Written by How a Medieval Christian Grimoire Preserved the Oldest Ethical Formula in the World
Introduction: A Formula Older Than Its Container
In the orations of the Ars Notoria — that strange and brilliant medieval grimoire of memory, wisdom, and divine illumination — the practitioner returns again and again to a single phrase. He asks God to purify him, to guide him, to hear him in all his thoughts, words, and deeds. The formula appears so often, woven so naturally into the Latin prayers, that the modern reader is tempted to treat it as ordinary Christian piety. It is not. Or rather, it is — but only because Christianity itself absorbed it.
The triad of thought, word, and deed is not an organic flowering of the medieval Latin imagination. It is the foundational ethical formula of Zoroastrianism, taught by Zarathustra perhaps three thousand years ago: Humata, Hūxta, Huvarshta — good thoughts, good words, good deeds. It is older than the Hebrew Bible. It is older than the Vedas in their canonical form. It predates the Greek philosophers who would later be credited with founding ethics in the West.
That this formula sits at the operative core of one of medieval Europe’s most ambitious magical-devotional texts is not a coincidence. It is a transmission. The Ars Notoria preserves, beneath layers of Christianized vocabulary and angelic nomenclature, the working ethical engine of the Magi. To understand why this matters — and why it represents one of the clearest unbroken threads from Zarathustra into late medieval Latin Christendom — we must trace the formula backward, from the manuscripts of the thirteenth century into the fire-lit sanctuaries of ancient Iran.
I. The Ars Notoria in Its Own Terms
The Ars Notoria, or “Notory Art,” is a Latin manual of theurgic practice that circulated in Europe from at least the early thirteenth century. Falsely attributed to Solomon — as much of the Western magical corpus would be — it claims to transmit a method by which the operator may, through the recitation of specific prayers (orationes) and the contemplation of intricate diagrams called notae, receive direct infusion of knowledge from God. The promised gifts include perfect memory, eloquence, mastery of the liberal arts, theological insight, and prophetic discernment.
Unlike later grimoires that summon spirits to compel obedience, the Ars Notoria is fundamentally a prayer system. The operator does not command; he petitions. He does not bind angels; he asks to be illuminated by them. The textual core is a long sequence of orations, many opening in corrupted Hebrew or Greek transliterations and resolving into Latin invocations addressed to God, to the angelic hierarchies, and to the celestial intelligences associated with each art and science.
What distinguishes the Ars Notoria from ordinary medieval prayer is the rigor of its preparatory framework. The operator must fast. He must abstain from sin. He must recite the orations at astrologically appropriate hours, in a state of ritual and moral purity, and — critically — he must offer himself entirely to God in thought, in word, and in deed. This phrase is not decorative. It is structural. The orations specify, again and again, that the practitioner’s interior life, his speech, and his conduct must all be aligned, because the working depends on the alignment. A practitioner who thinks one thing, says another, and does a third cannot receive the illumination the system promises.
This is exactly the Zoroastrian operative principle. And it is not the only one.
II. The Triadic Architecture of Zoroastrian Ethics
To see why the Ars Notoria is more Zoroastrian than its Christian framing suggests, we must understand what Humata, Hūxta, Huvarshta actually is in its original context. The phrase appears throughout the Avesta, the sacred scripture of Zoroastrianism, and is recited daily in the Kusti prayers — the central devotional practice of every observant Zoroastrian. The triad is not a moral suggestion. It is the operative description of how a human being participates in cosmic order.
In Zarathustra’s vision, the universe is structured by the opposition of Asha (truth, order, the right) and Druj (the lie, disorder, the false). Every human being is a moral agent whose thoughts, words, and deeds either reinforce Asha or strengthen Druj. There is no neutral act. There is no private thought that does not shape the cosmos. The triad is therefore not a list of three separate moral domains but a single integrated system: thought generates word, word commits to deed, and deed inscribes the soul into reality on one side of the cosmic struggle or the other.
Three features of this system are worth marking, because each of them survives in the Ars Notoria:
First, the triad is sequential and causal. Thought is upstream of word, word is upstream of deed. To purify the deed, one must purify the word; to purify the word, one must purify the thought. The medieval practitioner of the Notory Art who asks to be cleansed “in thought, word, and deed” is reproducing this sequence with precision.
Second, the triad is the precondition for receiving divine knowledge. In the Gathas — the oldest hymns of Zarathustra himself — wisdom (mazda) is given to those whose thoughts, words, and deeds align with Asha. The Magi inherited this premise: illumination is not earned by intellect alone but by integrated alignment. The Ars Notoria operates on exactly this assumption. The orations cannot work for a divided practitioner.
Third, the triad is performative speech. To declare oneself to be acting in good thought, word, and deed is itself an act that participates in Asha. The Zoroastrian recites the formula not as a description but as a renewal of cosmic alignment. The medieval operator reciting the corresponding Latin formulae is doing the same thing, whether or not he knows it.
III. The Channels of Transmission
The skeptical historian will object: how could a thirteenth-century Latin grimoire have inherited anything from a religion most of medieval Europe believed extinct? The answer is that Zoroastrian ethical and theological structures had been entering the Western tradition for over a thousand years before the Ars Notoria was compiled, through at least four well-documented channels.
1. The Babylonian Captivity and Second Temple Judaism
When Cyrus the Great liberated the Jews from Babylon in 539 BCE, he initiated a period of Persian patronage that would last two centuries. The Hebrew Bible itself acknowledges Cyrus as the Lord’s anointed (Isaiah 45:1) — the only non-Israelite to receive that title. During this period, Jewish theology absorbed structural elements that had not been present in pre-exilic Israelite religion: a developed angelology, a cosmic adversary, a final judgment, the resurrection of the dead, a coming savior, and — significantly — a sharpened ethical dualism between the way of righteousness and the way of wickedness.
The threefold ethical pattern enters Jewish thought in this period as well. By the time of the rabbinic literature, formulations resembling “in thought, in speech, and in action” appear in liturgical and ethical contexts. The Hebrew triad of machshavah, dibbur, ma’aseh (thought, speech, action) becomes a standard category in later Jewish mysticism, particularly in Kabbalistic thought, where it maps onto the inner structure of the divine emanations themselves.
2. The Magi and the Hellenistic World
Greek writers from Herodotus onward described the Magi with a mixture of fascination and reverence. Pythagoras was reputed to have studied with them. Plato’s later dialogues bear unmistakable Zoroastrian fingerprints in their cosmology and eschatology. By the Hellenistic period, “Magian” wisdom had become a recognized intellectual tradition within the Greek-speaking world, and Zoroastrian texts circulated — often pseudepigraphically — under names like Zoroaster, Hystaspes, and Ostanes.
This Hellenistic Magian literature would feed directly into the late antique magical and philosophical traditions: the Chaldean Oracles, Hermeticism, Neoplatonism, and the broader stream of theurgic practice that the Ars Notoria would later inherit. When Iamblichus wrote On the Mysteries in the fourth century, defending theurgy as a path of purification and divine ascent, he was working in a tradition whose deepest roots ran back to Persia.
3. Early Christianity and the Gospel of Matthew
The most public Zoroastrian intervention in Christian origins is the visit of the Magi to the infant Jesus (Matthew 2:1–12). This is not a literary flourish. It is an explicit acknowledgement that the priestly caste of Zoroastrianism recognized the birth of a figure whose significance their astrological tradition allowed them to identify. The early Christian movement absorbed, through this and other channels, Zoroastrian motifs that would shape its eschatology, its angelology, and its ethical framework.
The triadic pattern of thought, word, and deed enters Christian devotional life through multiple streams. The Confiteor, recited at the opening of the Latin Mass, includes the confession of sin “in my thoughts and in my words, in what I have done and in what I have failed to do.” Examinations of conscience throughout the medieval period are organized around the same three categories. By the time the Ars Notoria is compiled, the formula is so embedded in Christian piety that no one questions its origin.
4. The Islamic Transmission
When Islamic civilization absorbed the conquered Persian world after the seventh century, it did not entirely erase Zoroastrian thought; it translated it. Persian scholars converted to Islam carried Zoroastrian concepts into the new theological and philosophical vocabulary. The great Islamic philosophers — al-Kindi, al-Farabi, Avicenna, Suhrawardi — engaged seriously with Zoroastrian and Hermetic material. Suhrawardi explicitly identified his “Illuminationist” philosophy as a recovery of the wisdom of the ancient Persian sages.
It was through Arabic and Hebrew intermediaries that much of this material reached Latin Europe in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries — precisely the period in which the Ars Notoria takes its surviving form. The translators of Toledo, the Jewish kabbalists of Provence and Spain, and the Latin scholastics who absorbed their work were all participants in the largest single transfer of Eastern wisdom into Western Christendom since late antiquity.
The Ars Notoria sits at the receiving end of all four channels.
IV. The Operative Logic: Why the Formula Has to Be There
Once these channels are mapped, the presence of the threefold formula in the Ars Notoria ceases to look incidental and begins to look necessary. The text is not merely decorated with the language of thought, word, and deed; it cannot function without it.
Consider what the Notory Art claims to do. It promises that the operator, by reciting prayers and contemplating diagrams, will receive direct infusion of knowledge — not merely information, but understanding, eloquence, memory, and discernment. This is the same promise the Gathas make to those who align with Asha. It is the same promise the later Hermetic literature makes to the practitioner of theurgic ascent. It is the same promise the Kabbalist makes to the one who cleaves to the Tree.
In every case, the mechanism is the same: the human being is a tripartite agent whose thought, speech, and action must be unified for the divine influx to occur. A divided agent — one whose thoughts contradict his words, or whose words contradict his deeds — cannot receive the influx, because the channel is fractured. The grimoire’s emphasis on purity is not moral hand-wringing. It is engineering. The threefold alignment is the antenna.
This is why the Ars Notoria spends so much textual energy on the operator’s preparation. The fasts, the confessions, the recitations of penitential psalms, the demands for moral integrity — these are not Christian additions to a magical core. They are the Zoroastrian core itself, transmitted through Christian vocabulary, doing the same operative work it has always done. Strip the Latin away and the structure beneath is the structure of the Magi: thought aligned, word aligned, deed aligned, and through that alignment, the descent of wisdom from above.
V. The Diagrams and the Light
A further point deserves attention. The notae themselves — the intricate geometric diagrams the operator contemplates — bear striking resemblance to the symbolic geometries of the broader Zoroastrian-Hermetic-Kabbalistic tradition. The use of sacred figures as channels for divine illumination is not native to Latin Christianity; it is native to the theurgic tradition that runs through Iamblichus back to the Magi. The Notory Art’s combination of diagram-contemplation with ethical purification is a textbook reproduction of the Magian operative method.
Add to this the Ars Notoria‘s preoccupation with light, with fire-imagery in its descriptions of divine illumination, with the ascent of the soul through purification, and the picture sharpens. The grimoire is not a Christian text with magical elements. It is a Magian text with a Christian surface — and the threefold formula is the tell.
VI. Implications: The Continuity Was Never Broken
The conventional narrative of religious history treats Zoroastrianism as an ancient religion that flourished, contributed indirectly to the Abrahamic traditions, and then declined into a small surviving community. This narrative is incomplete. What the Ars Notoria demonstrates — and what a careful reading of the medieval magical corpus consistently demonstrates — is that the operative core of Zoroastrian ethics and practice was never lost. It was carried forward in the most unlikely vessels: penitential prayers, monastic confessions, theurgic manuals, kabbalistic meditations, Sufi devotions.
Wherever a tradition emphasizes that the human being must align thought, word, and deed in order to receive divine knowledge, the lineage of Zarathustra is operative, whether acknowledged or not. The Ars Notoria is one of the clearest cases because the formula is so literally preserved and so structurally central to the working. But the same continuity can be traced in the Catholic Confiteor, in the Jewish ethical tradition of machshavah, dibbur, ma’aseh, in the Sufi insistence on the unity of intention and action, and in the broader Western devotional inheritance.
The implication is significant. The ethical architecture that medieval Europe believed it had received from Sinai or from the Gospels was, in its threefold operative form, received from Persia. The fire-temple is older than the cathedral, and the cathedral’s most rigorous prayers still bear its mark.
VII. Conclusion: Reading the Ars Notoria as Heir
To read the Ars Notoria with this lineage in mind is to read it correctly. The medieval operator who recited his orations, asked to be purified in all his thoughts and words and deeds, and waited in expectation for the descent of wisdom, was performing — without knowing it — the working of the Magi. The grimoire is a survival, a relay station, a vessel in which the oldest ethical formula in the world continued to do its work under a different name.
For the modern student of Zoroastrianism, this matters. It means that the tradition’s reach is far greater than its census. It means that to recover Zarathustra’s teaching is not to introduce something foreign into Western spirituality but to name something that has been silently operative within it for centuries. The threefold flame has never gone out. It has only been carried, often by hands that did not know what they held.
Humata, Hūxta, Huvarshta. Good thoughts, good words, good deeds. The formula is not Christian, not Jewish, not Hermetic, not Kabbalistic — though all of these traditions have carried it. It is Zoroastrian at its root, and the Ars Notoria, for all its Latin surface, is one of the clearest medieval witnesses we have to that root’s enduring power.
The flame still burns. The Notory Art is one of the lamps it lit.