Sefer HaRazim (The Book of Mysteries)

About Sefer HaRazim (The Book of Mysteries)

Sefer HaRazim, the Book of Mysteries, is the most extensive surviving handbook of Jewish magic from late antiquity. Composed in Hebrew with Greek loanwords during the third to seventh centuries CE — most current scholarship places its core composition in the fourth or fifth century — it offers an organized practical guide to angelic magic, theurgic invocation, divine name speculation, and the manipulation of cosmic powers for ends ranging from healing and protection to romantic conquest and the destruction of enemies. The book's claim to attention rests not only on its content but on the dramatic circumstances of its modern recovery: it was reconstructed by the Israeli scholar Mordecai Margalioth in 1963 from fragments scattered across the Cairo Genizah and across European library collections, after having been lost to mainstream Jewish memory for over a thousand years. The publication of Margalioth's Hebrew edition (Sefer HaRazim, Yediot Aharonot Press, 1966) and Michael Morgan's English translation (Sefer Ha-Razim: The Book of the Mysteries, Scholars Press, 1983) opened a window onto the practical religious life of Jews in late-antique Palestine and Egypt that had been completely closed for centuries.

The book is structured around the seven heavens of late-antique Jewish cosmology. Each chapter is devoted to one of the seven heavens, beginning with the lowest and ascending to the highest. Each heaven is described in terms of its presiding angels, the offices and powers of those angels, and the rituals by which the practitioner can invoke them for specific purposes. The first heaven contains the largest array of practical formulas: spells for healing diseases, for influencing rulers and judges, for protecting against thieves, for winning the love of women (and occasionally men), for cursing enemies, for winning at chariot races, for understanding the speech of birds and animals, for catching fish, for restraining a wild animal, and dozens of other purposes that reveal the practical concerns of the book's intended audience. The higher heavens contain progressively more elevated and theurgic material, culminating in the seventh heaven, which presents a vision of God enthroned in glory in language that recalls the throne visions of Heikhalot Rabbati and the broader Heikhalot tradition.

The narrative frame of Sefer HaRazim is striking. The book presents itself as a revelation given by the angel Raziel to Noah before the Flood. Noah, the text says, wrote the secrets in a sapphire book that he carried with him into the ark and used to sustain himself and his family during the Flood. The book was passed from Noah to Shem, from Shem to Abraham, from Abraham to Isaac, from Isaac to Jacob, and so on through the generations of Israel until it came into the hands of Solomon, who used its formulas to build the Temple and to compel the demons to obey him. The narrative locates the book within the broader pseudepigraphical tradition of revelations transmitted through the patriarchs and ascribed to the antediluvian period — a tradition that includes the Book of Enoch, the Book of Jubilees, and the related Sefer HaYashar. The narrative frame is itself part of the book's claim to authority: the practitioner who recites its formulas is invoking secrets that go back to the dawn of human history.

The discovery and reconstruction of Sefer HaRazim by Mordecai Margalioth is among the great achievements of twentieth-century Jewish scholarship and a model of philological reconstruction from scattered fragmentary witnesses. Margalioth, working in the late 1950s and early 1960s with the Genizah fragments at Cambridge, Oxford, the Jewish Theological Seminary, and the libraries of Jerusalem, identified scattered passages that he recognized as belonging to a single book and pieced them together into a coherent reconstruction. The reconstructed text was published in Hebrew in 1966 (with subsequent reprints) and remained the standard edition until the appearance of Bill Rebiger and Peter Schäfer's two-volume critical edition Sefer ha-Razim I und II: Das Buch der Geheimnisse (Mohr Siebeck, 2009), which prints both the long recension (Sefer HaRazim I, corresponding roughly to Margalioth's reconstruction) and a shorter recension (Sefer HaRazim II) discovered subsequently. Rebiger and Schäfer's edition is now the definitive scholarly resource and includes a German translation, comprehensive introduction, and extensive notes.

The dating of Sefer HaRazim has been debated, but the evidence is more concrete than for many other texts of the Jewish mystical tradition. The Hebrew of the book contains a substantial number of Greek loanwords, suggesting a Greek-speaking environment such as late-antique Palestine or Egypt. The names of the angels in the seven heavens overlap significantly with those found in Greek magical papyri from the same period, suggesting a shared milieu of practical magic in the eastern Mediterranean. The cosmological scheme of the seven heavens, with its angels and rituals, is consistent with what we know of late-antique Jewish religion from other sources, including the Heikhalot literature and the Aramaic incantation bowls of Babylonia. Most current scholarship places the composition of Sefer HaRazim in the fourth or fifth century CE in late-antique Palestine, with possible later revision in Babylonia or elsewhere.

The relationship of Sefer HaRazim to the broader corpus of Jewish magical and mystical literature is one of the central concerns of recent scholarship. The book shares vocabulary, formulas, and angelic names with Heikhalot Rabbati and Heikhalot Zutarti, and the line between Sefer HaRazim's "magical" content and the "mystical" content of the Heikhalot literature is much thinner than older categorizations would suggest. Michael Swartz's Scholastic Magic (Princeton, 1996), Yuval Harari's Jewish Magic Before the Rise of Kabbalah (Wayne State, 2017), and Gideon Bohak's Ancient Jewish Magic: A History (Cambridge, 2008) have all argued that the modern distinction between mysticism and magic is foreign to the religious world of late-antique Jewish practitioners and that Sefer HaRazim should be read as part of a single broader tradition of Jewish ritual power that produced both the magical bowls of Babylonia and the visionary literature of the Heikhalot circles.

The book's recovery has had a significant effect on the modern academic study of Jewish religion. Before 1963, the practical magical traditions of late-antique Jews were known primarily through the polemics of their opponents (both Jewish and Christian) and through the small corpus of Aramaic incantation bowls that had survived in the soil of Mesopotamia. After Margalioth's reconstruction, scholars had for the first time a comprehensive practical handbook from the Jewish side of the magical tradition, written in Hebrew and reflecting an organized cosmological framework. The book has become a central object of study in the field of ancient Jewish magic, and its publication has been instrumental in establishing magic as a legitimate object of academic inquiry within Jewish studies.

Content

Sefer HaRazim is structured around the seven heavens of late-antique Jewish cosmology. Each chapter (or "firmament") is devoted to one of the seven heavens, beginning with the lowest and ascending to the highest. The structure reflects the broader Jewish cosmological scheme of seven concentric heavens populated by angelic hosts of varying ranks and offices.

The introduction presents the book as a revelation given by the angel Raziel to Noah before the Flood. Noah, the text says, wrote the secrets in a sapphire book that he carried with him into the ark and used to sustain himself and his family during the Flood. The book was passed from Noah to Shem, from Shem to Abraham, and so on through the generations until it came into the hands of Solomon, who used its formulas to build the Temple and to compel the demons to obey him. The introduction also includes warnings about the dangers of the practice and prescriptions for the ritual purity required of the practitioner.

The first firmament is the largest section of the book and contains the bulk of the practical magical material. It is divided into seven encampments of angels, each presided over by a leader and each devoted to a particular range of magical purposes. The formulas in the first firmament include spells for healing diseases (fevers, headaches, eye troubles, possession by spirits), spells for protection (against thieves, against demons, against evil dreams), spells for influencing other people (winning the love of a woman or man, gaining favor with a judge or ruler, winning at chariot races, defeating an enemy in court), spells for revealing hidden knowledge (prophetic dreams, the location of buried treasure, the identity of a thief), and spells for various practical purposes (catching fish, restraining wild animals, opening locks). The rituals typically involve the recitation of divine and angelic names, the writing of formulas on parchment or metal tokens, the use of specific incenses or herbs, and the performance of the ritual at specific times of day or night and in specific physical postures.

The second firmament contains additional formulas for prophetic dreams, for divination, and for the influence of celestial powers on human affairs. The angels of the second firmament are presented as having authority over weather, over agricultural prosperity, and over the broader functioning of the natural world.

The third firmament is devoted to angels who govern the courses of the stars and planets. The formulas in this section are largely concerned with astrological influences and with the manipulation of celestial powers for human benefit. The text shows the influence of late-antique Hellenistic astrology and represents a Jewish appropriation of cosmological ideas that were common across the eastern Mediterranean.

The fourth firmament contains material on the sun and the cycles of the day. The angels of the fourth firmament are presented as governing the daily course of the sun and as having authority over the times and seasons.

The fifth firmament is devoted to angels who govern night and darkness. The text describes nocturnal rituals and the powers that operate in the hours between sunset and sunrise.

The sixth firmament contains material on more elevated angelic ranks and on the cosmic order that approaches the highest heavens.

The seventh firmament presents a vision of God enthroned in glory, surrounded by the four living creatures of Ezekiel's vision and by the angelic hosts. The language of the seventh firmament closely recalls the throne visions of Heikhalot Rabbati and the broader Heikhalot tradition. There are no practical magical formulas in the seventh firmament; the chapter functions instead as a theological climax in which the practical magic of the lower firmaments is grounded in the ultimate cosmic reality of the divine king on his throne. The book ends with a hymn of praise that resembles the angelic hymnody of the Heikhalot literature.

Key Teachings

The central teaching of Sefer HaRazim is that the cosmos is structured into seven heavens, each populated by angelic hosts of specific ranks and offices, and that the practitioner who knows the names of those angels and the formulas for invoking them can compel them to grant his requests. The book is not a treatise of speculative cosmology but a practical handbook of theurgic operation, and its teachings are oriented toward action rather than contemplation.

A second teaching is the doctrine that divine names and angelic names are instruments of power. The names that fill the pages of Sefer HaRazim are not merely labels for the heavenly beings but are presented as keys to those beings' power: to recite a name correctly is to compel the bearer of the name, to write a name on a parchment is to bind its bearer to perform the practitioner's will. This conception of names as instruments of power runs through the entire late-antique magical tradition — Jewish, Greek, Christian, and pagan — and finds in Sefer HaRazim a particularly comprehensive expression.

A third teaching is the doctrine of correspondences between the cosmic and the human. The angels of each heaven govern specific aspects of human life: healing, love, prosperity, justice, knowledge, protection. The practitioner who wishes to influence one of these aspects must invoke the angels of the corresponding heaven through the proper rituals. The cosmos is presented as a vast machine whose levers can be operated by anyone who knows how, and the book is essentially a manual of operation.

A fourth teaching is the central importance of ritual purity and ethical worthiness. Sefer HaRazim emphasizes again and again that the practitioner who is impure or unworthy will not succeed and may suffer harm. The ritual prescriptions for fasting, for ritual immersion, for abstaining from sexual contact, for avoiding contact with the dead, and for maintaining a state of physical and ritual purity are integral to the formulas and cannot be separated from them. The book thus presents magical practice not as a value-neutral technology but as a religious discipline embedded in the broader Jewish concern with purity and holiness.

A fifth teaching is the doctrine that magical practice is continuous with the broader religious life of Jews. The angels invoked in Sefer HaRazim are the same angels who appear in the rabbinic and Heikhalot literature; the cosmos described is the same cosmos described in those literatures; the divine name on which the entire system depends is the same divine name worshipped in the synagogue. The book does not present magic as an alternative to ordinary Jewish religion but as a particular and intensive form of it, available to those who have mastered its specialized techniques.

A sixth teaching, less explicit but real, is the conviction that the practical magical formulas of the lower firmaments are ultimately grounded in the visionary reality of the seventh firmament — the throne of glory and the divine king who occupies it. The book ends not with a magical formula but with a hymn of praise to God enthroned in glory, and the entire structure of the seven firmaments is oriented toward this climactic vision. Magic, on Sefer HaRazim's view, is not an autonomous technical operation but an extension of the same religious reality that culminates in the worship of God.

Translations

Sefer HaRazim has had a focused but limited translation history, reflecting both the difficulty of the text and its specialized scholarly audience.

The foundational scholarly edition is Mordecai Margalioth's Sefer HaRazim (Yediot Aharonot Press, 1966), the first published reconstruction of the text from the Cairo Genizah and other manuscript sources. Margalioth's edition presents the Hebrew text with extensive scholarly apparatus and a Hebrew introduction. This edition remained standard for over forty years.

The standard English translation is Michael A. Morgan's Sefer Ha-Razim: The Book of the Mysteries (Scholars Press, 1983), produced for the Society of Biblical Literature's Texts and Translations series. Morgan translates Margalioth's reconstructed text in full and provides a brief introduction and notes. The translation is technical and aimed at scholars but accessible to readers willing to work with the material.

The most recent and now definitive scholarly edition is Bill Rebiger and Peter Schäfer's two-volume Sefer ha-Razim I und II: Das Buch der Geheimnisse (Mohr Siebeck, 2009). This edition prints both the long recension (Sefer HaRazim I, corresponding roughly to Margalioth's reconstruction) and a shorter recension (Sefer HaRazim II) that was discovered after Margalioth's work. Rebiger and Schäfer provide a German translation, comprehensive introduction, and extensive notes that incorporate forty years of subsequent scholarship. For serious work on the text, this edition is now indispensable.

Other significant scholarly treatments and partial translations appear in Gideon Bohak's Ancient Jewish Magic: A History (Cambridge, 2008), which translates and analyzes many passages from Sefer HaRazim in the context of the broader history of Jewish magic; in Yuval Harari's Jewish Magic Before the Rise of Kabbalah (Wayne State University Press, 2017), which provides extensive analysis and partial translation; and in Michael Swartz's Scholastic Magic (Princeton, 1996), which discusses the book in the context of late-antique Jewish ritual practice.

The book has not received the kind of widely distributed popular translation that some other Jewish mystical texts have received, in part because of its difficult and specialized content and in part because of the technical nature of its magical formulas, which are unlikely to be of practical interest to most contemporary readers. Serious students will need to work with Morgan's English translation alongside Rebiger and Schäfer's German edition.

Controversy

The principal controversies surrounding Sefer HaRazim concern its date, its provenance, its relationship to the broader corpus of Jewish magical and mystical literature, and the question of how to interpret its magical content within the framework of Jewish religion.

The dating of the book has been debated since its modern recovery, but the evidence is more concrete than for many other texts of the Jewish mystical tradition. The Hebrew of Sefer HaRazim contains a substantial number of Greek loanwords, suggesting a Greek-speaking environment such as late-antique Palestine or Egypt. The angelic names overlap significantly with those found in the Greek magical papyri from the same period, suggesting a shared milieu of practical magic in the eastern Mediterranean. Most current scholarship places the composition of the book in the fourth or fifth century CE in late-antique Palestine, with possible later revision in Babylonia or elsewhere. Margalioth's original dating to roughly the third century CE has been pushed somewhat later by subsequent scholars; Rebiger and Schäfer's edition discusses the question at length.

A second controversy concerns the relationship between Sefer HaRazim and the Heikhalot literature. The book shares vocabulary, formulas, and angelic personnel with Heikhalot Rabbati and Heikhalot Zutarti, and the seventh heaven of Sefer HaRazim presents a throne vision that closely resembles those of the Heikhalot tradition. Some scholars treat Sefer HaRazim as essentially continuous with the Heikhalot literature and see the two as parts of a single broader tradition; others maintain a sharper distinction and treat the two as related but separate textual traditions. Michael Swartz, Gideon Bohak, and Yuval Harari have all argued for the integration of magical and mystical traditions in late-antique Jewish religion and have read Sefer HaRazim as a key witness to this integration.

A third controversy concerns the social location of the book's practitioners. Were they marginal figures on the edge of Jewish society, or were they integrated into the synagogue and academic life of late-antique Judaism? The book's combination of practical magic with elevated theological vision suggests that its practitioners were not simple street magicians but possessed substantial Jewish learning. Yuval Harari and others have argued that the producers and consumers of Sefer HaRazim were probably members of the broader Jewish religious establishment who practiced magic alongside other forms of religious activity, rather than a separate magical caste.

A fourth controversy concerns the relationship between Sefer HaRazim and the Greek magical papyri. The shared vocabulary and formulas show clear contact between the two traditions, but the direction of influence is debated. Some scholars see Sefer HaRazim as a Jewish appropriation of Greek magical practices; others see it as a Jewish contribution to a broader Mediterranean magical culture in which Jewish, Greek, and Egyptian traditions all influenced one another. The question is unlikely to be resolved definitively, and most current work treats the two traditions as parts of a single broader magical culture of the late-antique eastern Mediterranean.

A fifth controversy, related to the others and largely settled in favor of those who would take the texts seriously, concerns the legitimacy of treating Jewish magic as a topic of serious academic study. Earlier generations of Jewish studies scholars, influenced by the rationalist apologetic of nineteenth-century German Jewish thought, tended to dismiss magical literature as marginal or embarrassing. Recent scholarship has decisively rejected this view and has established Jewish magic as a central object of academic inquiry, in significant part on the basis of Sefer HaRazim and the texts that have come to light alongside it. The book is now treated as essential evidence for understanding Jewish religious life in late antiquity, and the older apologetic embarrassment about its content has been replaced by serious scholarly engagement with what it tells us about the practices and beliefs of late-antique Jews.

Influence

The influence of Sefer HaRazim on the later history of Jewish religion is harder to trace than its significance as a primary source might suggest. The book was lost to mainstream Jewish memory for over a thousand years, and its modern recovery by Margalioth in 1963 means that its direct influence on the medieval and early modern periods was largely through the channels by which fragments of its content survived in other texts.

The clearest line of influence is through the Hasidei Ashkenaz of twelfth- and thirteenth-century Germany, who preserved fragments of Sefer HaRazim along with the rest of the Heikhalot corpus and incorporated its imagery and theurgic practice into their own mystical and pietistic system. Eleazar of Worms drew on the lists of divine and angelic names that appear in Sefer HaRazim along with parallel lists in Heikhalot Zutarti and Shi'ur Qomah for his own works on the divine names. Through the Hasidei Ashkenaz, fragments of Sefer HaRazim's content passed into the broader stream of medieval Jewish mysticism and influenced the doctrines of divine names and angelic invocation that run through medieval and early modern Kabbalah.

A second line of influence runs through the broader Jewish magical tradition. The names, formulas, and ritual prescriptions of Sefer HaRazim appear in fragmentary form in Genizah magical texts, in medieval Jewish magical manuals, and in the practical Kabbalah of the early modern period. The Sefer Raziel HaMalakh, a medieval magical compendium that circulated widely in the Jewish world from the late Middle Ages onward, contains material that derives from Sefer HaRazim and from related late-antique sources. Through such intermediate texts, the practical magical tradition of late-antique Judaism remained alive in Jewish folk practice for many centuries even after the original Sefer HaRazim was lost.

A third line of influence is felt in modern academic scholarship. Since Margalioth's reconstruction in 1963, Sefer HaRazim has been at the center of the modern academic study of Jewish magic and has shaped the work of scholars from Gershom Scholem to Gideon Bohak, from Michael Swartz to Yuval Harari. The book has been instrumental in establishing Jewish magic as a legitimate object of academic inquiry and in revising the picture of late-antique Judaism that earlier scholarship had inherited from the rabbinic tradition. The publication of Rebiger and Schäfer's critical edition in 2009 has further entrenched the book's central place in the field.

A fourth and more diffuse influence is felt in the contemporary revival of interest in practical Jewish spirituality. Aspects of Sefer HaRazim — its angelology, its concern with healing and protection, its visionary climax in the seventh heaven — have been incorporated into the broader contemporary Jewish meditation movement and into popular accounts of Jewish mysticism aimed at general readers. The book has not been widely received in contemporary spiritual practice in the way that Sefer Yetzirah or the Zohar have been, but it has informed the broader picture of Jewish mysticism that contemporary practitioners draw on.

A fifth influence, finally, is felt in the comparative study of religion. Sefer HaRazim has become a key document in the comparative study of late-antique magic alongside the Greek magical papyri, the Aramaic incantation bowls, and the broader corpus of Coptic, Mandean, and other magical literature from the eastern Mediterranean. The book's elaborate angelology, its theurgic formulas, its prescriptions for ritual purity, and its visionary climax all find parallels in other late-antique magical traditions, and the comparative work on Sefer HaRazim has helped scholars understand the broader religious and magical culture of the period. The book has thus become a central document not only of Jewish religious history but of the history of religion in the Mediterranean world during the centuries that saw the consolidation of Christianity, the rise of rabbinic Judaism, and the eventual emergence of Islam.

Significance

Sefer HaRazim is significant first as a practical handbook of late-antique Jewish religion that has no real parallel in any other surviving source. Where the Heikhalot literature describes the visionary ascent of an elite mystical practitioner, where the Talmud and the midrashim describe the legal and exegetical activities of the rabbinic academies, Sefer HaRazim describes what ordinary Jews — or at least Jews with magical aspirations — actually did when they wanted to heal a disease, win a lover, defeat an enemy, or gain favor with a ruler. The book opens a window onto a religious life that was practical, ritualized, and saturated with the assumption that the cosmos is populated by angelic powers who can be invoked, compelled, or persuaded to grant the practitioner what he seeks.

The book's significance for the history of Jewish religion is that it forces a revision of the picture of late-antique Judaism that earlier scholarship had inherited from the rabbinic tradition itself. The rabbinic literature, with its focus on legal interpretation and exegetical creativity, gives the impression that Judaism in this period was primarily a religion of study and observance. Sefer HaRazim shows that there was a parallel world of magical practice — practiced by Jews, written in Hebrew, drawing on the same cosmological assumptions as the Heikhalot literature, and considered legitimate enough to be passed down through generations of practitioners until it was finally lost in the medieval period and only recovered in the twentieth century. The book is thus a corrective to any view of Jewish religion that excludes the magical and the practical from its account of what Jews actually believed and did.

The book is also significant for the comparative study of magic in the eastern Mediterranean. Sefer HaRazim shares vocabulary, formulas, and angelic names with the Greek magical papyri of late-antique Egypt, with the Aramaic incantation bowls of Babylonia, and with the broader corpus of magical literature from the Greco-Roman world. The book has thus become a central document in the comparative study of late-antique magic, and its publication has helped scholars trace the connections between Jewish, Greek, Christian, and pagan magical traditions. The work of Gideon Bohak (Ancient Jewish Magic, Cambridge 2008), Yuval Harari (Jewish Magic Before the Rise of Kabbalah, Wayne State 2017), and others has built on Sefer HaRazim to construct a coherent account of Jewish magic as a distinctive but interconnected element of the broader magical culture of the ancient Mediterranean.

The book's significance for the history of Jewish mysticism, finally, lies in its preservation of cosmological and theurgic material that closely parallels the Heikhalot literature. The seven heavens of Sefer HaRazim are recognizable as the same seven heavens that appear in 3 Enoch and in the broader tradition of late-antique Jewish cosmology; the angels of the higher heavens overlap with those of the Heikhalot texts; the visionary scenes of the seventh heaven recall the throne visions of Heikhalot Rabbati. Sefer HaRazim thus provides important evidence for the integration of mystical and magical traditions in late-antique Jewish religion and shows that the visionary and the theurgic, the contemplative and the practical, were inseparable aspects of a single religious world.

Connections

Sefer HaRazim is intimately connected to the broader corpus of late-antique Jewish mystical and magical literature. It shares cosmological assumptions, vocabulary, and angelic personnel with the texts of Heikhalot literature, particularly Heikhalot Rabbati and Heikhalot Zutarti, and the seventh heaven of Sefer HaRazim presents a throne vision that closely resembles those of the Heikhalot tradition.

The book is connected to Merkavah mysticism through its visionary climax and its angelic cosmology. The seven heavens of Sefer HaRazim are recognizably the same seven heavens through which the Heikhalot mystics ascend, and the angels of the highest heaven are the same angelic ranks that surround the divine throne in the Heikhalot tradition.

The book has affinities with Sefer Yetzirah through their shared interest in the cosmic order and the ritual manipulation of names and letters, though Sefer Yetzirah is far more compressed and abstract than the practical handbook of Sefer HaRazim.

Sefer HaRazim's pseudepigraphic frame — the claim that the book was given by the angel Raziel to Noah before the Flood and passed down through the patriarchs to Solomon — connects it to the broader Jewish pseudepigraphic tradition that includes the Book of Enoch, the Book of Jubilees, and the related Sefer HaYashar. The narrative locates Sefer HaRazim within a tradition of antediluvian revelations attributed to the patriarchs.

The book is also connected to the Greek magical papyri of late-antique Egypt and to the Aramaic incantation bowls of late-antique Babylonia. The shared vocabulary, formulas, and angelic names show that Sefer HaRazim belongs to a broader Mediterranean magical culture that crossed the boundaries between Jewish, Greek, Christian, and pagan traditions.

Through its preservation by the Hasidei Ashkenaz of medieval Germany, Sefer HaRazim influenced the broader stream of Kabbalistic thought, particularly the doctrines of divine names and angelic invocation that runs through medieval and early modern Jewish mysticism. Eleazar of Worms drew on Sefer HaRazim along with the Heikhalot literature for his works on the divine names.

The figure of Abraham Abulafia in the late thirteenth century, with his elaborate system of letter combinations and divine name meditations, drew on a tradition that descended through the Heikhalot literature and Sefer HaRazim back to the late-antique world of Jewish theurgic practice.

Further Reading