Mafteah ha-Hokhmot · מפתח החכמות

The first of the five keys under which Abulafia gathers the secrets of the Torah, one for each of its five books — this one the key to Genesis. It was written at the request of seven sages of the isle of Sicily, in Messina and Palermo, and for two causes, divine and human: the nearness of the end-time, and the want of sages of the wisdom of kabbalah today. Each part is called a key, since his way is to hand over keys that open the locked gates; the five are the keys of the wisdoms, the names, the sacrifices, the sefirot and the rebukes. He first collects the general principles of the twelve portions of Genesis by their plain sense, sets a preface on the three ranks — the righteous, the pious and the prophets — and their three ways, the plain sense, the hidden philosophical way and the way of the names, which is the kabbalah, and then goes back over the portions by the way of wisdom and the way of kabbalah, in permutations and gematria. The seven ways, he says, he has already treated in Otsar Eden Ganuz and in his commentary on Sefer Yetsirah, and at the close he also calls the book Sefer ha-Hokhmot.