Ars Notoria

I just learned, via this delightful article by Anne Lawrence-Mathers, about a fascinating medieval manuscript called the Ars Notoria.

Mastering the full range of subjects taught in medieval universities normally required many years of hard and expensive study. From the thirteenth century on, however, an anonymous work known as the Ars notoria promised, through diagrams, incantations, and arcane rituals, to rapidly transmit to scholars the total knowledge of anything they might need. Condemned by church authorities, the fifty-six extant manuscripts nevertheless testify to the seductiveness of that offer.

The manuscript claimed, like many others in circulation at the time, to be an account of the secret, angelic magic revealed to King Solomon. The author asserted that by pondering the arcane diagrams in a ritualistic way, according to a calendrical progression, one could shortcut the normal process of learning. 

Unlike diagrams in other magical texts, those in Ars Notoria do not illustrate what the text is seeking to communicate. Instead, they supposedly work almost in the same way as religious icons. That is, faithful possession and use of them can offer direct contact with powerful and benign supernatural forces — and ultimately even with God. The diagrams themselves are the route to magic and consist of arrangements of symbolic and geometric forms, patterns, and symbols, interspersed with “words”, which are frequently unintelligible combinations of letters. Practitioners who opened their minds to receive and imprint these labyrinthine images, while reciting complex verbal formulae and strings of mysterious, almost unpronounceable words and names, are engaging in a significant act of trust.

The manuscript presents itself as Christian, with a reverential attitude toward divine power. Yet the official church denounced the Ars Notoria. Thomas Aquinas seems to have been referencing it specifically when he wrote, in Question 96 of the Summa Theologica,

The magic art is both unlawful and futile. It is unlawful, because the means it employs for acquiring knowledge have not in themselves the power to cause science, consisting as they do in gazing certain shapes, and muttering certain strange words, and so forth. Wherefore this art does not make use of these things as causes, but as signs; not however as signs instituted by God, as are the sacramental signs. It follows, therefore, that they are empty signs, and consequently a kind of "agreement or covenant made with the demons for the purpose of consultation and of compact by tokens" [Augustine]

A quick search reveals that the Ars notoria still has a following among modern magical practitioners. Which I suppose means the idea of a shortcut to learning has eternal appeal.