This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Sefer HaRazim did not survive the way most texts do, as a book someone kept whole. It survived as pieces, medieval copies here, fragments pulled from the Cairo Geniza there, and the version scholars read today is a twentieth century critical reconstruction stitched together from that scattered evidence rather than a transcription of any single surviving manuscript. That itself says something about how the text was used across the centuries: pulled apart, excerpted, copied selectively, the way a working reference manual gets used rather than the way a single treasured codex gets preserved.
What makes the reconstructed text distinctive is the seam running straight through it. Its cosmology, seven heavens stacked in ascending order, each with its own population of angels and its own function, is presented in unmistakably Jewish terms, tracing its own transmission back to Noah and Enoch. But the practical magic layered onto that cosmology, the invocations, the technique for petitioning a given angel for a given result, draws recognizably on the wider Greco-Egyptian magical vocabulary and method that circulated across the late antique eastern Mediterranean regardless of which religious community a practitioner belonged to.
That combination is exactly why the text matters to scholars beyond its own tradition. It is direct evidence that Jewish magical practice in late antiquity was not sealed off from its neighbors' technique even while it insisted on its own theological framing, a Jewish liturgy of angelic address built using tools that a Greek or Egyptian magical practitioner down the street would have recognized as familiar.