This is a tale of two stories tied together across a century of cosmological and epistemological change. The first of these stories takes place in the Western Sahara Desert of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, where two Sufi scholars, Muḥammad ibn al-Mukhtār al-Kuntī and ʿAbdallāh ibn al-Ḥājj Ibrahīm al-ʿAlawī, debated a category of Islamic knowledge alternatively called "the sciences of the unseen," or "sorcery." My analysis demonstrates that, even though these two scholars disagreed about the permissibility of engaging with the sciences of the unseen, they shared the same underlying cosmological and metaphysical assumptions about how these practices worked. My discussion then turns to a short, and previously unstudied, work entitled "Easing the Heart in Discussing Sorcery," by the renowned Senegalese Sufi, Musa Kamara, who lived at the turn of the twentieth century, during the French colonial occupation. This work heavily cites the earlier debate between Muḥammad al-Kuntī and ʿAbdallāh al-ʿAlawī, but often strips the debate over sorcery of its cosmological foundations, resulting in a list of practices that the French would call "superstitious magic." While abundant scholarship has traced the development of the idea of "religion" from the Roman religiones until today, the development of "superstition" has received scant attention. The two stories examined in this paper provide a lens into the colonial-era cosmological transformations that turn true knowledge and effective practice into an assortment of irrational legends and habits.