The text describes an elaborate ritual whose purpose is to obtain the "knowledge and conversation" of the magician's “guardian angel”. The preparations are elaborate, difficult, and long. During the period of the work, the magician must daily pray before sunrise and again at sunset. During this preparatory phase, there are many restrictions which must be observed, and the magician must conduct his business with scrupulous fairness. After the preparatory phase has been successfully completed, the magician's Holy Guardian Angel will appear and reveal magical secrets. Once this is accomplished, the magician must evoke the 12 Kings and Dukes of Hell (Lucifer, Satan, Leviathan, Belial, etc.) and bind them. Thereby, the magician gains command of them in his own mental universe, and removes their negative influence from his life. Further, these spirits must deliver a number of familiar spirits (four principal familiars, and several more associated with a set of magical word-square talismans). The magical goals for which the demons can be employed are typical of those found in grimoires: the practitioner is promised the ability to find buried treasure, cast love charms, the ability of magical flight, the secret of invisibility, and more. Because the work involves evocation of demons, the Abramelin operation has been compared to Goetic magic, especially by European scholars. However, the text's primary focus is upon the invocation of the guardian angel, and modern works on the subject tend to focus upon this aspect as well. The magic described in the grimoire was influential in the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, of which Mathers was the head. Aleister Crowley, at the time a young member of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, started preparations for seeking the angel by following Abramelin's instructions, at Boleskine House, Scotland, but he abandoned this plan to assist Mathers during the Golden Dawn schism of 1901. Crowley would later incorporate the ritual into his own mystical system and felt it to be a required operation for any serious student of magic. Mathers’s lengthy introduction is superb. At the end of it he states: “I will only say that I have written this explanatory Introduction purely and solely as a help to genuine Occult students; and that for the opinion of the ordinary literary critic who neither understands nor believes in Occultism, I care nothing.”