Skip to content
Libra Esoterica

Fragment of the Picatrix.

Author not recorded

  • First published:
  • 13th century
  • Language: Latin
Read free

Description

Description from Library of Congress (opens in a new tab)

The document presented here is a two-page fragment of the work known in medieval Europe as the Picatrix. This was a book of astronomy, astrology, mystical and occult knowledge, alchemy, and magic composed in Arabic in Moorish Spain some time before the middle of the 11th century. The version known in Europe was a Latin translation of a lost Arabic original, dating from around 1250. The original work was often attributed to the astronomer and mathematician Maslama ibn Ahmad al-Majriti (died circa 1004), but this attribution was disproved by modern scholarship. The title "Picatrix" is thought to be a distortion of the name of the great Greek physician Hippocrates. The fragment shown here dates from the 14th century and was long preserved in the Piarist library in Podolínec, northern Slovakia. It is now in the collections of the Slovak National Library. The German Arabist Wilhelm Printz discovered the Arabic original of the Picatrix in around 1920, the title of which (Ghāyat al-Ḥakīm) has been translated as "The Aim of the Sage" or "The Goal of The Wise."

Provenance

Why this book is in the catalog

Included because retained bibliographic metadata links this work to Alchemy and Hermeticism, Astrology, Occultism and esotericism, and Ritual magic and grimoires.

  • Occultism and esotericism

    Controlled discovery queries from library-of-congress matched “occultism”. Retained metadata contains “occult” in the description and “Occultism” in the subject metadata.

    • “occultism”· via Library of Congress
    • “occult”· in description
    • “Occultism”· in subject
  • Ritual magic and grimoires

    Controlled discovery queries from library-of-congress matched “magic occult”. Retained metadata contains “Magic” in the description and “Magic” in the subject metadata.

    • “magic occult”· via Library of Congress
    • “Magic”· in description
    • “Magic”· in subject
  • Alchemy and Hermeticism

    Retained metadata contains “Alchemy” in the description.

    • “Alchemy”· in description
  • Astrology

    Retained metadata contains “Astrology” in the description and “Astrology” in the subject metadata.

    • “Astrology”· in description
    • “Astrology”· in subject

Membership records how this book met the catalog’s discovery criteria — relevance to a tradition, not a judgment of the book’s claims.

Read & download

Free, public copies reported by our sources. Links open the source directly.

Not yet in passage search

Pro research answers quote indexed passages. Ask the library to index this book’s public text.

marks a direct file download. Rights vary by country; each source states its own terms.

Buy or borrow

No ISBN on record, so the Amazon link searches by title and author. WorldCat shows libraries near you that hold a copy.

Editions

One edition cataloged here.

Library of Congress digitized edition

1300-01-01—Latin—Public digital item

Subjects

6 subject headings

Identifiers & provenance

How this record was assembled, and the authority identifiers it carries.

Identifiers

LCCN
Library of Congress
  • 2021667701

Cataloged from

Catalog id
library-of-congress:2021667701
Edition coverage
Multi source partial
Retrieved