Every library has one book that it must be able to explain. Ours is the Picatrix, because a city described in its fourth book gave us our name. People who come to the desk asking for it tend to expect either a slim book of spells or a work of unspeakable darkness. It is neither. It is a long textbook, and its subject is how the heavens act upon the earth.
What it is
The Picatrix is the Latin version of an Arabic work, Ghayat al-Hakim, "The Goal of the Wise", compiled in Muslim Spain. Medieval tradition assigned it to the mathematician Maslama al-Majriti, who died about 1007, and older reference works still say so. Many scholars now attribute it to another Andalusian, Maslama al-Qurtubi, who died in 964, which would place its writing in the middle of the tenth century.
The author says that he drew on more than two hundred books, and the text reads like it. It is a compilation of Greek, Persian, Indian, and Arabic learning on the stars and their powers, held together by a philosophy in which everything below is moved by what is above.
Between 1256 and 1258 the book was translated into Castilian by order of Alfonso X of Castile, called the Learned, and from Castilian into Latin soon afterward. The Castilian survives only in fragments. The Latin is the Picatrix. The title is a puzzle in itself: the Latin text treats Picatrix as the name of the author, and no explanation of the word has been generally accepted.
What is in it
The work is divided into four books.
- Book I explains what magic is, why the sage must know the heavens, and how images are made under chosen configurations of the sky. It includes the twenty-eight mansions of the moon and the works proper to each.
- Book II surveys the figures of the heavens: the fixed stars, the planets and their natures, the images of the planets and of the thirty-six decans, and the stones proper to each.
- Book III treats the spirits of the planets and how they are to be addressed, with robes, incense, and long prayers. It contains the account of the sage's own guiding spirit, the Perfect Nature, said to have been revealed to Hermes.
- Book IV returns to the spirits and the moon, gathers recipes and compounds, and tells stories of the ancient sages, among them the building of Adocentyn.
The magic is astral throughout. A talisman, in this book, is an object made at a moment when the sky is rightly arranged, so that it receives and holds the influence of a star or planet. The maker must be an astronomer first, and the book insists that he must also be a philosopher of upright life.
The city in Book IV
In the third chapter of the fourth book, Hermes Trismegistus builds a city in Egypt with four guarded gates, a tower whose light changes color through the seven days, a great tree, and engraved images that keep the citizens virtuous. In the Latin the city is called Adocentyn. We tell the story in full, and say what we make of it, under The Name Adocentyn.
Who read it
The Picatrix was never printed in the centuries when it was most read. It circulated in manuscript, quietly, among people who preferred not to advertise the fact. Marsilio Ficino drew on it for his book on obtaining life from the heavens without naming it. Agrippa used it. Rabelais made a joke of "the reverend father in the Devil, Picatrix", rector of a faculty of diabolical studies.
The printed editions are all modern. The Arabic text was published in 1933, a German translation in 1962, and the Latin text in 1986. Complete English translations have appeared only in the present century.
How to read it
- Do not start at the beginning and plow on. Read the opening chapters of Book I, then the chapter on the Perfect Nature in Book III, then the stories in Book IV. Leave the lists for later.
- Expect repetition and contradiction. The author is compiling from many sources and often gives several accounts of the same thing without choosing among them.
- Keep an astrology primer beside you. The book assumes that you know what a mansion, a decan, an exaltation, and an aspect are. See our guide to astrology.
- Know which text you are reading. A translation made from the Arabic and one made from the Latin are not the same book. The Latin version shortens, rearranges, and sometimes softens its source.
- Remember what it is. Some of the recipes call for poisons and for things no one should handle, and some of the aims are malicious. It is a document of medieval learning, not a workbook.
Why it matters
The Picatrix is the fullest surviving statement of a view of the world that educated people held for a very long time: that the cosmos is one connected thing, that knowledge of it is a moral discipline, and that the wise can bring heaven and earth into harmony. Hermes's city is that view in the form of a story. It never stood anywhere. It has been worth building toward ever since.