The Book of Abramelin recounts how the magician Abraham of Worms learned a system of magic from a master named Abramelin the Egyptian, and it centres on a long retreat, of purification, prayer and withdrawal, undertaken to attain "the Knowledge and Conversation of the Holy Guardian Angel," after which the operator commands a hierarchy of spirits by means of word-square talismans.
The frame is Jewish and the setting fifteenth-century, but the earliest actual manuscripts are German, from the seventeenth century, and the work is generally dated to the fifteenth or sixteenth; the ascription to a real Abraham of Worms is at best uncertain. The English text that made it famous is the 1900 translation of S. L. MacGregor Mathers, but Mathers worked from a single, defective French manuscript: it omits an entire book of practical spells, sets the retreat at six months where the older German manuscripts give eighteen, and garbles many of the magic squares.
The later critical edition of Georg Dehn (with Steven Guth), drawing on all the surviving German manuscripts, corrects these and is the more reliable text. The book's most influential idea, the Knowledge and Conversation of the Holy Guardian Angel as the central aim of the magical path, was taken up by Aleister Crowley, for whom it became the defining operation of his system, and it is largely through Crowley that the Abramelin working is known in modern occultism.