Ars Notoria: The Grimoire That Promised Knowledge
There is a book of magic that summons no spirits, raises no treasure and compels no one to love. It promises something far more seductive: that you will master the seven liberal arts without having studied them. Grammar, rhetoric, logic, arithmetic, geometry, music, astronomy — in weeks instead of years.
Contents
The Ars Notoria is a Latin book of magic attributed to Solomon whose surviving manuscripts begin only in the thirteenth century; scholarship places its origin in northern Italy. Its goal is unusual: not the conjuring of spirits but memory, eloquence and mastery of the seven liberal arts. The method consists of long sequences of prayers and the contemplation of complex pictorial diagrams, the notae, at fixed times and under fasting. Those figures are missing from every printed edition, including Robert Turner's English translation of 1657 — so anyone who knows only the printed text knows the book without its core. That the method confers knowledge is not established and is not, by its nature, testable.
The surviving Latin manuscript tradition of the Ars Notoria begins in the thirteenth century; scholarship places its origin in northern Italy.
Source/tradition: Manuscript evidence; research literature on the medieval ars notoria, notably Julien Veronese
Robert Turner published the first English translation in London in 1657 as Ars Notoria: The Notory Art of Solomon.
Source/tradition: Turner, London 1657
The notae, the pictorial diagrams at the centre of the system, are absent from the printed editions, from the early Latin prints through to Turner 1657.
Source/tradition: Comparison of manuscripts and prints; the editorial record
Thomas Aquinas discusses the ars notoria and rejects it, arguing that unintelligible strings of words cannot produce a divine effect.
Source/tradition: Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae II-II, q. 96
That Solomon was the author and the method came from him is the text's own framing claim and is attested nowhere outside the genre.
Source/tradition: Self-description of the text; no independent attestation
In contemporary ceremonial practice the Ars Notoria is worked in reconstructed form, usually with shortened prayer cycles and figures redrawn from manuscripts.
Source/tradition: Current practice in Western ritual magic and reconstruction groups
That contemplating the notae and speaking the orations confers memory, eloquence or subject knowledge is not established.
Source/tradition: No study exists; the claimed effect is not testable in kind
Extended fasting combined with shortened sleep over weeks can be physically and psychologically taxing; the method is not a health tool.
Source/tradition: No studies on this specific practice; the caution rests on general clinical experience
VERIFIED = verifiable in scientific or official sources · TRADITIONAL = historically or culturally recorded · LIVED PRACTICE = widely practiced, experiential knowledge · NOT PROVEN = spiritual interpretation, not scientifically established.
The book is the Ars Notoria, and it was the students' grimoire.
What the Ars Notoria promises
The name comes from the notae, the signs or figures. These are not sigils in the later conjuring sense but complex, densely inscribed pictorial diagrams. You are meant to look at them. Not read them, not decipher them: look, while reciting particular prayers, at particular times, in a particular bodily state.
The promise is shamelessly concrete. Perform the procedure correctly and you receive, on the text's own account, memory, eloquence, understanding and steadiness — and on that foundation, command of the academic subjects of the day. This makes the Ars Notoria the rare grimoire whose goal is not power over other people but power over your own head.
Picture the reader: a cleric or a student of the thirteenth century, in Bologna or Paris, who knows that knowledge means memorisation, that books are expensive, and that a career depends on speaking freely and correctly. For him this was not a curiosity. It was a shortcut.
Where the text comes from
The Ars Notoria is attributed to Solomon, like nearly everything in this family of texts. The surviving Latin manuscript tradition, however, begins only in the thirteenth century, and scholarship places the origin in northern Italy. There is no Hebrew original, no ancient predecessor, no manuscript reaching back past the Latin Middle Ages.
That is not unusual. The Solomonic attribution is a seal of quality, not a statement of provenance — the same is true of the Key of Solomon and of the Book of Abramelin, whose fictitious origin has been studied in some detail. Anyone writing about hidden knowledge in the Middle Ages put it in Solomon's mouth, because Solomon was the legendary master of spirits. The biblical text says nothing of the kind.
The manuscripts differ considerably from one another. There are shorter and longer recensions, different prayer sequences, different sets of figures. Speaking of a single unified work is a simplification the tradition does not support.
The notae: pictures you are supposed to stare at
The heart of the book is the figures. They typically consist of basic geometric forms — circles, rectangles, trees, ladders — filled with text: prayer incipits, angel names, and strings of words in a Latin that at points stops being Latin and becomes sound sequences with no graspable meaning. Scholarship calls these voces magicae.
Each nota belongs to an art. There is a figure for grammar, one for rhetoric, one for philosophy. You contemplate them in a fixed order, speak the corresponding orations, and repeat the process over weeks.
Here lies the largest problem in how the book has been received. The printed editions do not contain the figures. From the early Latin appearance in the Opera omnia attributed to Agrippa through to Robert Turner's English translation of 1657, the notae were simply left out — they were expensive to reproduce and barely printable at all. So anyone who knows the Ars Notoria only in print knows the text without its core. Only the manuscripts show what the thing actually is.
How the procedure runs
The Ars Notoria is a discipline programme, not a trick. In outline it requires:
Binding to time. Particular prayers belong to particular days, often tied to the phases of the moon and to the canonical hours.
Bodily preparation. Fasting, continence, washing, clean clothing. The text is thoroughly Christian and monastic in this, not pagan.
Orations. Long prayer sequences, spoken exactly and aloud. Errors count as grounds to break off.
Inspection of the nota. Looking at the figure while its oration runs.
Repetition. Over weeks, in a cycle modelled on the lunar month.
What actually happens can be described without metaphysics: you sit still daily for weeks, concentrate on a complex visual pattern and speak rhythmic texts. That is a concentration exercise of considerable severity. Whether it teaches grammar is another question.
Why the church hated it in particular
The Ars Notoria had a problem the cruder grimoires did not. It looked pious. The prayers are addressed to God, the names are angel names, the programme is ascetic. In the eyes of its opponents that made it more dangerous, not less.
Thomas Aquinas takes up the procedure in the thirteenth century and rejects it. His argument is precise: if unintelligible strings of words are to have an effect, that effect cannot come from God, because God does not need formulae. It must therefore come from someone else — and under the given assumptions that someone is a demon. From which it follows: the holier the Ars Notoria sounds, the more suspect it is.
The criticism did not kill the text. It drove it into the manuscript cellars, where it went on being copied, sometimes in composite volumes alongside perfectly harmless treatises on memory.
The Ars Notoria compared
The best way to sort the Solomonic literature is by its goal.
| Text | Goal | Means | Earliest manuscripts |
|---|---|---|---|
| Ars Notoria | Memory, eloquence, the seven arts | Contemplating figures, speaking orations | 13th c. |
| Key of Solomon (Clavicula) | Effects of all kinds ("experiments") | Circle, pentacles, planetary hours, tools | 15th-16th c. |
| Book of Abramelin | Knowledge of the holy guardian angel | Months of retreat, letter squares | early 17th c. |
| Picatrix | Talismans, astrological effect | Materials, stellar hours, invocations | Arabic 10th-11th c., Latin 13th c. |
Notice the direction. All the others want to move something outside. The Ars Notoria wants to move something inside. It is, by a distance, the most introverted book of magic the Middle Ages produced.
An anchor for the hour
Patagonia Incense Collection
The honest version of this practice is twenty minutes at a fixed time, said aloud, with a note afterward. What it needs is a start and a stop, and smoke is the oldest way to mark both — the text itself has you working in an order, at set hours, in a clean room. These are herb, fruit and resin blends from the far south; they are not medieval and we are not claiming they are. Light one at the beginning and stop when it is out. $24.95
See the incense →Voices from practice
What people who have worked with the text report, as subjective experience and not as evidence:
"I read the orations for a few weeks in the mornings. I learned nothing from it. But I got up at six regularly for the first time in years."
"The figures are the fascinating part. You understand immediately that someone built a visual memory system here — and then the printed edition simply contains none of it."
"What surprised me was how Christian it is. I expected something dark and got a prayer book with an extra function."
What we do not promise
The Ars Notoria confers no knowledge. There is no evidence that contemplating diagrams and reciting prayers transmits academic content.
The text is not ancient and is not by Solomon. The attribution belongs to the genre, not to history.
Anyone rebuilding it as ritual is working with a reconstruction. Complete sets of figures exist only in manuscript and are read differently by different editors.
Extended fasting combined with sleep deprivation can be taxing. If you have any medical vulnerability, this is not a field for experiments.
Practically: how to work with this
Read Turner's 1657 translation as a source, not as instructions. It is in the public domain and easy to find, and it has no images.
Go looking for manuscript scans. Several European libraries have digitised copies online. Only there do you see what a nota actually is.
If you want to practise, practise small. A fixed hour, twenty minutes, one text spoken aloud. That is the checkable substance of the method.
Set a scent as an anchor. A grain of frankincense or myrrh on charcoal marks the beginning and the end — see how to burn resin on charcoal if you have not done it before. Nothing more is required.
Keep a log. Two lines a day. After four weeks you will know more about yourself than about the Ars Notoria, and that is the actual yield.
The antidote to reverence
Reading medieval magical texts tends to induce awe. A simple corrective: for every claim, ask which manuscript says so and which century it comes from. Where no answer arrives, it is the reception talking and not the source. The Picatrix shows the same test applied to another classic.
Frequently asked questions
What is the Ars Notoria?
A thirteenth-century Latin book of magic attributed to Solomon. It promises memory, eloquence and mastery of the seven liberal arts through the contemplation of pictorial diagrams, the notae, combined with long sequences of prayer.
Is it really by Solomon?
No. The surviving tradition is Latin and begins in the thirteenth century; scholarship places its origin in northern Italy. The attribution to Solomon is a literary seal of quality, as it is in almost every Solomonic grimoire.
What are the notae?
Complex pictorial diagrams built from geometric forms and filled with prayer incipits, angel names and partly meaningless sound sequences. They are contemplated rather than read. Each figure belongs to one art or faculty.
Why are the figures missing from printed editions?
Because they were barely reproducible in print. From the early Latin editions through Robert Turner's English translation of 1657 they were omitted. Anyone who knows only the printed text knows the book without its core.
Why was it condemned?
Because it looked pious. Aquinas argued that unintelligible word strings cannot take their effect from God, since God needs no formulae — so the effect must come from elsewhere. The Christian form is exactly what made it suspect in that logic.
How does it differ from the Goetia?
Sharply. The Goetia in the Lemegeton calls named spirits and sets them tasks. The Ars Notoria summons no one; it directs prayers to God and angels in order to change the practitioner's own mental faculties. The target is inside, not outside.
Where to go next
For the Solomonic family and how a spellbook differs from a book of shadows, see grimoire vs. book of shadows. For the talismanic branch, the Picatrix. For the philosophy the later reception hung on all of it, the Kybalion. And for the practice of making your own figures, how to make a sigil.
Sources: Robert Turner, Ars Notoria: The Notory Art of Solomon, London 1657 · the Latin print tradition in the Opera omnia attributed to Agrippa · Julien Veronese's work on the medieval ars notoria and its manuscripts · Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae II-II, q. 96.
This article presents a historical text and describes transmitted practices. It is not a set of instructions and makes no claim about their efficacy. Questions about an order or anything on this site: 28@templeofdesire.com.
