Al-Kindi was the first significant philosopher to write in Arabic and the organising figure of the translation movement in ninth-century Baghdad, working under Abbasid patronage on the transmission of Greek philosophy and science into Arabic. Peter Adamson's study is the standard account. His range was enormous, metaphysics, optics, medicine, music, cryptanalysis, where he produced the earliest known description of frequency analysis.
His interest for this atlas is the treatise De radiis, On the Stellar Rays, which survives complete only in Latin. It argues that every object in the world emits rays that act upon everything else, that the stars are the most powerful emitters, and that the resulting web of influence explains astrology, the efficacy of words and images, and the operation of magic.
The crucial feature is that this is a naturalistic theory. It requires no spirits, no demons and no divine intervention; magical effect becomes a physical process obeying regular laws, in principle as investigable as optics, the model is deliberately optical, with rays radiating, weakening with distance, and reflecting. That move gave later Latin writers a defensible way to hold that magic could be natural rather than demonic, and the theory of correspondences and sympathies that runs through Ficino, Agrippa and everything downstream of them has a substantial debt to it. The book was condemned as it circulated in the West, which is a fair indication that its readers understood the implications.