Medieval alchemy, Kabbalah and Islamic esotericism
Picatrix
A wide-ranging textbook of astral and talismanic magic: astrology, planetary spirits, ritual timing, magical compounds, cosmology and philosophy.
- Dates
- Arabic, c. tenth century – Latin, thirteenth century
- Dating
- tradition or corpus
The life
Composed in Arabic as the Ghāyat al-Ḥakīm, translated into Castilian in the thirteenth century and then into Latin under the name Picatrix. It drew on hundreds of earlier materials.
Place in the tradition
Ficino, Pico and Agrippa all lived downstream of this book, whether or not they said so.
a note on the record
History and later legend
Modern scholarship has connected it with Maslama al-Qurṭubī, but the attribution remains debated.
the written record
Principal works
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Arabic, probably second half of the tenth century
Ghāyat al-Ḥakīm
غاية الحكيم
A large handbook of astral magic, carried into Renaissance occultism through its Latin translation as the Picatrix.