Picatrix (Ghayat al-Hakim)

The Latin title by which this work is known in Europe is a corruption, probably of an Arabic name, and it has stuck so thoroughly that the original title is the one that needs introducing. In Arabic it is the Ghayat al-Hakim, the Goal of the Sage, and it is the most substantial surviving manual of astral magic from the medieval Islamic world.

David Pingree did the source-critical work. The compilation, put together in al-Andalus in roughly the tenth or eleventh century, draws on Harranian Sabian planetary religion, on Greek and Hellenistic astrological material transmitted through Arabic, on Indian sources, and on the Arabic hermetica. It is a synthesis of an already long tradition rather than a single author's system, and its attribution to the mathematician al-Majriti is not sustainable.

It entered Europe by a specific and documented route. It was translated into Castilian at the court of Alfonso X of Castile in the thirteenth century, as part of the same programme of translation that produced that court's astronomical tables, and a Latin version followed from the Castilian. This is why the book is in European libraries at all, and why Renaissance magicians could read it.

Its practical importance is that it supplies the operative half of a system whose theoretical half came from the Hermetic and Neoplatonic texts. The talismanic magic of the Renaissance, images engraved in specific metals at astrologically elected moments, with suffumigations and invocations matched to a planet, is substantially this book's procedure. Ficino's own cautious astral medicine draws on it. Agrippa uses it. Much of the material in later grimoires descends from it, generally without attribution.

There is a point about intellectual geography worth stating plainly. The standard narrative of Western esotericism runs from Egypt through Greece to Renaissance Italy, and this book does not fit that line. It is an Arabic work, compiled in Muslim Spain, drawing on Syrian, Indian and Greek sources, and it reached Europe because a Castilian king paid for translations. Removing it from the account would leave the practical tradition without its main technical source.

The Picatrix is long, roughly four hundred pages in modern editions, and it is a working manual rather than a treatise. Its four books set out how to make astral talismans: what image to engrave, in what material, at what astrological moment, with what suffumigation and what invocation, in order to draw down the power of a planet or a star for a stated purpose. Those purposes are entirely practical and often unedifying, running to love, wealth, the ruin of an enemy and the destruction of a city.

It is also a philosophical work, and the two halves sit awkwardly together. The theoretical passages present a Neoplatonic cosmology in which the operator works with the natural sympathies of a living universe; the operative passages describe rites involving blood, unpleasant ingredients and prayers to planetary spirits that are hard to read as anything but address to a god.

That combination made it the most compromising book a Renaissance scholar could own. It circulated widely in manuscript and was not printed, which is itself informative: the Latin version, made for Alfonso X of Castile in the thirteenth century, was too useful to destroy and too dangerous to publish.

Modern scholarship has largely detached the work from al-Majriti, the Andalusian mathematician whose name it carries, and treats the Arabic original as an eleventh century compilation drawing on much older Hellenistic and Harranian material.