Ghāyat al-Ḥakīm (Picatrix): A New Literal Translation from the Earliest Arabic Sources Hardcover – December 20, 2025

Ghāyat al-Ḥakīm, known in the Latin world as Picatrix, is one of the most influential and misunderstood works of the medieval intellectual tradition. Composed in Arabic in the tenth century, it stands at the crossroads of philosophy, astronomy, astrology, alchemy, and the science of images, preserving a vast body of cosmological and operative knowledge inherited from the ancient world and systematized within the early Islamic scientific milieu.Written by Abū Maslama Muḥammad ibn Ibrāhīm ibn Waḥshiyya al-Nabaṭī, the text presents a unified vision of the cosmos governed by proportion, correspondence, and lawful mediation between celestial and terrestrial orders. Far from superstition or fantasy, Ghāyat al-Ḥakīm articulates a disciplined framework in which natural forces, times, materials, and forms interact according to intelligible principles. Its influence extended widely through later Arabic, Hebrew, and Latin traditions, shaping medieval astrology, talismanic practice, and Renaissance natural philosophy.This volume offers a new, literate, and rigorously literal translation from the earliest Arabic sources, rendered with careful attention to language, structure, and technical vocabulary. Unlike previous editions that paraphrase, abridge, or interpret the text through later traditions, this translation allows Ghāyat al-Ḥakīm to speak in its own voice, preserving its conceptual rigor and internal coherence without modern embellishment or simplification.This translation also includes the Emerald Tablet (Arabic recension), rendered in a new literal translation from its earliest Arabic witnesses and presented as a foundational Hermetic statement whose cosmological principles closely parallel those articulated in Ghāyat al-Ḥakīm.This is not a medieval reinterpretation transmitted through later Spanish and then Latin intermediaries. It is a faithful, literal translation of the original Arabic text itself, returned to its earliest recoverable form. Read more