This paper draws on my dissertation research on the large corpus of manuscripts of works attributed to the Ifriqiyan cum Cairene Sufi and putative ‘magician’ Ahmad al-Buni (d. ca. 622/1225). I examine the ‘esotericist’ ethics surrounding the early transmission and circulation of al-Buni’s works on the occult science of letters (‘ilm al-huruf), as well as the potential paradox the notion of transmitting secret knowledge in writing presents to those seeking to understand the place of al-Buni and similar writers in the wider ecology of late-medieval Islamicate thought. Drawing on a variety of paratexts from manuscripts of al-Buni’s works, including a small handful of ‘audition’ (sama’) certificates recording events at which al-Buni formally transmitted his texts, as well as evidence internal to the texts themselves—especially his use of the esotericist compositional strategy of tabdid al-‘ilm (‘the dispersion of knowledge)—I argue that al-Buni’s works were intended for, and initially circulated among, small networks of elite Sufi readers who protected its contents from ‘the vulgar’, such that the majority of his works did not find wider circulation until more than two centuries after his death. Denis Gril, in his essay on the occult science of letters in the writings of al-Buni’s famous contemporary Muhyi al-Din Ibn ‘Arabi, has suggested that al-Buni “published” elements of the science that “others either had kept under greater cover or had limited to oral transmission,” implying that al-Buni abruptly exposed a formerly secret tradition to public circulation. I argue, however, that such an understanding fails to account for the complexities of broader sociointellectual trends in this period (the 6th/12th-7th/13th centuries), a time which the historian of medieval Jewish thought Moshe Halbertal has dubbed “the age of esotericism and its disclosure.” Drawing comparisons with earlier Islamic esoteric corpora, such as the alchemical texts attributed to Jabir ibn Hayyan and the Epistles of the Ikhwan al-safa’, as well as with those of some of al-Buni’s Western-Mediterranean contemporaries, including Ibn ‘Arabi and various Jewish Kabbalistic authors, I argue that al-Buni and his early transmitters sought to strike a balance between guarding powerful bodies of secret knowledge from the masses and their own efforts to bring initiatic knowledge to socioreligious elites whose spiritual integrity they felt had become perilously degraded. This paper adduces Bunian manuscript material not previously discussed in modern scholarship, and will be of interest to scholars of late-medieval intellectual history, Sufism, the occult sciences, and manuscript studies.