The Sixth and Seventh Books of Moses: from Stuttgart to the world

Tradition attributes to Moses the five books of the Torah, the Pentateuch. The idea that the prophet had written other, secret books is ancient: among the Greek magical papyri of Roman Egypt there is already an «Eighth Book of Moses», and the figure of Moses as a magician, victor over Pharaoh's wise men, runs through Jewish, Christian and pagan tradition. Against this background one of the most widespread grimoires in the world was born in the modern age: the Sixth and Seventh Books of Moses.

A German origin

The text belongs to the German magical tradition and circulated in manuscripts in the eighteenth century, with variable contents. It presented itself as a translation of ancient Hebrew documents, rich in divine names, seals and tables attributed to Moses, sometimes with fictitious dates. As with other grimoires, the antiquity it claims has no foundation: it is a modern compilation based on reworked cabalistic and Solomonic material.

The turning point came in 1849, when the Stuttgart publisher and bookseller Johann Scheible included the text in Das Kloster, a vast multi-volume anthology of popular, magical and curious literature published between 1845 and 1849. Scheible's printing fixed a reference version and allowed a circulation that no manuscript could have ensured, opening the way to reprints and translations.

Content and structure

The editions contain a series of circular seals and tables, accompanied by angelic and divine names in pseudo-Hebrew characters, which the text links to various purposes, from protection to wealth. An important part is devoted to the magical use of the psalms and of the names of God, in particular the Shem ha-Mephorash, the «explicit name» of Jewish tradition. Much of this material derives from Christian cabalistic sources of the Renaissance.

Scholars of Jewish culture have stressed that the book has no authentic link with rabbinic tradition: the Hebrew is often garbled, and the Mosaic frame is a device to confer authority. This does not make the text less interesting; it is in fact an instructive example of how the European imagination built a fanciful magical «Jewishness», often intertwined with prejudice.

A global circulation

Around 1880 an English translation appeared in New York, followed by numerous reprints. The book thus spread through the United States, where it entered African American hoodoo practice and the German-descended communities of Pennsylvania. Through commercial networks and mail-order sales it then reached the Caribbean and West Africa, becoming an object of great prestige and equal fear.

In Jamaica its importation was banned by the colonial authorities, who associated it with the practices of obeah. In Ghana, Nigeria and other West African countries the book played a part in twentieth-century popular religious culture, sought after by some and strongly condemned by Christian churches and by itinerant preachers.

The history of the Sixth and Seventh Books of Moses is that of a local book that became global. Born among German magical manuscripts, fixed by the Stuttgart press and relaunched by American publishing, it crossed continents and cultures, adapting to very different religious contexts. For historians it is a textbook case of the power of print in the transmission of magical traditions.