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,[1] presumed to have lived from c. 1362 to c. 1458.[citation needed] The system of magic from this book regained popularity in the 19th and 20th centuries partly due to Samuel Liddell MacGregor Mathers' 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 by Samuel L. MacGregor Mathers and more recently by Georg Dehn and Steven Guth. Dehn attributed authorship of The Book of Abramelin to Rabbi Yaakov Moelin (Hebrew יעקב בן משה מולין; c. 1365–1427), a German Jewish Talmudist. This identification has since been disputed.[2]