Sirāj al-Dīn al-Sakkākī’s (d. 1229) Miftāh al-ʽulūm is a distinguished and ground-breaking book on al-balāghah (Arabic eloquence) that has been receiving increasing attention over time. Some studies insist on isolating the Miftāḥ from the rest of al-Sakkākī’s oeuvre. An emphasis is laid on the author’s life as a locksmith and scholar, and his gloomy penchant for the study and practice of the occult. In view of the author’s background in practical crafts and interest in al-ʽulūm al-gharibah (mysterious sciences), I argue the Miftāḥ as a surprising backdoor to a workshop where the relationship between crafts, literary and rhetorical investigations, speculative thought, language practice, science, and the domains of wonder, can be observed through two principal axes of research. I try first to see how craftsmanship was used terminologically and thematically as a source of inspiration within this text. This entails an effort to reconstruct the realms of logic and practice in the spirit of marvel. In this sense, and harmonizing balāghah's reasoning with the modern theory of illocutionary acts, I will reflect on the key leit-motif traced in the Miftāḥ as a door of access to the author’s world where visual communication espouses the alphabetical one to boost effects, enact reactions; in other words, “make things with words.” Focusing on al-Sakkākī as a scholar/alchemist with a professional vocation, my second reflection moves from the Miftāḥ’s very prescriptive organization and style resulting from the sharḥ tradition, to a conceptualization of this work as a handy instruction manual to explore the geniality of the craftsman or poet, already mined in sense and feeling by ʽAbd al-Qāhir al-Jurjānī (d. 1078). In line with al-Sakkāki reasonings on al-maʽānī and not al-badīʽ, I explore how the author turned his attention from the embellishment of statements - often conceived as a raw product to be chiselled – to an exploration of the rationalist way (iʽtizāl) through which the artisan frees the marble from the “empty wheels of languages” and uses the ability set for him by the divine to make poetry. Conceiving al-Sakkākī systematic detection of causes and effects as the attempt to frame them in a coherent divine and cultural project, thus, I look at the Miftāḥ’s “dryness” and prescriptivism as the logical output of a project that wants to explore the craft, not the beauty of the handicraft itself, like the spell that simultaneously performs the prodigy without unveiling its mystery.