The Sixth and Seventh Books of Moses

Few books have been more feared, more banned, and more beloved than The Sixth and Seventh Books of Moses. Attributed — with a wink — to the prophet himself, it is in truth a German folk grimoire, stitched together in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries from Kabbalistic seals, Latin conjurations, and the Psalms. Johann Scheibel's 1849 edition sent it into the world; the American occult publisher L.W. de Laurence sent it everywhere else.

What matters, for us, is where it landed. Carried into the American South, the book was absorbed into Hoodoo and rootwork so completely that generations of practitioners treated it as scripture — the seals copied out by hand, the psalms prescribed like remedies, the whole volume kept hidden because it was understood to be powerful. That is the review that counts: not whether the magic 'works,' but that a displaced people made a displaced book their own, and in doing so authored a tradition.

As a text, it is gloriously uneven — part spell-book, part devotional, part printer's opportunism. The famous seals are woodcut mandalas of divine names; the instructions are terse to the point of comedy. Read it as literature and you will be frustrated. Read it as a record of how faith and necessity fuse under pressure, and it is one of the most important books in the African American esoteric canon.

Our verdict: essential, and best read alongside a good folklorist. Approach the seals as art and the psalms as poetry, and let the history do the haunting.