© 2020 Andrea Franchetto. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License. Published by Correspondences: Journal for the Study of Esotericism. Book Review 121 Correspondences 8, no. 1 (2020): 121–127 Dan Attrell and David Porreca. Picatrix: A Medieval Treatise on Astral Magic. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2019. xii + 372 pp. ISBN: 978-0-271-08212-7. $39.95. Dan Attrell and David Porreca offer an English translation of the Picatrix. To better appreciate my comments on the translation, it is useful for the reader to know what the Picatrix contains. Divided into four books preceded by a prologue, the Picatrix is one of the most famous texts in the history of learned magic. Commissioned by Alfonso X, king of Castile and Leon, this treatise is a 13th-century Latin rendition of the Ghāyat al-Ḥakīm, a theoretical and practical compendium of astral magic written in Arabic by Maslama b. Qāsim al-Qurṭubī in the 10th century. 1 The Picatrix evidences a concern with legitimizing astral magic. In the prologue and Book One we are told that astral magic is not the outcome of an interaction with malevolent spirits but the result of pure devotion to God and awareness of the occult law that God created in the universe. Even though destructive purposes are often the goals of ritual operations included in the Picatrix, the laws that govern those operations are dependent on the spirits of heavenly bodies that act according to God’s will. Knowing those principles is the ultimate goal of a righteous life. However, as explained in Chapter 1 of Book Two, to understand and perform astral magic, one should master the quadrivium (astronomy, arithmetic, geometry, and music) and study metaphysics. 1. The work was first translated into Castilian, presumably by Yehuda ben Moshe, a Jewish astronomer known to have translated other astronomical texts for Alfonso X. Some time after the first translation was finished, the Castilian text was translated into Latin, presumably by Aegidius de Tebaldis of Parma. Only a few fragments of the Castilian version have survived in a 13th-century manuscript (Vat. Reg. lat. 1283 a ), which Alfonso D’Agostino edited in 1992: Astromagia (Napoli: Liguori, 1992). The Latin text, however, exists in many different manuscript copies spread across Europe. The Latin text differs in some respects from the Ghāyat due to interpolations during the process of translation and transmission.