Useful Prologues and Bad Geography: Magic’s Origins Between Ghāyat al-ḥakīm and the Picatrix of Alfonso X

The Andalusī grimoire known as the Aim of the Wise One or Ghāyat al-ḥakīm (ca. 4th/10th c.) was famously translated century by Alfonso X el Sabio of Castile (d.682/1284). Relying on bilingual Jewish intermediaries, Alfonso created the mysteriously-named Castilian Picatriz and Latin Picatrix, monikers he took as the author’s name. Bursting with planetary prayers and gory rituals, the idiosyncratic and influential Ghāya/Picatrix is, like most occult texts, erased from mainstream intellectual history. I argue that the text, in both Arabic and Latin, uses Ancient and foreign lineages to legitimize its project of the production of magical knowledge. In other words, both the Muslim author and Alfonso located the origins of occult knowledge with peoples who were temporally and culturally Othered (the Arabs of Picatrix, and the Kurds, Nabateans, and Ethiopians of Ghāya) even as they claimed magical authority for themselves.