Ars Notoria — Large Print

Introduction

There is a moment, familiar to almost every serious student of knowledge, when the sheer volume of what remains unknown becomes almost paralyzing. You sit before a mountain of texts, languages, disciplines, and traditions, and you feel the weight of human ignorance pressing down upon you like stone. The ancient world felt this weight too. Philosophers, priests, scholars, and kings all grappled with the terrifying gap between what the human mind could hold and what the universe seemed to contain. And in that gap — in that aching, restless space between mortal limitation and divine comprehension — certain extraordinary individuals began to ask a different kind of question. Not merely 'how do I learn more?' but rather, 'what if there existed a sacred technology, a divine method, by which the human mind could be opened directly to the source of all wisdom itself?'

The text you are holding is one of the most remarkable answers ever written to that question. It belongs to a tradition so old, so layered with mystery, and so persistently misunderstood that most modern readers encounter it for the first time with a mixture of fascination and bewilderment. This is entirely appropriate. The work demands a certain quality of attention — patient, open, and willing to sit with ambiguity — that our age of rapid information consumption rarely encourages. But for those willing to slow down, to read carefully and with genuine curiosity, what unfolds is nothing less than a complete philosophy of mind, memory, divine communication, and spiritual transformation, encoded in a form that has survived centuries of suppression, misattribution, and neglect.

The grimoire tradition — the broader category of magical and esoteric handbooks to which this text belongs — is frequently dismissed by casual observers as mere superstition, the credulous fumbling of pre-scientific minds grasping at supernatural shortcuts. This dismissal is both historically ignorant and intellectually lazy. The great grimoires of the medieval and Renaissance periods were not written by fools. They were composed, compiled, and transmitted by some of the most educated individuals of their respective eras: monks, physicians, court scholars, Kabbalists, Neoplatonist philosophers, and theologians who had spent lifetimes wrestling with the deepest questions of existence. When they wrote about angels, about divine names, about the power of sacred language to reshape consciousness, they were working within sophisticated intellectual frameworks that drew on centuries of accumulated wisdom from Greek philosophy, Jewish mysticism, Arabic science, and Christian theology. To read their work as primitive nonsense is to reveal more about the reader's limitations than about the text's.

The particular work gathered in these pages occupies a unique and especially fascinating position within that tradition. Unlike many grimoires that focus primarily on the summoning of spirits, the casting of spells, or the manipulation of material circumstances, this one is oriented almost entirely toward the interior life — toward the transformation of the mind itself. Its central preoccupation is with wisdom: how to acquire it, how to retain it, how to purify oneself sufficiently to receive it from divine sources, and how to use it in the service of genuine understanding rather than mere worldly advantage. In this sense, it reads less like a manual of sorcery and more like a rigorous curriculum of spiritual and intellectual development — one that happens to involve angels, sacred geometry, divine names in multiple languages, and prayers of extraordinary beauty and complexity.

The attribution to Solomon is, of course, immediately significant to any reader familiar with the Western esoteric tradition. Solomon — the great king of Israel, the builder of the Temple, the master of spirits described in both biblical and apocryphal sources — became over the centuries the supreme symbolic figure of the magician-philosopher: a ruler who commanded not through brute force but through wisdom, a man whose relationship with the divine was so intimate that he could speak with angels and bend supernatural forces to his will. The Solomonic tradition in magic is vast and ancient, encompassing dozens of texts, hundreds of manuscript variants, and an interpretive literature that stretches from late antiquity through the present day. But within that tradition, this particular text stands apart. It does not claim to give Solomon's methods for binding demons or compelling spirits to do one's bidding. Instead, it claims to preserve the very method by which Solomon himself became wise — the divine art through which the king's mind was opened to receive the full breadth of human knowledge directly from God.

This is a claim worth pausing over, because it tells us something essential about the text's self-understanding and its intended audience. The work does not present itself as a shortcut for the lazy or a trick for the unworthy. It presents itself as a genuine spiritual discipline — demanding, systematic, and requiring sustained commitment over weeks and months of practice. The prayers it contains are not brief incantations to be muttered once and forgotten. They are elaborate, multilingual devotional texts that must be memorized, repeated at specific times, and approached with specific states of mind and heart. The figures and images associated with the practice — the so-called 'notae' or sacred characters from which the work takes its name — are not decorative. They are focal points for a meditative practice designed to still the ordinary noise of the mind and create conditions under which higher knowledge can be received. In this respect, the work has more in common with the contemplative manuals of Christian mysticism or the meditative texts of Jewish Kabbalah than it does with the popular image of the sorcerer's spellbook.

The title itself rewards careful attention. The word 'notoria' derives from the Latin 'nota,' meaning a mark, a sign, or a note — but also, in classical Latin, a shorthand symbol used by scribes to record speech rapidly and completely. The 'notarii' were the trained secretaries of the ancient world, men who had developed systems of symbolic notation so efficient that they could capture the full content of spoken discourse in real time. To call this art 'notoria' is therefore to invoke a very specific metaphor: the idea that there exists a kind of divine shorthand, a set of sacred signs and practices through which the human mind can receive and retain knowledge with a completeness and speed that ordinary study could never achieve. The 'notary art' is, in this sense, the art of becoming a perfect receiver — a living manuscript upon which divine wisdom can inscribe itself fully and permanently.

For modern readers, this metaphor may resonate in unexpected ways. We live in an age obsessed with information processing, with the optimization of learning, with the enhancement of memory and cognitive performance. We take supplements, practice spaced repetition, experiment with meditation and neurofeedback, all in pursuit of a mind that can absorb and retain more of what it encounters. The ancient practitioner of this art was pursuing something recognizably similar, though within a completely different cosmological framework. Where the modern learner might speak of neuroplasticity and memory consolidation, the medieval scholar spoke of angelic illumination and divine infusion. The underlying aspiration — to transcend the ordinary limitations of the human mind and access a fuller, more complete form of knowing — is strikingly consistent across the centuries. This recognition should not collapse the difference between these frameworks, but it should make the ancient text feel less alien and more urgently relevant than it might initially appear.

A Living Manuscript Across the Centuries

To understand what you are reading, it helps enormously to understand something of what this text has been through. The history of its transmission is itself a kind of testament to the power of the ideas it contains — ideas so compelling that generation after generation of readers, copyists, translators, and practitioners found them worth preserving at considerable personal risk.

The earliest surviving manuscripts of this work date to the thirteenth century, though the text itself almost certainly draws on much older sources. Scholars have identified within it elements that suggest roots in late antique magical practice, in the Hellenistic tradition of theurgy — the use of ritual to achieve union with divine principles — and in the early Jewish mystical tradition of Merkabah, which sought through elaborate liturgical and contemplative practices to ascend through the heavenly realms and stand before the divine throne. By the time the text reaches its medieval form, these diverse streams have been thoroughly Christianized: the angels bear the names familiar from Christian angelology, the prayers invoke the Trinity, and the entire enterprise is framed as a form of devotion rather than magic in any transgressive sense.

This Christianization was both a genuine theological development and a pragmatic survival strategy. The medieval Church's relationship with magical practice was complex and often contradictory. On one hand, official doctrine condemned magic as either fraud or diabolism. On the other hand, the boundary between approved religious practice — the use of relics, the recitation of specific prayers for specific purposes, the veneration of saints as intercessors — and what we might call magical practice was genuinely blurry, and remained so throughout the medieval period. A text that framed its practices entirely in terms of prayer, angelic intercession, and the pursuit of divinely sanctioned wisdom was positioned much more safely than one that explicitly invoked demons or claimed to manipulate supernatural forces through human will alone.

Nevertheless, the text attracted controversy. The great Dominican theologian and philosopher Albertus Magnus — teacher of Thomas Aquinas and one of the most formidable intellectual figures of the thirteenth century — explicitly condemned it. His condemnation is itself historically revealing: Albertus was no credulous reactionary. He was deeply engaged with Arabic science and philosophy, fascinated by natural magic, and genuinely interested in the relationship between human knowledge and divine illumination. His objection was not that the text was obviously absurd, but rather that it represented a dangerous circumvention of the proper path to knowledge — that it promised a kind of divine shortcut that bypassed the hard work of rational inquiry and thereby corrupted both the intellect and the soul. This is a sophisticated critique, and it tells us that the text was taken seriously enough to require serious refutation.

Despite such condemnations, the work continued to circulate. It was copied in monasteries, carried in the libraries of wealthy patrons, translated into vernacular languages, and eventually printed in the early modern period as the new technology of the press made the dissemination of esoteric texts both easier and more dangerous. The Renaissance brought a renewed and intense interest in all forms of ancient wisdom, including magical and mystical traditions that the medieval Church had tried to suppress. Within this environment, a text claiming to preserve Solomon's own method for achieving divine wisdom was precisely the kind of ancient treasure that the Renaissance mind most eagerly sought.

The seventeenth century brought the text to English readers through the work of Robert Turner, whose 1657 translation made it accessible to a much wider audience and helped establish the version of the text that most subsequent readers have encountered. Turner's translation is itself a fascinating document — a product of a moment when England was convulsed by religious and political revolution, when questions about the proper relationship between human authority and divine wisdom were being fought over with extraordinary intensity, and when the esoteric traditions of the Renaissance were beginning their long transformation into what would eventually become modern occultism. To read Turner's version is to encounter the text filtered through all of these pressures and preoccupations, and the result is something that speaks with particular force to readers navigating their own moments of upheaval and uncertainty.

What is most remarkable about this entire history of transmission is not the text's survival — many texts survive — but the quality of attention it has consistently attracted. The people who copied it, translated it, commented on it, and practiced it were not, by and large, the credulous and the ignorant. They were scholars, physicians, monks, philosophers, and intellectuals who found in it something that their other sources of wisdom did not provide. Whatever that something was — a method, a vision, a set of practices that genuinely worked in some experiential sense — it was compelling enough to keep the text alive through centuries of suppression and transformation. That fact alone should give the modern reader pause, and should encourage an approach of genuine curiosity rather than premature dismissal.

The manuscript tradition also reveals something important about the text's intended use. Unlike many ancient and medieval texts that were primarily read rather than practiced, the surviving manuscripts of this work show clear signs of active use: marginal annotations, worn pages, ink stains, and the kind of physical evidence that accumulates when a book is handled repeatedly and with purpose. These were not shelf ornaments or curiosities collected for their antiquarian interest. They were working documents, consulted regularly by people who were actually attempting to put their contents into practice. This is a crucial reminder for the modern reader: the text you are holding was never meant to be merely read. It was meant to be used.

Understanding this helps to resolve what might otherwise seem like a frustrating feature of the work: its repetitiveness, its apparent redundancy, its insistence on returning again and again to the same prayers, the same divine names, the same injunctions to purity and devotion. From the perspective of a reader seeking information, this repetition can seem tedious. From the perspective of a practitioner engaged in a sustained discipline of memory, meditation, and prayer, it is entirely appropriate. The text is structured not as an argument to be followed but as a practice to be inhabited — and practices, by their nature, require repetition. The prayers do not reveal their full meaning on first reading. They accumulate resonance through repeated encounter, the way a piece of music becomes richer and more complex the more deeply you know it.

How to Read What Cannot Be Merely Read

All of this raises the question that every serious reader of this text eventually must face: what does it actually mean to engage with a work like this in the twenty-first century? We are not medieval monks. We do not share the cosmological assumptions that the text takes for granted. We do not live in a world where the existence of angels is a matter of common consensus, where Latin is the language of educated discourse, or where the idea of receiving knowledge directly from a divine source seems self-evidently plausible rather than metaphorically interesting at best. How, then, should we read?

The first and most important answer is: with genuine humility about the limits of your own framework. The modern secular worldview is extraordinarily powerful in many domains — it has given us science, technology, medicine, and a vastly expanded understanding of the physical universe. But it is not, despite its occasional pretensions, a complete account of human experience. There are dimensions of consciousness, of meaning, of the inner life, that the materialist framework struggles to address adequately. The practitioners who developed and transmitted this text were not working in these dimensions out of ignorance of other possibilities. They were working in them because they found, through direct experience, that these dimensions were real and that they responded to specific kinds of attention and practice. To approach their work with the assumption that you already know better is to guarantee that you will learn nothing from it.

The second answer is: with attention to the experiential rather than the merely intellectual. The text makes claims that cannot be evaluated by reading about them. It claims that specific prayers, practiced with specific qualities of attention and intention over specific periods of time, will produce specific transformations in the mind and in the practitioner's relationship to knowledge. The only way to evaluate this claim honestly is to test it — to actually engage with the practices, to sit with the prayers, to work with the sacred figures, and to observe what happens in your own experience. This is not a call to credulity. It is a call to genuine empiricism: the willingness to actually examine the evidence rather than to dismiss it without looking.

The third answer is: with attention to the philosophical and psychological depth that underlies the text's apparently supernatural framework. Even if you find yourself unable to accept the literal existence of the angels named in these pages, the text's understanding of the conditions under which genuine learning and wisdom become possible is extraordinarily sophisticated. The insistence on purity of intention — on approaching the pursuit of knowledge without pride, without the desire for personal advantage, without the contamination of ego — reflects a profound psychological insight. We learn best, we think most clearly, we perceive most accurately, when we are not defending a position, not trying to impress an audience, not seeking to confirm what we already believe. The text's language for this state of mind is theological: it speaks of humility before God, of the soul cleansed of sin and made receptive to divine light. But the underlying reality it points toward is recognizable in the language of any serious contemplative tradition, and increasingly in the language of cognitive science as well.

The prayers themselves deserve particular attention from the modern reader, because they are among the most remarkable things in the text. They are long, complex, and multilingual — moving between Latin, Greek, Hebrew, and other languages in ways that can seem bewildering at first encounter. But they reward careful attention. Their structure is not arbitrary. The movement between languages mirrors the text's understanding of wisdom as something that transcends any single cultural or linguistic tradition — that the divine names in Hebrew carry one kind of resonance, the Greek philosophical vocabulary another, the Latin liturgical tradition another still, and that the practitioner who can hold all of these simultaneously within a single act of prayer is doing something qualitatively different from one who operates within a single tradition. There is a kind of cognitive and spiritual stretching required by these prayers, a demand that the mind expand to hold more than its ordinary categories can contain. This is, in itself, a form of the very transformation the text promises.

The sacred figures — the notae that give the art its name — present a different kind of challenge and opportunity. They are strange objects: complex geometric and symbolic designs that bear no obvious resemblance to anything in the practitioner's ordinary visual environment. The text instructs the practitioner to gaze upon them with specific qualities of attention while reciting the associated prayers — not to analyze them, not to decode them intellectually, but to hold them in awareness as focal points for a particular state of consciousness. This practice is recognizable to anyone familiar with the use of mandalas in Tibetan Buddhist meditation, or with the yantra tradition in Hindu tantra, or with the use of sacred images in Christian hesychasm. The specific symbols differ across these traditions, but the underlying principle is consistent: there are forms that, when encountered with the right quality of attention, facilitate the quieting of ordinary mental noise and the opening of deeper modes of awareness. Whether one explains this in terms of divine grace, neurological entrainment, or archetypal resonance in the Jungian sense, the functional reality of the practice is documented across too many traditions and too many centuries to be dismissed.

For the reader who approaches this text as a historian of ideas, it offers a remarkable window into the intellectual world of medieval and Renaissance Europe — into the ways that diverse traditions of wisdom were synthesized, the ways that the boundaries between religion, philosophy, and magic were negotiated, and the ways that fundamental human questions about the nature of knowledge and the possibility of wisdom were addressed in a pre-modern context. For the reader who approaches it as a practitioner of some form of contemplative or esoteric discipline, it offers a set of practices with deep roots and a long history of serious engagement. For the reader who approaches it simply as a curious and open-minded person interested in the full range of human experience and possibility, it offers something harder to categorize but no less valuable: an encounter with a way of thinking about the mind, about knowledge, and about the relationship between human beings and the larger reality they inhabit that is genuinely different from anything available in the mainstream of contemporary culture.

What this text ultimately asks of you is not belief in the literal truth of its cosmological claims, though such belief is certainly one possible response to it. What it asks is something more fundamental: the willingness to take seriously the possibility that the human mind is capable of more than it ordinarily achieves, that there are conditions under which wisdom of a qualitatively different order becomes available, and that the cultivation of those conditions is among the most worthwhile things a human being can undertake. This is not a mystical claim in any dismissive sense. It is a claim that has been made, in different languages and different frameworks, by virtually every serious intellectual and spiritual tradition in human history. The work you are about to read is one of the most sustained, systematic, and historically significant attempts to specify exactly what those conditions are and how to create them.

The pages that follow contain prayers of great beauty, practices of genuine depth, and a vision of human possibility that is both ancient and urgently contemporary. They contain the distilled aspiration of countless generations of human beings who refused to accept that the ordinary limits of the untrained mind were the final word on what human knowing could become. Approach them with patience, with openness, and with the kind of respectful seriousness that any great work of the human spirit deserves. What you find within them may surprise you. It has been surprising serious readers for the better part of a thousand years.

Chapter 1

The Notory Art that the highest Creator showed to Solomon.

The beginning and the end! Oh all-powerful God, the beginning of everything, without beginning and without end: Please hear my prayers today; do not judge me for my sins or my wrongdoings, O Lord my God, but act according to your mercy, which is greater than anything seen or unseen. Have mercy on me, O Christ, the wisdom of the Father, the light of the angels, the glory of the saints, the hope, refuge, and support of sinners, the creator of all things, and the savior from all human weaknesses, who holds the heavens, earth, sea, and the entire world in the palm of your hand: I humbly beg you to mercifully light up my mind with the rays of your Holy Spirit, so that I may be able to achieve the perfection of this most holy art; and so that I may gain the knowledge of every science, art, and wisdom; and of every power of memory, intelligence, and understanding, by the virtue and power of your most Holy Spirit, and in your name.

And you, O God my God, who in the beginning created the heavens and the earth, and all things from nothing; who reshapes and makes all things with your own Spirit; complete, fulfill, restore, and place a good understanding in me, so that I may glorify you and all your works, in all my thoughts, words, and actions. O God the Father, confirm and grant this prayer of mine, and increase my understanding and memory, and make them stronger, to know and receive knowledge, memory, eloquence, and persistence in all types of learning, you who live and reign, forever and ever. Amen.

Here begins the first section of this art, which Master Apollonius calls, The Golden Flowers , which is the general introduction to all the natural sciences; and this has been confirmed, written, and approved by the authority of Solomon, Manichaeus, and Euduchaeus.

I, Apollonius, a Master of Arts, properly called, who has been granted an understanding of the liberal arts, intend to discuss the knowledge of the liberal arts and astronomy; and what experiments and documents can be used to gain a complete and capable knowledge of these arts; and how the greatest and smallest mysteries of nature can be properly divided, fitted, and applied to the nature of the times; and what proper days and hours should be chosen for people's actions to begin and end; what qualities a person should have to achieve the power of this art; and how they should manage the actions of their life, and watch and study the course of the moon. Therefore, first, I will explain certain rules of the spiritual sciences, so that everything I plan to talk about can be achieved in the right order. So, do not be surprised by what you will hear and see in this next section, and that you will find an example of such priceless knowledge.

Some of the things that follow, which I will give to you as examples of wonderful effects, have been taken from the most ancient books of the Hebrews; when you see them (even though they are forgotten and no longer part of any human language), you should still consider them miracles: For I truly admire the great power and effectiveness of words in the workings of nature.