Or ha-Sekhel — Light of the Intellect (c. 1285)

⚠ A gap this app had for a long time: it has been running an Abulafia mode without carrying Abulafia's books.

Or ha-Sekhel is his manual of the Name — written in Sicily in the 1280s, and the place where the technique is set out most concretely. It is where the app's five head-motions come from: how the letters of the Tetragrammaton are to be combined, sounded with each of the vowels in turn, one breath at a time, with the head moved according to the vowel.

The register is the striking thing. This is not poetry about the divine name; it is closer to a set of instructions for an instrument — do this, then this, this many times, breathing thus. Idel's work made the case that Abulafia's corpus is the most explicitly procedural body of meditation instruction in the Jewish canon, and this is the text that makes it hard to argue with. Survives in manuscript in numerous copies; modern printed editions are 20th–21st century. Abulafia was widely opposed in his own time and after — Rashba's ban is the famous instance — and much of the corpus circulated quietly for centuries.