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Which Maslama Wrote the Picatrix

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Which Maslama Wrote the Picatrix

The Ghayat al-Hakim, the Aim of the Sage, is the largest surviving Arabic handbook of astral magic. It was translated into Castilian and then Latin in the circle of Alfonso X in the 1250s, and the Latin version, called the Picatrix, became one of the most influential magical texts in Europe. Manuscripts of the Arabic ascribe it, and its companion the Rutbat al-Hakim, to a Maslama, and the tradition took that to mean the astronomer of Cordoba.

Maribel Fierro argued in 1996 that it means a different man: Maslama ibn Qasim al-Qurtubi, who died in 964, a traveller and traditionist with esoteric interests whose biography fits the books better. Her case turns on the dates the Rutbat al-Hakim gives for its own composition, which sit awkwardly against the astronomer's career, and on the biographical notices attached to each man. Many scholars now follow her. Others keep the older identification or treat both works as effectively anonymous.

The atlas records the attribution and marks it disputed. It does not assert that this astronomer wrote the Picatrix, and it does not assert that he did not, because the question is genuinely live and the two candidates are separate people who happen to share a name and a century. The specific question of which Maslama is carried as an open question against the text itself, where a specialist can pick it up.

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