Picatrix — A Medieval Treatise on Astral Magic
Contents — 40 chapters
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About this book
The Picatrix (Ghāyat al-Hakīm, "The Goal of the Wise") is the most influential astral-magic compendium of the Middle Ages — an 11th-century Arabic synthesis (originally compiled in al-Andalus) of Hermetic, Neoplatonic, and Sabaean sources. Across four books and forty chapters it teaches the construction of talismans, the invocation of planetary spirits, and the correspondences that bind the 7 planets, 12 zodiac signs, stones, plants, and animals into a single sublunary chain of influence.
Relevance to this project
The Picatrix is the practical bridge from the Ptolemaic planetary-zodiac frame to the Renaissance magic (Agrippa, Ficino, Dee) that the Magi timeline traces. Its core structure — the 7 planets and 12 signs as a system of correspondences, each planet and sign ruling a set of letters, names, and images — is the operational version of the Sefer Yetzirah's assignment of the 7 doubles to the 7 planets and the 12 simples to the 12 signs that the project documents.