Arabic Grimoires in Translation

One of the things that struck me, when I got started collecting grimoires, is that there seemed to be a peculiar void in the ones available. You see the same books over and over again.... The Keys of Solomon, The Arbatel of Magic, Abramelin.... and it always seemed peculiar to me that these seemed to be the only grimoires out there.

Well.... the thing is, they aren't. There is a wide world of grimoires out there that for whatever reason have simply not been translated into English. My very first experience with this was in attempting to find an English copy of Le Grand et Petit Albert. Then I ran into it again with El Libro de San Cipriano.

 Even these, however, are somewhat easy to find in their native languages. It is easy to puzzle out the titles of these works because of their similarity to English and use of Roman characters. What about those that aren't?

I've recently gotten interested in Arabic magic, and discovered, much to my frustration, that most of the original materials have never been translated. The Picatrix is the notable exception, and I own both volumes of the Ouroboros Press edition. I've seen the Warburg Institute translations into German and English, and have a copy of their Latin edition.

But what about Shams al-Maarif by al-Buni? Its on Dan Harms' Grimoire Wishlist as well as my own, and there seems to be great difficulty in getting it translated, despite it being one of the most important works on magic in the Arab-speaking world. I have an English translation of the Birhatiya Conjuration oath from that work, and what seems to be a Spanish language version translated as a doctoral thesis. But there are no full English editions at all.

And while there still isn't a translation of that important work, there is at least one publisher who is trying to make Arabic grimoires available to an English-language audience: Ishtar Publications.

Ishtar and author Nineveh Shadrach have started releasing some formerly Arabic language only books of magic into English. Thus far, their offerings include Red Magic and The Forbidden Grimoire of Harut and Marut by "Egyptian Sorcerer Al-Toukhi", The Grand Key of Solomon the King, and more recently, one that interests me greatly, Berhatiyah.  Even Shadrach's other works, such as the innocuously titled Magic That Works draws heavily on Arabic sources which he cites.

The problem I have, which is one Dan Harms cites as well, is that there is no real commentary on the material, so it is impossible to put into context. It is only through a vague search, for example, that I discovered that al-Toukhi worked in the early 20th Century. Other than that, I have found out little about him.

Annoyingly, Shadrach seems to have editorialized some of the material. For example, in the section on Elemental Magic in Magic That Works, he makes mention of deriving the names that are inscribed on the Elemental Rings as being "derived from an ancient formula found in the rare occult text known as Tayseet al-Mataleb by Abu A'abed Allah al-Kufi."  All well and good, but then he explains that he tested the names, formulas, and chants, and decided that they were TOO effective, and so decided to not include them in the book, and included a different set of names for the rings. This is quite frustrating, to me, at any rate, since I would like to see and reference the original source material whenever possible.

There are other omissions that are equally frustrating. I was going through the exercise to discover the name of my 'Holy Guardian Angel', and discovered that Shadrach omits a key piece when developing the name using Hebrew characters. While the Arabic example he uses works just fine, he fails to explain how to create a Hebrew letter correspondence for the number 1000, which is key. Digging through other books on Gematria and Numerology, I *think* I discovered a way to calculate it, but I'm not sure if it is correct or not.... that method being the placement of 2 characters, in this case Yod (10) followed by the multiple that arrives at the number of thousands, in this case Qof (100).

Nevertheless, its fascinating to finally get a chance to see some of these less-than-common works, and it gives some insight into a world of magic that we've seldom gotten a chance to glimpse at before.