Picatrix: from the Arabic Ghāyat al-Ḥakīm to the court of Alfonso X

The Picatrix is the most important treatise on astral magic to have reached the Latin West from the Islamic world. Its original Arabic title, Ghāyat al-Ḥakīm, means «The Goal of the Sage», and the work was composed in al-Andalus, Muslim Spain, in all likelihood in the tenth century. Translated in thirteenth-century Castile, it circulated in Europe for centuries under an enigmatic name, Picatrix, which the Latin text presents as that of an author.

Author and sources

For a long time the work was attributed to the astronomer and mathematician Maslama al-Majrīṭī, who died around 1007, but this attribution is now considered unfounded. Recent studies, notably those of Maribel Fierro, have proposed identifying the author with Maslama ibn Qāsim al-Qurṭubī, an Andalusian scholar who died in 964 and to whom a treatise on alchemy is also attributed. The question is still debated, but the Andalusian setting is widely accepted.

The Arabic text draws on an impressive mass of sources: Hermetic treatises, Hellenistic astrological texts, writings attributed to the Sabians of Harran, the so-called Nabataean Agriculture and works of Neoplatonic philosophy. It is an encyclopedic synthesis of late antique and Islamic astral magic, set within a philosophical frame that presents magic as the crowning of knowledge of nature and the heavens.

The Castilian and Latin translations

In 1256, at the court of Alfonso X of Castile, called the Wise, the work was translated from Arabic into Castilian; from the Castilian version, which survives today only in fragments, derived the Latin translation that circulated throughout Europe. The Alfonsine court was one of the great centres for the transmission of Arabic learning, and alongside the Picatrix it produced works of astronomy, astrology and lapidaries.

The Latin Picatrix is divided into four books. The first defines magic and its relationship to philosophy; the second deals with astrological foundations and the nature of talismans; the third with the planets, their properties and the prayers addressed to the planetary spirits; the fourth gathers heterogeneous material, including descriptions of cults attributed to the Sabians and the ancient sages.

Readers and rediscovery

In the Renaissance the Picatrix was read, often discreetly, by philosophers and physicians, and it circulated in the libraries of humanists and princes. It has been suggested that Marsilio Ficino knew its content when he wrote De vita, published in 1489, whose third book deals with astral images and the influence of the planets. The text was as famous as it was suspect, and was rarely cited openly.

Its modern rediscovery is due to the scholars of the Warburg Library in Hamburg, where Aby Warburg and his collaborators regarded it as a key to understanding the astrological iconography of the Renaissance. Hellmut Ritter published the edition of the Arabic text in 1933 and, with Martin Plessner, a German translation in 1962; David Pingree edited the critical edition of the Latin version in 1986.

The Picatrix is a bridge between worlds: Hellenistic Egypt, Harran, Baghdad, Córdoba, the Castile of Alfonso, the Florence of the Medici. Its textual history shows how astral magic travelled across languages and religions, adapting to each culture, and it is also an example of how decisive medieval Spain was in the formation of European learning.