The Picatrix: The Goal of the Sage

Take a stone engraved at the right hour, it says, when the Moon is in the right mansion and the right planet is rising, and the power of the heavens will pour down into the image you have cut. Burn the right incense, speak the prayer to the planet in its own words, and wear the talisman. This is the teaching of the Ghāyat al-Ḥakīm, "The Goal of the Sage", an Arabic handbook of astral magic written in Muslim Spain. In Latin Europe it was called Picatrix, and for five centuries it was the most complete manual of talismanic magic that European readers had.

The book

• Written in Arabic, probably in al-Andalus in the tenth or eleventh century. It is a compilation, drawing on Hermetic, Sabian (Harranian), Neoplatonic, Indian and Persian material, and names dozens of earlier works.
• Four books: on the heavens and the nature of magic; on the figures of the heavens and the making of talismans; on the properties of the planets and their prayers; on spirits, the Sabian rites, and potions and fumigations.
• It teaches that the universe is one, that the lower world receives the influence of the higher, and that the sage who understands the correspondences can draw down celestial power, the rūḥāniyyāt, "spiritual forces" of the planets.

Who wrote it?

• Many manuscripts name Maslama al-Majrīṭī (d. c. 1007), the Córdoban astronomer; modern scholarship calls this pseudo-Majrīṭī.
• In 1996 Maribel Fierro argued for another Córdoban, Maslama ibn Qāsim al-Qurṭubī (d. 964), and later scholars (Godefroid de Callataÿ, Sébastien Moureau) have supported her. Others keep the question open.

The translation

At the court of Alfonso X of Castile, the text was put into Castilian between 1256 and 1258, and from the Castilian into Latin. The Latin Picatrix shortened the philosophy and changed or dropped passages tied to Islamic practice. It was copied throughout late medieval and Renaissance Europe and was known to Marsilio Ficino and Cornelius Agrippa. The origin of the name "Picatrix" is itself uncertain; the Latin preface presents it as the name of the author.

Symbology and sacred encoding

Lunar mansions. The Moon's monthly course is divided into 28 mansions, each with its own image and uses; a talisman is made when the Moon is in the mansion that suits the work.

Planetary images. For each planet the book gives the figures to be engraved, the metals, stones, colours, incenses and animals that belong to it, and the hours and days it rules: a complete system of correspondences.

Prayers to the planets. The planets are addressed as powers with names and costumes, drawing on the traditions attributed to the star-worshipping Sabians of Harran.

Connections

Islam (ch21), with Theosophy & the Occult Revival (ch37) for the Western magical tradition that drew on it. Compare the Emerald Tablet (V03), the Sefer Yetzirah (V80) for another book of correspondences, and the Book of Soyga (V19) for a later European magical manuscript.

From The Divine Archives · https://getconexto.com/vault/picatrix.html