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Near the beginning of his Disputationes advenus astrologiam divinatricem Pico della Mirándola mentions (') «the books of Plato concerning the Cow (which) the magi cause to circulate [...] filled with execrable dreams and figments». This paper presents an attempt to define the origins - in part Neoplatonic - of the execrable dreams contained in the Book of the Cow, to explain how its magic works in tandem with its gemellus, the celestial magic of the Picatrix generally so much more familiar to historians of Renaissance Neoplatonism, and finally to examine what little evidence there is for the popularity of this text during the Renaissance.
The Syrian city of Harrän has long been associated with occult events (2) - if not from the time that Abraham was brought there from Ur of the Chaldaeans as recorded in Genesis (5), at least from about 550 B.C. when the last of the Chaldaean kings, Nabonidus, dreamed that Marduk ordered him to rebuild Ehulhul, the temple of Sin, the god of the Moon, at Harrän. In order to make this restoration possible, Marduk employed Cyrus the Persian - the eventual obliterator of Nabonidus' feeble power and of the ancient kingdom of Babylon - as his instrument to destroy the army of Medes who were besieging the city (*).
A millennium and a half after the jubilant re-installation of the Moon in his temple liarrän was still in ferment with the occult sciences, with some elements derived from Babylon, some from Sasanian Iran, and some from Western and Southern India, while others came from the Greeks, and especially the Neoplatonists (5). In the ninth, tenth, and eleventh centuries the planets and the noetic hierarchy of Neoplatonism were still being worshipped in Harrän with rituals of mixed Mesopotamian, Zoroastrian, Indian, and Hermetic origins. The $äbians' study of the xôcjxoç, of the voûç, of the <jmxfi> and of «Komata, however, was based not only on Plato's Republic, Timaeus, and Laws, but as well on an Aristotelian corpus familiar to students of the Neoplatonic schools at Alexandria and at Athens; Ibn al-Nadlm in his Fihrist (6) quotes al-SarakhsI V), a pupil of al-Kindl, as citing their use of the Physics, the De Cáelo, the De generatione...