The Sixth and Seventh Books of Moses: What's Inside

The Sixth and Seventh Books of Moses is the most consequential occult book ever published in the German language, and almost none of that consequence happened in Germany. This article follows it: where it actually came from, what is on its pages, and how a Stuttgart bookseller's 1849 compilation became a foundational text of American conjure.

Why there is supposed to be a sixth and seventh book at all

The Bible has five books of Moses. Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy — that is the Torah, complete, and nobody has seriously argued otherwise.

Which is exactly the opening. A sixth and seventh book does not claim to be an additional chapter. It claims to be the chapter, the one that was taken out. Every edition states the pitch somewhere on its first pages: here is the secret knowledge of Moses, removed from scripture because it was too powerful to leave in.

That is one of the most durable sales arguments ever devised, because it cannot be disproved. A text that says it was suppressed turns its own absence from every reputable source into evidence of its authenticity. The harder you look and fail to find it, the better the story works.

Moses the magician: the part that really is ancient

The idea that Moses was a magician is not a nineteenth-century invention. It is close to two thousand years old.

In the Greek and Roman world, certain circles regarded Moses as an Egyptian-trained sorcerer — a man who had studied at Pharaoh's court and learned what priests learned there. He turns a staff into a snake, parts a sea, strikes water from a rock. In a culture where miracle and magic were not separate categories, that reads as a professional résumé.

There is written evidence for the attribution. Among the Greek Magical Papyri from Roman Egypt there is a text scholars list as the Eighth Book of Moses (PGM XIII), dating to the second or third century. It has nothing in common with what has been sold in Germany since 1849, but it proves how old the habit is of circulating magical instruction under that name.

So: is there anything genuinely ancient here? In the motif, yes. In the book, no. Keeping those two answers apart is most of what this article does.

Stuttgart, 1849: the printing that started everything

The version everyone means has a place, a date and a name attached to it.

Johann Scheible was an antiquarian bookseller and publisher in Stuttgart. Between 1845 and 1849 he issued a twelve-volume compendium called Das Kloster — a vast gathering of grimoires, chapbooks, superstition, legend and folk tale that is now one of the most important source collections for German popular tradition. Alongside it he ran a series he called the Library of Magic, Secret and Revelation Books.

In 1849 that series produced Das sechste und siebente Buch Mosis, with a subtitle promising Moses's magical spirit-art, the secret of all secrets, reproduced "word for word and picture for picture from an old manuscript." Expanded editions followed in 1851 and 1853. It has essentially never been out of print since.

The clause about the old manuscript is where the whole thing turns. Which manuscript, from when, held where — the book does not say, and nobody has produced it. What can be shown is the run-up: in 1797, half a century before Scheible, a periodical called the Allgemeiner litterarischer Anzeiger advertised a "6. et 7. Liber Mosis" for ten Reichstaler. Handwritten magical recipe books under Moses's name were already circulating, expensively, among the few people who could get one.

Scheible did not invent. He gathered, supplemented and printed — and in doing so turned a manuscript tradition for a handful of people into a mass-market product. That is the real event, and it is a publishing event.

What is actually on the pages

Open it and you find less narrative than the reputation suggests, and a great deal more graphic design.

The core is seals: circular or rectangular figures assigned to the spirits of the planets, ringed with rows of characters meant to look Hebrew. Each seal comes with a statement of what it is good for and how it must be made — often on virgin parchment, at a stated hour, in a stated ink.

Around them sit the Semiphoras and Schemhamphoras, blocks of text about the names of God and their supposed operation, and the spirit citations: invocations, banishing formulas, instructions for the circle. Under all of it runs a layer of ordinary household recipes of the kind found in any early modern book of secrets — against fire, against theft, for luck in trade.

Layer	What it is	How old it really is
Moses as magician	The authorship claim itself	Antique — attested by the 2nd–3rd century
Planetary seals, spirit names	The building blocks	Late antique, Jewish and early modern strands
Household recipes	Fire, theft, trade, illness	Early modern books of secrets
This arrangement, in this order	The book you can buy	18th–19th century; the print, 1849

And then there is the problem that sits at the centre of the whole thing. The Hebrew-looking character strings are, over long stretches, mangled, phonetically transcribed, or simply invented. A reader who knows Hebrew finds, in many places, nothing at all. That is not a specialist quibble. A text that draws its entire authority from its age and its language fails on exactly those two points.

Structurally it belongs with the rest of the early modern magical literature — the same architecture of seals, names, hierarchies and conditions you find in any grimoire, and the same family that later fed the ceremonial revival of the Golden Dawn.

The curse that came with it

Few books have collected so many stories about themselves. In Germany, Austria and Switzerland the warnings are nearly standardized: do not buy it; if you have it, do not burn it, because it comes back; you cannot give it away; you may only sell it below cost. Some versions say it has to be buried by running water, others that it must pass through three pairs of hands. Read it without knowing what you are doing, the stories say, and you call something you will not be able to send away.

All of this is well documented — as story. It belongs to a fixed body of motifs that attaches itself to forbidden books. What the documentation establishes is the spread of the motif, not its cause.

The interesting part is the function. A book you cannot get rid of is a book that is taken seriously. The curse is advertising, probably not by design, and it worked for a century and a half. If you have ever wondered whether your household is under one, our piece on how to tell if you are cursed takes that question apart from the other direction.

How it got to Pennsylvania

The real career of this book is American, and it starts with emigration.

German-speaking settlers brought it to Pennsylvania, where it landed beside a book printed on American soil: Johann Georg Hohman's Der lange verborgene Freund, published at Reading in 1820 and known in English as The Long Lost Friend. Together these two became core texts of Braucherei — the German-American tradition of healing and blessing that English speakers call powwow, a word borrowed from an Algonquian language and applied, confusingly, to a practice with no Native American content in it.

Powwow was ordinary rural medicine in parts of Pennsylvania into the twentieth century. A powwower stopped bleeding, drew out fire from a burn, removed warts, and blessed livestock, usually with a spoken charm and the sign of the cross. The same communities painted the geometric barn stars that tourists now photograph; our piece on hex signs and witch marks covers what those are and are not. The word hex in American English comes out of this world.

Rehmeyer's Hollow, 1928

The practice ended in public, in a courtroom, and the case is worth telling accurately because it is usually told badly.

In November 1928, in York County, Pennsylvania, three men went to the farm of Nelson D. Rehmeyer, a respected local powwower. John Blymire had convinced himself that Rehmeyer had hexed him and that the way to break it was to take a lock of the man's hair and burn his copy of The Long Lost Friend. Rehmeyer refused. He was beaten to death and his body set on fire.

The trial the following year drew reporters from across the country and was written up nationally as a witchcraft trial in modern Pennsylvania. Blymire and his accomplices were convicted. The publicity did what the killing alone would not have: it drove powwow underground almost overnight, made the books shameful to own, and fixed in the American mind an association between these texts and something dangerous.

Two details matter for anyone repeating the story. The book at the centre of the case was Hohman's Long Lost Friend, not the Sixth and Seventh Books of Moses — the two are frequently confused, including by people who should know better. And the harm in the case was done entirely by men acting on a belief. Nothing was done by a book.

Chicago, 1910: the mail-order occult empire

The book's second American life begins with a publisher who deserves to be better known.

Lauron William de Laurence (1868–1936) ran the de Laurence Company out of Chicago. He issued an English Sixth and Seventh Books of Moses in 1910 and pushed it, alongside a catalogue of talismans, oils, crystal balls and reprints of other people's books, through the United States mail. The business model was the same one Sears was running from a few miles away: a catalogue, a rural customer, a post office.

Where the mail reached, the book reached. It moved into African-American hoodoo and the working practice of rootworkers across the South, and it moved out of the country into the Caribbean. De Laurence's name became so closely identified with imported occultism in Jamaica that his publications are widely said to have been placed on a list of prohibited imports there — a claim repeated in a great many places and difficult to verify from an accessible primary source, so it is worth passing on carefully rather than confidently.

The scholarly record for the hoodoo side is unusually good. Between 1936 and 1940, Harry Middleton Hyatt recorded interviews with hundreds of practitioners across the American South; the resulting five volumes of Hoodoo–Conjuration–Witchcraft–Rootwork, published from 1970, contain informants discussing the Sixth and Seventh Books by name. Zora Neale Hurston's fieldwork in Mules and Men (1935) documents the same commercial world from the inside. These are not rumours about the book's reach. They are transcripts.

What the American editions added

The book that crossed the Atlantic is not quite the book that left Stuttgart. American printings accumulated companion material, most importantly a short text on the magical uses of the Psalms — a practice with genuine roots in Jewish tradition, which arrived in American conjure bundled with Moses and stayed there. In a great many households the Psalms material was used and the seals were never touched at all.

Editions also drifted. Reprints were cut, padded, re-illustrated and re-titled with no statement of what they were reproducing. This is why two people arguing about what the Sixth and Seventh Books "says" are frequently holding different books.

Old, older, and merely printed

Three layers, separable with a little care.

Ancient is the figure — Moses as magician, attested since antiquity. Old is the material: seal magic, planetary spirits, divine names, circle ceremony, drawn from late antique, Jewish and early modern sources and recognizable across the whole grimoire literature. Compare the way a written formula worked as a physical object in our piece on Abracadabra, or the older logic of the inscribed curse tablets.

New is the book: this compilation, this sequence, these plates, this title, and the claim of suppressed revelation. That is eighteenth- and nineteenth-century work, much of it by a publisher who understood his market.

The distinction takes nothing away. It puts the book where it belongs — as a remarkable document of how people have imagined access to power, and not as a find from a sealed temple.

What we do not claim

We are not telling you the seals work. There is no evidence that copying a figure out of this book has any effect on outside events. What people experience while doing it belongs to attention, expectation and ritual focus, and that is a different thing from a cause.

We are also not telling you it is dangerous. The curse belongs to the book's folklore, not to its binding. Owning it, reading it or passing it on is not something anyone needs to be warned about.

And we are not telling you it is ancient. The title is old, the motif is antique, the components are early modern — the text as sold is a nineteenth-century product. Anyone who writes otherwise has not checked, or is selling you something.

No claims about health, money or relationships. Physical symptoms belong with a physician and distress belongs with a licensed therapist; a practice can sit alongside those, and it does not replace them.

How to actually approach it

Read it as a source, not as instructions. The 1849 printing is digitized and free — the Internet Archive and German library portals both carry it. Nobody has to buy anything to find out what is in it.

Check which edition you have. If a printing does not state which text it reproduces, it has omitted the single most important fact about itself.

Take the warning stories seriously as stories. They describe how a culture handled forbidden knowledge. They do not describe the object on your shelf.

Separate curiosity from a problem. If you opened this because book history interests you, that is a good reason. If you opened it because something in your life has not moved for months, then that is the subject, and a nineteenth-century seal whose characters no one can read is the long way around.

Frequently asked questions

What is the Sixth and Seventh Books of Moses?
A magical book claiming to contain the secret knowledge of Moses removed from the Bible. The standard version was published in 1849 by the Stuttgart antiquarian Johann Scheible. Its contents are mainly planetary seals, texts on the divine names, spirit invocations and household recipes.

Is it really ancient?
Not in this form. The idea of Moses as magician goes back to antiquity and the components are late antique and early modern, but the text as sold descends from eighteenth-century handwritten recipe books and was fixed in print in 1849.

Is it true you cannot burn it or give it away?
That is folklore, not law. The warnings are widespread in German-speaking Europe and belong to a standard set of motifs about forbidden books. What is documented is the spread of the stories, not any cause behind them.

Is the Hebrew in the book real?
Largely not. The Hebrew-looking strings are frequently garbled, written out phonetically or simply made up, and cannot be read meaningfully. This matters because the book's authority rests on its claimed age and language.

How did it reach American hoodoo?
Through German settlers in Pennsylvania, where it sat beside Hohman's The Long Lost Friend (1820) in powwow practice, and then through L. W. de Laurence's Chicago mail-order business, which published an English edition in 1910 and shipped it across the South and into the Caribbean.

Was the 1928 Pennsylvania hex murder about this book?
No. The book John Blymire wanted to burn was Hohman's The Long Lost Friend. The two are often confused. Nelson Rehmeyer was killed by three men acting on a belief about a hex.

Where can I read the original?
The 1849 printing is digitized and freely available through the Internet Archive and German library portals. When comparing editions, always check which printing a given edition reproduces.

Where to go next

For the wider category this book sits in, start with grimoires and books of shadows. For the objects the seals were meant to become, see amulet, talisman and charm and how to make a protection amulet. For the planetary scheme underneath the seals, our planetary days guide lays out the correspondences, and the Golden Dawn piece covers what the ceremonial tradition did with the same material a generation later.

Questions about an order or anything on this site: 28@templeofdesire.com.