A Folk-Magic Bestseller Falsely Fathered on Moses

The Sixth and Seventh Books of Moses purport to contain secret magical knowledge given by God to Moses beyond the five books of the Torah, seals, incantations and spirit-tables for healing, protection and the commanding of angels and spirits, fusing Kabbalistic divine names, Christian prayer and folk charm. The attribution is pseudepigraphal: there is no ancient book, and the work as such is a compilation that took shape in Germany in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, printed cheaply and eventually issued in an influential edition associated with the publisher Johann Scheible (1849). Its real historical importance lies less in its content than in its travels.

Carried by German immigrants to the United States, it became a foundational text of African American Hoodoo and conjure, and it spread through the Caribbean and, via colonial routes, into parts of West Africa, where it acquired a formidable reputation. It is thus a striking case of a spurious European folk-grimoire becoming, through migration and the cheap-print trade, a genuinely important book in traditions far from its origin.