The Book of Abramelin

The Book of Abramelin tells the story of an Egyptian mage named Abraham, or Abra-Melin, who taught a system of magic to Abraham of Worms, a Jew from Worms, Germany,Template:Sfnp presumed to have lived from Template:Circa to Template:Circa.Template:Cn The system of magic from this book regained popularity in the 19th and 20th centuries, partly due to Samuel Liddell MacGregor Mathers's translation, The Book of the Sacred Magic of Abramelin the Mage.

The book presents an autobiography written in the form of an epistolary novel. The character of Abraham of Worms narrates his travel to the Egyptian desert and to a town bordering the Nile. An elderly Egyptian mage offers him two manuscripts containing knowledge of Kabbalistic magic, but extracts an oath that bounds Abraham in the service of God and the divine law.

The work was translated into English in 1897 by Samuel L. MacGregor Mathers and more recently in 1995 by Georg Dehn and Steven Guth.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref> Dehn attributed authorship of The Book of Abramelin to Rabbi Yaakov Moelin (Maharil) (Hebrew Template:Lang; Template:Circa), a German Jewish rabbi.Template:Sfnp This identification has since been disputed.Template:Sfnp

Structure

The grimoire is framed as a sort of epistolary novel or autobiography in which Abraham of Worms describes his journey from Germany to Egypt and reveals Abramelin's magical and Kabbalistic secrets to his son Lamech. Internally the text dates itself to the year 1458.

The story involves Abraham of Worms passing his magical and Kabbalistic secrets on to his son and tells how he acquired his knowledge. Abraham recounts how he found Abramelin the Mage living in the desert outside an Egyptian town, Arachi or Araki, which borders the Nile.<ref>There is a small town named Al ‘Arakī at the edge of the Nile floodplain, in a region famous for ancient Gnostic texts discovered there long after the Book of Abramelin was written.