WESTERN CEREMONIAL MAGIC · LESSON 10 OF 11 · 18 MIN
The Picatrix
The great handbook of astral magic — the Arabic Goal of the Sage, its disputed author, its translation at the court of Alfonso X, what its four books teach about talismans, planetary prayers and the mansions of the Moon, and how it reached Ficino and Agrippa.
If there is one book behind the planetary magic of the West — the talisman made in the planet's hour, the prayer to Saturn, the stone and the herb and the suffumigation chosen to match — it is the Picatrix. Agrippa drew on it without naming it, Ficino read it with alarm and used it anyway, and the Planetary Talismans tool is, at several removes, its descendant. This lesson is the book itself.