Picatrix: The Latin Version of the Ghayat al-Hakim.

• Author: Newman, William R.

David Pingree's edition of the Latin Picatrix marks the final stage of a project inaugurated by the Warburg Institute in 1933, with Helmut Ritter's edition of the famous Arabic magical text attributed falsely to Maslama al-Majriti. First translated into Spanish and then Latin under the patronage of Alfonso X el Sabio, the Picatrix, as is well known, became a powerful force in occidental magic during the Renaissance, influencing such diverse figures as Marsilio Ficino and Francois Rabelais. Pingree's edition of this text marks the legitimation of the so-called occult sciences as a serious field of scholarly studies, taken alongside such other recent works as the edition of al-Kindi's De radiis by M.-Th. d'Alverny and F. Hudry (1974), and the edition of Albertus Magnus' Speculum astronomiae by Paola Zambelli et alii (1977).

Pingree's scholarship has at least one quality lacking in previous researchers of the Picatrix. He combines the skills of a classical philologist with those of the Arabist and Sanskritist. These linguistic skills, along with his long immersion in the history of astronomy and astrology, put him in an unusually capable position as expositor of the Picatrix. Thus, in a series of seminal articles including (among others) "Some of the Sources of the Ghayat al-Hakim" (JWCI 43 |1980~: 15) and "Indian Planetary Images and the Tradition of Astral Magic" (JWCI 82 |1989~: 1-13), Pingree has been able to make a number of hitherto unsuspected associations between the Indian and Arabic magical traditions.

Equally important is his argument in the former article that the type of celestial magic prescribed by the Picatrix, in which detailed astrological rules are combined with the ancient practice of vivifying a statue by drawing down "a god or demon to inhabit a statue,"...