When nineteenth-century Deccan merchants set out from the Kollur diamond mine, they consulted strange square diagrams to determine which days to travel, what to eat before leaving (coriander seeds on Tuesday, jaggery on Thursday), and how to position themselves relative to the rijāl al-ghayb — the “men of the Unseen,” a Sufi concept from Ibn ʿArabī that Ottoman sailors treated as a physical hazard roaming in a circular orbit around the earth. These charts come from a now-lost Urdu manuscript, Jaʿfar Sharīf’s Qanoon-e-Islam, translated in 1832 by the East India Company surgeon Gerhard Herklots, and they encode a palimpsest of intellectual history: the invisible constellation shukur yulduz that Mughal emperor Babur kept at his back in battle was never seen by any astronomer, yet it travelled from India through Buddhist Central Asia to Turkic courts and back south with the Mughals, requiring charts to locate a thing that doesn’t exist. Mathilde Montpetit traces how the superstitions of practical merchants preserved a trail of forgotten astronomy, Sufi mysticism, and the movement of ideas across four empires.