19.09.12 Attrell/Porreca (eds.), Picatrix: A Medieval Treatise on Astral Magic

Picatrix: A Medieval Treatise on Astral Magic Translated with an introduction by Dan Attrell and David Porreca

A manual for constructing talismans, mixing magical compounds, summoning planetary spirits, and determining astrological conditions, Picatrix is a cornerstone of Western esotericism. It offers important insights not only into occult practices and beliefs but also into the transmission of magical ideas from antiquity to the present. Dan Attrell and David Porreca’s English translation opens the world of this vital medieval treatise to modern-day scholars and lay readers.

Entangled Magic in the Medieval Latin West

This article focusses on the history of learned magic in late medieval Europe, breaking a period of about 500 years into chronological stages to explore how medieval supporters and critics of magic represented the art and responded to each other’s arguments, then reframed their own in a continuous dynamic entanglement. In this period learned magic texts from diverse religious and cosmological traditions (primarily Christian, Jewish, Arabic and Greco-Roman) circulated among people familiar with, and emotionally invested in, a great variety of institutional and informal rituals. Sources reveal a vibrant culture of exchanges of texts between members of religious orders, physicians and lay men, clerics and lay women – a culture of entanglement: discussion, borrowing, critique and adaptation alongside practitioner-client relationships and necessary secrecy and concealment.

Traces of Necromantic Divinatory Practices in the Picatrix

In the famous medieval magical manual called the Picatrix, the unknown author describes the phenomenon of magic with the term nigromantia. As is well known, the original meaning of the Greek term necromantia has a more concise meaning. It is used for a special kind of divination, i.e., divination through the parts of a cadaver and the conjured spirit of the dead. Seemingly, in the Picatrix, no necromantic ritual can be found; moreover, the author stresses that his main goal is pious, i.e., to find the path leading to the ultimate source of the universe, the one and only God. In my article, I show that on some pages of the Picatrix, there are traces of divinatory practices that may be connected to the original meaning of the term nigromantia. In the third book of the manual, descriptions of some interesting rituals attributed to the pagan Sabeans of Harran and their teacher, the god Hermes can be found. During the practices, the magician involved conjured spirits of the heavenly bodies and powers as well. Because of this, by looking closely at and analyzing the given text, it is possible to piece together a complex web of necromantic and demonic divinatory rituals.

Face of a Bird, Legs of an Eagle: The Hybrid Venus in Medieval Texts of Image Magic and the So-Called Talisman of Catherine de’ Medici

This article examines the imagery of the goddess Venus in medieval sources of astrological magic, focusing on a zoomorphic hybrid Venus characterized by avian features. Furthermore, the article examines the transmission of this motif into early modern printed sources and talismans. The most renowned among surviving items related to the hybrid Venus is the 18th-century medallion known as Catherine de Medici’s talisman, depicting on one side a classical Venus figure, and on the other, a seated Jupiter alongside a hybrid with the head and feet of a bird. In previous scholarship it has been argued that the hybrid figure, interpreted as Venus, derives from Cornelius Agrippa and the medieval magical compendium Picatrix.    The study demonstrates that the same hybrid Venus appears in several other medieval sources predating Agrippa and independent of the Picatrix. These sources, explored in this article in detail, offer a new insight into the evolution of the zoomorphic Venus, providing a deeper understanding of the ways in which non-Christian and non-classical astrological iconography was transformed and found pathways within medieval literature. Based on the findings of this research, De sigillis attributed to Arnoldus Saxo, seems to provide the most direct model for depicting two distinct Venus figures within the same talisman. The article further argues that the avian hybrid Venus was a dynamic figure among non-classical hybrids, appearing in a relatively wide range of sources, including contexts where astrological hybrids were a rarity.

“If you want to pray to Mercury, wear the garments of a scribe:” <i>kuttāb</i> , <i>udabāʾ,</i> and readers of the <i>Ghāyat al-Ḥakīm</i> in the court of ʿAbd al-Raḥmān III

This work addresses the question of the intended audience of the Ghāyat al-Ḥakīm, the famous Andalusi treatise on magic, better known by its Latin moniker, Picatrix. I propose that a substantial po...

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Pappus of Alexandria Book 7 of the Collection

The seventh book of Pappus's Collection, his commentary on the Domain (or Treasury) of Analysis, figures prominently in the history of both ancient and modern mathematics: as our chief source of information concerning several lost works of the Greek geometers Euclid and Apollonius, and as a book that inspired later mathematicians, among them Viete, Newton, and Chasles, to original discoveries in their pursuit of the lost science of antiquity. This presentation of it is concerned solely with recovering what can be learned from Pappus about Greek mathematics. The main part of it comprises a new edition of Book 7; a literal translation; and a commentary on textual, historical, and mathematical aspects of the book. It proved to be convenient to divide the commentary into two parts, the notes to the text and translation, and essays about the lost works that Pappus discusses. The first function of an edition of this kind is, not to expose new discoveries, but to present a reliable text and organize the accumulated knowledge about it for the reader's convenience. Nevertheless there are novelties here. The text is based on a fresh transcription of Vat. gr. 218, the archetype of all extant manuscripts, and in it I have adopted numerous readings, on manuscript authority or by emendation, that differ from those of the old edition of Hultsch. Moreover, many difficult parts of the work have received little or no commentary hitherto.

Michail Rybakov

Art, AI and human bodies