Historical books, manuscripts and ritual texts associated with ceremonial magic, folk magic, occult practice, divination and culturally specific magical traditions. Entries distinguish documented textual history from later attribution, legend and modern occult interpretation.
The Greek Magical Papyri, conventionally abbreviated PGM, are a modern editorial grouping of papyrus manuscripts produced in Egypt across several centuries. They contain Greek, Demotic Egyptian and sometimes Coptic material involving prayers, hymns, divination, healing, protection, astrology and coercive magic.
Shams al-Maʿārif, the “Sun of Knowledge,” is an Arabic work associated with the thirteenth-century writer Aḥmad al-Būnī. It treats divine names, letters, numbers, magic squares, prayers and cosmology. Surviving short and long recensions differ, and much material in later printed versions may be later accretion.
Sefer Raziel HaMalakh, the Book of the Angel Raziel, is a composite Hebrew work assembled from several earlier textual traditions. It was attributed to secret knowledge given by the angel Raziel to Adam and later transmitted through biblical figures. The surviving medieval and early-modern evidence does not support a single ancient author.
