the story.
Magic: Usually practiced by sorcerers, whose natural habitat is Morocco (I don't know where this stereotype comes from). Sorcerers cast "geomantic tables", which tell them whatever they need to know. Usually this is that the treasure they seek can only be found by some random virtuous poor person with the right astrological chart; Disney's Aladdin's "diamond in the rough" plot point is very faithful here. Some sorcerers are nice to their astrological patsies and usually do well. Others try to double-cross them, and get their comeuppance. The big prize for a successful sorcerer is a ring with a genie bound to it; once you've got one of those, you've got it made.
Witchcraft: Totally different from sorcery. Sorcery is always performed by men, witchcraft by women. Sorcerers are always from Morocco, witches can be from anywhere. Sorcerers dig up genie-associated treasures, witches turn people into animals. In order to perform witchcraft, chant some spells over a jug of water, then sprinkle the water on someone and say "Turn into a [type of animal!]" In some forms of witchcraft, this only works if you can make the victim eat cursed food beforehand, so don’t eat any food prepared by suspected witches.
4: Alice Evans’ Research On “The Great Gender Divergence” (?/10) Dr. Evans has done over four months of research in Morocco, Italy, India, and Turkey. You can find some of her most recent thoughts at her blog here. Her book is still on track to be published from Princeton Press, more details tbd.
Inline links: at her blog here, book
Any black person who claims to be a citizen of Morocco (in some sense) will be bound by the rights and obligations listed in the US’ 1786 treaty with Morocco instead of normal citizenship laws. If the US’ 1786 treaty with Morocco contains no clauses related to rights or obligations (which I am told is true) then I will renegotiate it to contain those clauses.
I don’t have a great explanation for why I like the one on the left so much better. Some of it might be about creativity: “what’s the best idea you can think of?” might not be a fertile prompt. “How did the Moors do it?” might be a great prompt, especially if you know nothing about Morocco and you end up getting it totally wrong. Your imaginary version of Morocco, or the way you fill in the blanks in your idealized version of Morocco, or what happens when Morocco collides with everything else in your brain, might be more interesting than whatever you invent from whole cloth.
Since 2022, Alice has undertaken qualitative research in nine world regions: Mexico, Costa Rica, Brazil, Morocco, Italy, Spain, Britain, US, Poland, Turkey, India, Uzbekistan, South Korea and Hong Kong. Through this globally comparative analysis, she analyses the drivers and obstacles to gender equality. Gender interventions will be more impactful if they target locally binding constraints - in the Middle East, North Africa and South Asia, this is "the honour-income trade-off" (whereby male honour depends on female seclusion, and women tend to remain at home. Meanwhile, Latin America and the Caribbean face a different obstacle: pervasive violence elevates femicides. Over the past few years, she's held visiting appointments at Stanford, Chicago, and Yale, while providing policy advice to the World Bank, and sharing insights with a public audience via Substack (www.ggd.world). In April 2025, she gave a TedTalk on romantic love as an under-rated driver of gender equality.