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For centuries, the great grimoires of the Islamicate world have circulated in handwritten Arabic — passed between practitioners, copied by scribes, and studied by those who understood the tradition from within. These manuscripts contain the full apparatus of classical Arabic occult science: spirit conjurations, talismanic seals, divine name invocations, astrological timing, magic squares, and the esoteric science of letters (ʿilm al-ḥurūf). Almost none of them have ever appeared in English.

This series changes that.

Each volume is a faithful, unabridged English translation of a complete Arabic manuscript. Every invocation is rendered in three layers — English translation, scholarly transliteration, and original Arabic script — so the reader can study and recite from the same text. Talismanic diagrams and magic squares are reproduced directly from the source manuscripts, not redrawn. Nothing is paraphrased. Nothing is omitted. Nothing is sanitized.

These are the primary sources of an esoteric tradition that spans a thousand years. They are published here, for the first time, in the language they have long been denied.

Hidden Knowledge, Faithfully Preserved.

John Friend is a nom de plume. Behind it is an esotericist, occultist, scholar, and translator who has spent years immersed in the Arabic manuscript tradition — reading what most academics catalog but never open, and translating what has never before appeared in any Western language. His work sits at the crossroads of Islamic esotericism, Solomonic magic, and the living tradition of ʿilm al-ḥurūf (the science of letters). He translates not as an outsider looking in, but as a student of the tradition itself.