Notes on picatrix

The Picatrix has a long history, in the past as well as in the present. It was composed in Moorish Spain at a not clearly definable time and assumed its final shape after the middle of the eleventh century. Its author is unknown; its attribution to the great mathematician and astronomer Abfu 'l-Qasim Maslama b. Ahmad al-Madjrltl (d. C. A.D. 1008), as alleged by Ibn Khaldan in his Muqaddima,1 is out of the question for historical and other reasons. On one hand, reference is made in the text to events that took place half a century after Maslama's death; on the other, the work reveals, whenever occasion serves, such a lack of insight into the elements of mathematics and above all astronomy that no mathematician could possibly be held responsible for it. As for the ideas, facts, and superstitious practices accumulated and amalgamated in it, their history, at least in part, can be traced back to classical and Eastern antiquity. There is hardly one philosophic, theologic, magic, or mystic current surviving in popular or learned, pagan or Muslim, tradition that has been denied admission to the great melting pot. However, the more recent history of the book is long enough, too. More than fifty years ago, sometime before 1912, Aby Warburg (whose centenary will be celebrated in 1965) discovered the Latin Picatrix, under which name the medieval Latin translation of the then still unknown Arabic original was hidden. As concerns the strange name, Buqratas or Biqratas Picatrix, it is probably a distortion of that of the great physician Hippocrates, in spite of the fact that the Arabic text gives this name in another, shortened, form (Buqrat) whenever it speaks of the historic Hippocrates. Maybe the original identity of the two had already fallen into oblivion when the book was composed. In 1912, Fritz Saxl demonstrated the close relationship between the prayers to the planets recorded in the Picatrix and those ascribed by Muslim authors and others to the Harranian Sabians, and Warburg proved the Spanish origin of the translation.2 During the subsequent years, new light was shed on connections and affiliations with earlier and later literary and pictorial sources, from Graeco-Roman models down to Diirer's " Melencolia," until (about 1920) Wilhelm Printz discovered the Arabic original of the