Talisman designs in manuscripts & prints

Western Esoteric & Grimoire Talismans: the tradition

Western learned magic joined Greek astrology, Jewish Kabbalah and Arabic science. The Picatrix (Ghāyat al-Ḥakīm, 11th century, Latin 1256) taught how to capture a planet's power in an image made at the right hour. Marsilio Ficino's De vita (1489) and Cornelius Agrippa's Three Books of Occult Philosophy (1533) gave the planetary magic squares (kameas) and seals. The Key of Solomon (Clavicula Salomonis, 15th–16th century) supplied pentacles, and word squares such as SATOR and ABRACADABRA came from late antiquity. Francis Barrett's The Magus (1801) passed the whole system to the 19th-century occult revival, the Golden Dawn and modern practice.