Written by Word-for-word textual evidence that the most famous “Solomonic” prayer manual is reciting Yasna 12
The Claim
Open Robert Turner’s 1657 English translation of the Ars Notoria — the medieval magical manuscript Latin Christendom called “the Notory Art of Solomon” — to page three. The very first oration the practitioner is told to speak, before any other prayer, before any contemplation of the notae, before any of the famous angelic invocations, ends with this petition:
“compleat, fulfil, restore, and implant a sound Understanding in me, that I may glorifie thee and all thy Works, in all my Thoughts, Words, and Deeds.”
The Latin underneath reads: per omnia opera cognitationum mearum & verborum meorum — through all the works of my thoughts and my words. The translator has rendered it expansively, but the structure is unmistakable. The opening prayer of one of medieval Europe’s most influential grimoires asks God to reform the practitioner in all his thoughts, words, and deeds.
This is not Christian. Not at the root. This is the Zoroastrian creed.
Yasna 12: The Source Text
The formal confession of faith every Zoroastrian recites — Yasna 12, the Mazdayasnō Ahmi — contains the lines:
āstuye humatem manō, āstuye hūkhtem vachō, āstuye hvarshtem shyaothnem
“I praise good thoughts (humata), I praise good words (hūkhta), I praise good deeds (hvarshta).”
This is the formula in its native habitat. Humata, Hūxta, Huvarshta. It is the operative center of Zoroastrian devotional life — recited in the Kusti prayers daily, embedded in the Yasna liturgy, woven into the Ashem Vohu and the Yasna Haptanghaiti. Yasna 35.2 gives it the canonical formulation: “We praise good thoughts, good words, and good deeds.” Yasna 1.21 supplies the penitential form: “If I have offended you, whether by thought, or word, or deed…” Yasna 1.18 supplies the offering form: “Here I give to you… sacrifice and homage with the mind, with words, deeds, and my entire person.”
Three formulas, three liturgical functions: praise, confession, self-offering. All three structured by the triad. All three present in the Ars Notoria.
The Ars Notoria Reproductions
Turner’s text and the underlying Latin (printed in Agrippa’s Opera Omnia) reproduce the Zoroastrian threefold structure not once but as a structural backbone running through the prayers. Three examples make the case.
1. The Opening Petition (Turner p.3) — the praise/offering form
“implant a sound Understanding in me, that I may glorifie thee and all thy Works, in all my Thoughts, Words, and Deeds.”
Compare Yasna 12.8: I praise good thoughts, I praise good words, I praise good deeds. Same triad, same liturgical function — the operator declares the alignment of his three faculties as the basis on which God is asked to act. The Ars Notoria even mirrors the Zoroastrian sequence: thought → word → deed.
2. The Memory-Oration Prologue (Turner p.22) — the self-offering form
“Reform my heart, restore my senses, and strengthen them; qualifie my Memory with thy Gifts… temper the frame of my Tongue, by thy most glorious and unspeakable Name.”
Heart (interior thought), senses, and tongue (word) — and the prayer is offered for the strengthening of memory, eloquence, and right action. Compare Yasna 1.18: “I give to you… sacrifice and homage with the mind, with words, deeds, and my entire person.” Both prayers offer the tripartite self to the divine for transformation. Both ask that the three faculties be made instruments.
3. The Penitential Form (Turner pp.10–11)
“Send forth thy holy Spirit, O Lord, into my Heart and Soul, to understand and retain them, and to meditate on them in my Conscience… Establish the coming in and going out of my Senses, and let thy Precepts teach and correct me until the end.”
The structure tracks the same threefold purification — heart (thought), senses (the channel between thought and word), and conduct (“the coming in and going out”). Compare Yasna 1.21: “If I have offended you, whether by thought, or word, or deed, whether by act of will, or without intent or wish, I earnestly make up the deficiency.” Both prayers locate sin in the three faculties and seek correction in all three.
The Ars Notoria is not borrowing a phrase. It is reproducing a liturgical architecture.
What the Grimoire Tells You About Itself
The Ars Notoria does not pretend its core prayers are Latin in origin. The text is explicit. Of the very first magical formula it gives — Hely Scemath Amazaz, Hemel, Sathusteon, hheli Tamazam — Turner’s translation says:
“It being a Science of so Transcendent a purity, that it hath its Original out of the depth and profundity of the Chaldee, Hebrew, and Grecian Languages.”
The Latin: de Chaldei, Hebraei, Graeci profunditate sermonis extortam. The grimoire credits its mystical words to three source-languages: Chaldee, Hebrew, and Greek. Chaldee is the language of the Magi. That is who “Chaldeans” were in the Greek and Latin sources — the priestly astrologers of Mesopotamia and Persia, the inheritors of Zoroastrian astronomical and ritual learning. Herodotus uses the term this way. So does Strabo. So does the New Testament when it places Magi in the East.
The Ars Notoria tells you, in its own preface, that its operative vocabulary is partly Magian. And the operative ethical formula it pairs with that vocabulary is Humata, Hūxta, Huvarshta in Latin dress. The text is not hiding what it is. It only looks Christian because the surrounding Christian framework was assumed, by the medieval reader, to be the source. It was the vehicle, not the source.
Why the Match Has to Be Inheritance, Not Coincidence
Three considerations rule out independent invention.
First, the formula is structural, not decorative. A Christian prayer that happened to mention thoughts, words, and deeds in passing would prove nothing. But the Ars Notoria uses the triad three different ways — for praise, for self-offering, for penitence — exactly as the Avesta does, and it places the formula at the load-bearing positions of its prayer architecture. The structural correspondence is too tight for parallel development.
Second, the formula’s transmission path into Latin Christendom is documented. Yasna 12 is older than the Hebrew Bible’s final form. Persian patronage of Second Temple Judaism (539 BCE onward) carried Zoroastrian ethical structure into Jewish liturgy, where the triad of machshavah, dibbur, ma’aseh — thought, speech, action — became standard. From Hellenistic Judaism the formula entered early Christian penitential practice and was canonized in the Confiteor. The Ars Notoria, compiled in the thirteenth century from older materials, sits at the receiving end of this chain.
Third, the grimoire credits Chaldee. No other major medieval prayer manual is this honest about its non-Christian source-vocabulary. The Ars Notoria names Chaldean alongside Hebrew and Greek as the linguistic substrate of its most powerful words. This is the closest thing to an attribution medieval magical literature offers, and it points east.
Implication
The Ars Notoria is one of the clearest unrecognized witnesses to Zoroastrian survival in Latin Christendom. It functions as a Magian prayer-manual wearing Christian clothes. The threefold formula at its operative core is not borrowed Christian piety — it is the Zoroastrian creed, transmitted through the documented channels of Persian-Jewish-Christian contact, preserved in a thirteenth-century Latin grimoire that names Chaldee as its source language.
For a tradition that has been told for centuries that its survival amounts to a small Parsi community in India and a few Yazidi-adjacent groups in Iran, this matters. The fire never went out. It moved into the prayers of people who did not know whose prayers they were inheriting.
The opening words of the Notory Art of Solomon, recited by every medieval practitioner who ever opened the book, were a Latin rendering of the Mazdayasnō Ahmi.
Humata, Hūxta, Huvarshta.
Good thoughts, good words, good deeds.
Spoken in Latin, addressed to the Christian God, in a grimoire attributed to a Hebrew king — but Zoroastrian at the bone.
Sources
- Robert Turner, Ars Notoria: The Notory Art of Solomon (London, 1657). Digital edition by Joseph H. Peterson, esotericarchives.com.
- Ars Notoria, quam Creator Altissimus Salomoni revelavit, Latin text in Agrippa’s Opera Omnia, vol. 2.
- Julien Véronèse, L’Ars notoria au Moyen Age (Sismel, 2007), critical edition of Latin manuscripts.
- Avesta: Yasna 1, 12, 35 — translations from Joseph H. Peterson (1996) and standard Parsi liturgical sources.
- Almut Hintze, A Zoroastrian Liturgy: The Worship in Seven Chapters (Iranica 12, Harrassowitz, 2007).