Picatrix

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A sage who would master the work must first make himself one thing, the book says near its start: collect the scattered powers of the soul into a single attention, as a beam is gathered to a point, for only the gathered soul draws down the gathered virtue of a star. Everything that follows in the Ghāyat al-Ḥakīm — the planetary correspondences, the suffumigations, the consecrated images of metal and stone — rests on that premise. The cosmos is a chain of descending influence; the sage learns where in the chain to stand, and at what hour, so that what pours down from the heavens collects in the thing he has made. The Latin West called the book, and sometimes its author, Picatrix.

The Ghāyat al-Ḥakīm wa-aḥaqq al-natījatayn bi-l-taqdīm — “The Goal of the Sage and the Most Worthy of the Two Outcomes for Priority” — is the foremost Arabic handbook of astral and talismanic magic, composed in al-Andalus in the second half of the tenth century. It is the great synthesis of its subject: it gathers, into one architecture, the Neoplatonic doctrine of emanation, the astrology of planetary causation, the science of sympathetic correspondence between the celestial and terrestrial worlds, and the craft of the ṭilasm — the talisman, the constructed object into which a stellar power is drawn and bound. Through its Latin recension it became the single most consequential channel by which this Islamicate Hermetic cosmology reached the magi of the Renaissance.

The name and the title

The Arabic title is double, as Arabic book-titles often are: a plain name and a rhyming flourish. The Ghāya — the goal, the utmost — of the sage; and then the boast, that of two possible outcomes this is the one most deserving to come first. The Latin name Picatrix is a corruption, and not of the title but of a name. It descends from an authorial ascription, Buqrāṭīs, that scribes mangled across the language frontier into Picatrix — which the Latin readers then took, variously, for the name of the author, of the translator, or of the book itself. Henry Corbin proposed that Buqrāṭīs stood behind a Greek “Hippocrates” or “Harpocration”; the derivation is not secure, and the safer reading leaves Buqrāṭīs an opaque relic of the transmission rather than a recoverable Greek name.

Composition: al-Andalus, the later tenth century

The book was written in Muslim Spain, in the cultivated Córdoba of the late Umayyad caliphate, in the second half of the tenth century. Its own text fixes the lower bound: it refers back to the Rutbat al-Ḥakīm — “The Rank of the Sage,” an alchemical treatise by the same hand, completed in 343 of the Hijra, which is 954 of the common era. The Ghāya therefore comes after 954. An older bibliographical tradition, descending from Carl Brockelmann, dated the work to around 1047–1051; that range reflects the dates of surviving manuscripts and of the work’s circulation, not of its composition, and has been set aside.

Authorship is the more contested matter, and it turns on a long-standing misattribution. Since Ibn Khaldūn in the fourteenth century, the Ghāya — like the Rutbat al-Ḥakīm before it — was credited to Maslama b. Aḥmad al-Majrīṭī, the celebrated Cordoban mathematician and astronomer (d. c. 1007), the man who adapted the Khwārizmī astronomical tables to the meridian of Córdoba. Maribel Fierro, in a 1996 study in Studia Islamica, dismantled the attribution. The author of both the Rutbat and the Ghāya, she showed, was a different and near-contemporary Maslama: Maslama b. Qāsim al-Qurṭubī (d. 353/964), a Sunni ḥadīth-scholar and traveler of bāṭinī — esotericist — sympathies, whose dates fit the internal evidence and whose intellectual profile fits the book far better than the sober mathematician’s. The re-identification is now the consensus of the specialists, confirmed with fresh manuscript evidence by Godefroid de Callataÿ and Sébastien Moureau in Al-Qanṭara in 2016. A separate Maslama al-Majrīṭī remains attached, in some bibliographies, to the recension of the encyclopedic Epistles of the Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ; that is a distinct tangle, and the Picatrix’s authorship is best held to the al-Qurṭubī attribution and left there.

The architecture of the work

The Ghāya is divided into four books, and its method is accretive rather than systematic — it quarries and stitches, in the manner of the great Arabic compendia, drawing on more than two hundred sources. Beneath the quarrying runs a single cosmological frame, and it is Neoplatonic. From the First Cause emanates intellect, from intellect soul, from soul the world of the spheres; influence descends, rung by rung, from the One through the planetary intelligences into the sublunar world of generation and decay. The heavens are not symbols of the lower world but its causes. Each planet governs its own register of metals, stones, plants, animals, colors, scents, temperaments, hours, and human types, and these registers are bound across the levels of being by sympathy — the doctrine the Hermetic literature compresses into the formula as above, so below. To know the correspondences is to know where the chain of influence runs, and the ṭilasm is the device that taps it.

A talisman, in this system, is not a charm worn for luck but an instrument of applied cosmology. The maker assembles a material — a particular metal, a particular stone — that already belongs to a particular planet’s chain; he forms it under the celestial configuration in which that planet’s power is at its height; and the descending stellar rūḥāniyya, the spiritual influence the Latin translators rendered as spiritus, collects in the object as in a fitted vessel. The talisman is thus a node where the heavens are made to act locally and on purpose. The architecture of the practice is what concerns the cosmologist; the operative detail — the recipes, the suffumigation formulae, the hour-by-hour procedures and the invocations that fill the book’s working chapters — is the trade-craft of a manual, and the book is, unmistakably, a manual.

Its theory of how the influence travels is the same theory the philosopher al-Kindī had set out in the previous century in his De radiis: every body in the cosmos emits rays, the stars most powerfully of all, and the whole web of action at a distance — astrology, magic, the efficacy of words and images — is the physics of those rays. The Ghāya is in many ways the working application of that ray-cosmology, and the Latin Picatrix and the Latin De radiis would later travel the same roads into Europe together.

The sources: a contested genealogy

The materials the Ghāya synthesizes come from many directions, and naming them has been one of the long projects of scholarship. The book draws on Hellenistic and late-antique astrology; on the Neoplatonic emanationism of the Greek philosophical inheritance; on Babylonian and pseudo-Babylonian planet- and image-lore; on the cosmology of the Ismaili Epistles of the Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ; and on the technical Hermetic corpus. David Pingree demonstrated in 1980 that long passages of the Ghāya were quarried wholesale from the pseudo-Aristotelian Hermetic cycle — the Isṭamākhīs, Isṭimāṭīs, and Ustuwwaṭās — the deep stratum of Arabic astral magic out of which much of the genre is built.

One thread in this genealogy now needs a caution. An older and influential reconstruction, associated above all with Pingree and with Michel Tardieu, routed the astral and Hermetic technical sciences into Arabic through the pagan star-worshippers of Ḥarrān in upper Mesopotamia — the community absorbed under the Qurʾanic category of the Ṣābiʾūn, the “Sabians” — imagined as a continuous living temple-tradition that preserved a Hellenistic astral religion intact into Abbasid times. Kevin van Bladel’s The Arabic Hermes (2009) has substantially revised that picture. The technical Hermetica, on the current view, reached Arabic chiefly through Middle Persian Sasanian intermediaries and late-antique Christian chronography, and the “Ḥarrānian Sabian” channel is far more thinly evidenced than the older narrative supposed. The Sabian-Ḥarrānian provenance of the Ghāya’s materials is therefore a contested reconstruction, not a settled fact — and the book is better understood as an Andalusi synthesis of an already long-Arabicized tradition than as a transcript of Ḥarrānian temple-lore.

Into Latin: the court of Alfonso X

The Ghāya crossed into the Latin world at the one court most given to such crossings. Alfonso X of Castile — el Sabio, “the Learned” — gathered at Toledo, in the third quarter of the thirteenth century, the great translation atelier from which the Castilian astronomical and astrological corpus poured. Between 1256 and 1258, the Ghāya was rendered there in two stages: first into Castilian, by Yehudah ben Moshe ha-Kohen — the king’s physician and a Toledan rabbi, one of the most active of the Alfonsine translators — and then, from the Castilian, into Latin by a further, unnamed hand. The Castilian intermediate survives only in a few fragmentary folios; the Latin took on a life of its own. The Latin translators did not render the whole. They omitted passages they found philosophically difficult or doctrinally offensive, so that the Latin Picatrix is a leaner, partly bowdlerized book — a recension, not a mirror, of the Arabic original.

This is the channel that mattered for Europe. The technical Hermes of the Arabic world — the sage of astral causation, sympathetic correspondence, and talismanic image-making — reached the Latin West not through the Greek Corpus Hermeticum, which arrived only in the fifteenth century, but through the twelfth- and thirteenth-century translation schools, and the Picatrix is the most consequential single text that came that way.

The Renaissance reception

The book circulated in Latin manuscript for two centuries before it found its most famous reader. When Marsilio Ficino composed De vita coelitus comparanda — “On Drawing Life Down from the Heavens,” the third book of his De vita of 1489 — he built a Christianized, carefully hedged theory of astral medicine and image-magic in which a spiritus mundi, a world-spirit, carries celestial influence into talismanic objects prepared at the right hours under the right stars. The debt to the Picatrix is direct and demonstrable, even where Ficino works to keep his magic “natural” and licit and to disclaim its demonic uses. Through Ficino the book’s central operation — drawing celestial spiritus into a consecrated image — entered the bloodstream of Renaissance philosophy.

It went on from there. Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, Ficino’s younger contemporary, knew the astral-magical materials; Cornelius Agrippa drew on the Picatrix in building the three-world architecture of his De occulta philosophia; Giordano Bruno used its planetary image-magic in his works on memory and on the bonds that join all things; and Tommaso Campanella, at the far end of the Renaissance, performed astral rites in the Ficinian manner against an evil eclipse. One qualification belongs here, and it cuts against an older grand narrative. It was once supposed — the thesis is Frances Yates’s — that a unified “Hermetic tradition,” released into Europe by Ficino’s translation of the Greek Corpus, powered the magical Renaissance. The later philology has pulled this apart: the Greek Corpus Hermeticum is largely a body of philosophical dialogues with little magic in it, while the genuinely magical Hermes — the statue-animating passages of the Asclepius and the astral operations of the Picatrix — was already in Latin hands in the Middle Ages, long before Ficino. The Picatrix, on this corrected view, is not one tributary of a Hermetic Renaissance but a principal source in its own right, and an older one than the texts the Renaissance mythologized.

The text and its scholarship {#research}

The Arabic and Latin Picatrix are, properly, two texts, and each has its standard modern edition. The Arabic Ghāya was edited by Hellmut Ritter as Pseudo-Maǧrīṭī: Das Ziel des Weisen (Studien der Bibliothek Warburg XII; Leipzig and Berlin: Teubner, 1933), still the standard Arabic text; a German translation by Ritter and Martin Plessner followed from the Warburg Institute in 1962. The Latin recension was edited critically by David Pingree as Picatrix: The Latin Version of the Ghāyat al-Ḥakīm (Studies of the Warburg Institute 39; London: Warburg Institute, 1986), the indispensable scholarly Latin text. The Latin tradition survives in roughly twenty manuscripts; the most cited are Kraków, Biblioteka Jagiellońska 793 — a mid-fifteenth-century copy, the only illustrated one — together with London, British Library Sloane 1305, and Vatican, Reg. lat. 1283a.

The re-attribution of the work is set out in Maribel Fierro, “Bāṭinism in al-Andalus. Maslama b. Qāsim al-Qurṭubī (d. 353/964), Author of the Rutbat al-Ḥakīm and the Ghāyat al-Ḥakīm (Picatrix),” Studia Islamica 84 (1996), 87–112 (JSTOR record), and confirmed, with new manuscript data, by Godefroid de Callataÿ and Sébastien Moureau, “Again on Maslama Ibn Qāsim al-Qurṭubī, the Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ and Ibn Khaldūn,” in Al-Qanṭara 37 (2016) (open record). The transmission history of the Arabic technical Hermetica — and the revision of the older Ḥarrānian-Sabian narrative — is the subject of Kevin van Bladel, The Arabic Hermes: From Pagan Sage to Prophet of Science (Oxford University Press, 2009).

For readers in English, the standard access is Dan Attrell and David Porreca, Picatrix: A Medieval Treatise on Astral Magic (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2019), translated from Pingree’s Latin (publisher page). A full critical English translation of the Arabic Ghāya, by Liana Saif, is in advanced preparation, and will give the Arabophone text — fuller than the bowdlerized Latin — to readers without Arabic for the first time. The earlier English versions made from the Latin by John Michael Greer and Christopher Warnock, and from a partial Arabic by Hashem Atallah, are in wide circulation but are not relied upon for scholarly citation.

What the documentary record establishes is firm and worth keeping distinct from what it does not. The book’s place of composition, its terminus after 954, its two-stage Castilian-then-Latin translation under Alfonso X, and its use by Ficino are matters of philological evidence; the al-Qurṭubī authorship is now well-grounded; the quarrying of the pseudo-Aristotelian Hermetica is demonstrated. The continuous Ḥarrānian-Sabian temple-tradition behind it, and the unified Hermetic Renaissance the book was once made to serve, are the parts that have not survived close inspection — and the Picatrix stands free of both, an Andalusi sage’s gathering of the science of the stars, written so that a soul made one might draw the heavens down into a thing held in the hand.

→ Related: Arabic Hermetica · Astral Talismanic Magic · Hermes Trismegistus · Marsilio Ficino · Cornelius Agrippa · Talisman · Astrology · Al Kindi · Corpus Hermeticum · Giordano Bruno