Magical Diagrams: the Notae of the Ars Notoria and Lull's Wheels

Alongside figurative miniatures, medieval and Renaissance books of magic contain another kind of image, more abstract and geometric: the diagram. Concentric circles, wheels, stars, grids of letters and interlaced figures served to order knowledge, to visualise the structure of the cosmos or to fix in a precise form words considered powerful. For the scribe they were the hardest part to reproduce, and for that very reason they are often the clearest sign of the care with which a codex was made.

The notae of the Ars notoria

Among the texts richest in diagrams is the Ars notoria, a Latin work circulating from the thirteenth century and attributed by tradition to King Solomon. The treatise promised to bestow the liberal arts, memory and eloquence through prayers and the contemplation of figures called notae. These notes are elaborate compositions of circles, spirals and panels, with words and names written along the lines, sometimes painted in several colours and adorned with gold.

It was precisely the promise of knowledge gained without study that drew the condemnation of theologians. Thomas Aquinas, in the Summa theologiae, considered it an illicit practice, and other authors judged it a form of magic disguised as devotion. Nevertheless the Ars notoria went on being copied for centuries, and its manuscripts, kept in various European libraries, show how much the figures changed from one copy to another.

The wheels of Ramon Lull

A different use of the diagram is found in the work of Ramon Lull, the Majorcan philosopher who died around 1316. In his Ars magna and related treatises, Lull represented the principles of knowledge with letters arranged on concentric circles, some of which, in manuscripts and printed editions, were cut out and made to turn. By rotating the discs one obtained combinations of concepts, according to a method Lull conceived as a tool of demonstration and of religious mission.

Lull was not a magician, but his combinatorial art was soon associated with the Kabbalah and the occult sciences. In the Renaissance authors such as Cornelius Agrippa and Giordano Bruno took a keen interest in it, and many alchemical treatises that were not his circulated under Lull's name. His wheels thus became a typical image of secret knowledge, even though they were born from a logical and theological project.

The circles of the grimoires

In the grimoires of the late Middle Ages and the early modern period the most frequent diagram is the ritual circle, drawn on the page with concentric rings, divine names, crosses and planetary signs. Texts such as the Heptameron, attributed without foundation to the physician Peter of Abano and printed in the sixteenth century together with the so-called pseudo-Agrippan Fourth Book, offer famous examples. For the historian these schemes are valuable because they allow copies to be compared and families of manuscripts to be reconstructed.

The diagram was therefore the place where the magical book displayed its ambition to put the world in order. Whether it served memory, logic or ritual, the geometric figure gave authority to the text and demanded technical skill and patience from the scribe. Even today, leafing through these codices, one senses the tension between the precision of the drawing and the mystery of the words that inhabit it.