The Picatrix is the great handbook of Arabic astral magic, written as the Ghayat al-Hakim in the tenth or eleventh century and put into Latin at the court of Alfonso X of Castile in the thirteenth. It is full of plants. Storax and mastic, aloewood and camphor, saffron for the Sun, myrrh for Jupiter, mandrake and henbane in the rites nobody should try at home.
This register lists every plant the Latin text names, with the book and chapter where it appears, the modern botanical identification, how sure we can be of that identification, and what the text uses the plant for. The entries are grouped by kind (resins, aromatics, flowers, poisons and so on), and a planetary index at the back gathers the plants of Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, the Sun, Venus, Mercury and the Moon.
The base text is Dan Attrell and David Porreca's English translation (Penn State University Press, 2019) of David Pingree's Latin edition, checked against Ritter and Plessner's German translation from the Arabic. Where an identification is a guess, the register says so.
This is a study edition of an esoteric text. It records what the Picatrix says and makes no claim that any of it works. Nothing in it is advice to burn, eat or apply any plant, and several of the plants listed are poisonous.
Digital download, PDF. Compiled by Frater Leo Viridis and Frater Phyton Ambrosius.
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