The Sixth and Seventh Books of Moses stand as one of the most influential—and misunderstood—grimoires in the history of Western esotericism. In practice, despite the biblical naming convention, these texts have no canonical relationship to the Torah or the Pentateuch attributed to the prophet Moses. Instead, they represent a distinct genre of biblical apocrypha known as magical Kabbalah, blending Jewish mysticism, Christian folk magic, and medieval ceremonial rites into a practical manual for spirit conjuration, talisman creation, and divine intervention. For centuries, this work has circulated through European cunning-folk traditions, Pennsylvania Dutch Braucherei, and Caribbean spiritual practices, serving as a cornerstone text for practitioners seeking direct access to angelic and planetary forces And that's really what it comes down to..
Historical Origins and Textual Transmission
The precise authorship of the Sixth and Seventh Books of Moses remains obscured by the deliberate pseudepigrapha common to magical literature. Scholars generally trace the core material to German manuscript traditions of the 18th century, though the magical formulas within draw heavily on much older sources, including the Sefer Raziel HaMalakh (Book of Raziel the Angel), the Key of Solomon (Clavicula Salomonis), and various Heptameron texts attributed to Pietro d'Abano.
The first printed edition appeared in Stuttgart around 1780, published by Johann Scheible as part of his Das Kloster (The Monastery) series. This publication cemented the text’s structure: the Sixth Book focuses primarily on the theoretical framework, seals, and the "Magical Kabbalah," while the Seventh Book functions as a practical grimoire detailing specific rituals, incantations, and the construction of talismans for every conceivable human need—from winning court cases and finding treasure to healing livestock and silencing enemies.
It is critical to understand that the title "Sixth and Seventh" is a marketing and taxonomic convention. The five books of the Torah (Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy) constitute the written law; these appended books claim to represent the hidden oral law—the practical magic Moses allegedly used to perform miracles in Egypt and the wilderness, such as turning staffs into serpents or parting the Red Sea.
Structure and Core Philosophical Framework
The worldview of the Sixth and Seventh Books operates on a syncretic theology. It posits a monotheistic God (YHWH, Elohim, Adonai, Tetragrammaton) who governs a hierarchy of spirits: planetary intelligences, elemental rulers, and angels of the hours and days. The magician does not worship these spirits but commands them through the authority of the Divine Names.
The Sixth Book: Theory and Seals This section is heavily diagrammatic. It presents the Schemhamphorasch—the explicit 72-letter name of God derived from Exodus 14:19–21—as the ultimate key to power. It details the construction of the Magic Circle, the essential protective boundary within which the operator stands. Unlike the complex circles of the Key of Solomon, the circle here is often simpler, inscribed with the names of the four archangels (Michael, Gabriel, Raphael, Uriel) and the Tetragrammaton.
Crucially, the Sixth Book provides the Seals of the Spirits. In real terms, these are nuanced sigils combining Hebrew letters, astrological symbols, and geometric shapes. Each seal corresponds to a specific spirit governing a specific function (e.Here's the thing — g. , Aschmunach for treasure, Tapiel for love). The text asserts that these seals were delivered to Moses on Mount Sinai alongside the Tablets of the Law but were withheld from the "stiff-necked" Israelites Simple, but easy to overlook. Nothing fancy..
The Seventh Book: Praxis and Recipes If the Sixth Book is the textbook, the Seventh is the laboratory notebook. It organizes magic by planetary days and hours, a system derived from the Picatrix and Agrippa’s Three Books of Occult Philosophy. The practitioner must calculate the precise hour of Jupiter for wealth, Venus for love, Mercury for eloquence, or Saturn for binding.
The recipes are startlingly material. They require:
- Parchment or Virgin Paper: Often specified to be made from specific animals or untreated pulp. On the flip side, * Metals: Lead for Saturn, Tin for Jupiter, Iron for Mars, Gold for the Sun, Copper for Venus, Mercury for Mercury, Silver for the Moon. In practice, * Inks: Made from the blood of bats, doves, or black cats, mixed with gall and gum arabic. * Herbs and Roots: Mandrake, vervain, henbane, and other Saturnian or Martial botanicals.
A typical operation involves writing a spirit’s seal and name on the appropriate metal or parchment during the correct planetary hour, fumigating it with specific incense (storax, benzoin, sulfur), and reciting a conjuration in a mix of corrupted Hebrew, Latin, and German. The goal is almost always pragmatic: the recovery of stolen goods, the curing of "the falling sickness" (epilepsy), protection against "witchcraft," or the compulsion of a specific person’s affection.
The "Magic of the Psalms" and Folk Integration
One of the most enduring legacies of the Sixth and Seventh Books is the systematization of Psalmic Magic. * Psalm 91: The "Soldier’s Psalm" for physical protection from bullets and blades (Red candle). For example:
- Psalm 23: For protection and peace of mind (White candle). Because of that, the text assigns specific Psalms to specific outcomes, often paired with a candle color and anointing oil. * Psalm 37: To win favor in court (Green candle).
- Psalm 109: The "Cursing Psalm" for the destruction of enemies (Black candle).
This practice migrated naturally into Hoodoo, Conjure, and Pow-wow (Braucherei) traditions in North America. Because of that, in the 19th century, cheap printings by publishers like L. W. de Laurence in Chicago and Hohman in Pennsylvania (via The Long Lost Friend) disseminated these specific Psalm recipes far beyond the German-speaking immigrants who brought the original grimoires. The text became a "bible" for root workers precisely because it cloaked African and Indigenous spiritual technologies in the acceptable language of the King James Bible, allowing practitioners to operate under the radar of hostile authorities.
The Myth of the "Black Book" and Cultural Fear
The Sixth and Seventh Books have long suffered from a reputation as "Black Magic" or "The Devil’s Bible." This stigma arises from several factors:
- Blood and Sacrifice: Several recipes call for the blood of black animals (cats, hens, bats), a taboo in mainstream religion but standard in chthonic (underworld) magic.
- Illiteracy and Fear: In rural 18th and 19th-century communities, a book filled with Hebrew letters, strange diagrams, and instructions to command spirits was indistinguishable from a pact with the devil. Think about it: 2. The Conjuration of Evil Spirits: Unlike the Key of Solomon which focuses largely on planetary angels, the Seventh Book includes explicit rites for summoning demonic entities—Lucifer, Beelzebub, Astaroth—to fulfill "hard" requests that angels might refuse. Possession of the book was often cited as evidence in witch trials and heresy hearings.
Even so, a close reading reveals a deeply theurgic intent
Still, a close reading reveals a deeply theurgic intent masked by goetic trappings. The operator does not approach the spirits as a supplicant begging for favors, nor as a Satanist inverting the Mass. Instead, the magician assumes the mantle of divine authority—the Magus who commands by virtue of the "Names of God" (Shemhamphorash, Tetragrammaton, Elohim, Adonai) inscribed within the circles and sigils. Because of that, the demons are not worshipped; they are constrained. In real terms, they are treated as recalcitrant functionaries of the cosmic machinery who must be forced to perform their designated tasks—finding treasure, revealing secrets, healing the sick—through the sheer ontological weight of the Divine Names. In practice, the blood offerings and grotesque materia (bat’s blood, grave dirt, black cat bones) function not as "payment" to the devil, but as chthonic conductors, grounding the high-voltage theological current of the conjuration into the dense matter of the physical world. It is a magic of coercive orthodoxy: the operator asserts the hierarchy of Heaven over Hell to enforce order upon a chaotic reality Worth keeping that in mind..
The Bibliographic Phantom: Scheible, the Volksbücher, and the Problem of Authenticity
The textual history of the Sixth and Seventh Books is a hall of mirrors. Day to day, the definitive modern edition—the 1849 printing by Johann Scheible in Stuttgart as part of his Das Kloster series—is a scholarly reconstruction rather than a faithful facsimile of a single manuscript. Scheible collated multiple divergent Volksbücher (chapbooks) circulating in Southern Germany and Switzerland, smoothing contradictions and standardizing the German orthography.
Crucially, **no manuscript exists that contains both the "Sixth Book" (largely planetary/angelic magic, heavily derived from the Heptameron and Key of Solomon) and the "Seventh Book" (the demonic conjurations and folk recipes) as a unified whole prior to the 18th century.On the flip side, scheible’s editorial decision to bind them under a single cover created the canonical "Moses" grimoire known to the 19th and 20th centuries. ** The "Sixth Book" is essentially a corrupted Heptameron of Pietro d'Abano (c. 1298); the "Seventh Book" is a distinct Teufelsbuch (Devil’s Book) tradition rooted in the Grimoirium Verum and the Clavicula Salomonis Regis lineage. This act of bibliographic synthesis created the tradition as much as it preserved it, freezing a fluid oral-manuscript culture into a fixed "canon" that would later be exported globally via the American metaphysical supply houses.
The Modern Resurgence: From Rootwork to Chaos Magic
The 20th century saw the Sixth and Seventh Books migrate from the powder keg of the rural hearth to the laboratory of the urban occultist. The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn largely ignored it, dismissing its "impure" folk elements in favor of the "purer" Key of Solomon or Goetia. On the flip side, the mid-century Solomonic Revival (spearheaded by practitioners like Stephen Skinner and David Rankine) re-evaluated the text as a vital "missing link"—a working manual showing how high ceremonial forms actually degraded and adapted in the field No workaround needed..
Real talk — this step gets skipped all the time.
Simultaneously, the Chaos Magic movement of the 1980s and 90s (Peter Carroll, Phil Hine) stripped the text of its Christian theology entirely. But the elaborate circles, the Hebrew letters, the black candles: these became "meta-belief" technologies, aesthetic containers for the operator's will. They treated the "Spirits of the Seventh Book" not as objective demons, but as psychological complexes or egregores—archetypal patterns that could be "loaded" with intent and fired via the gnostic state. The Psalmic recipes, once the bread and butter of the conjure doctor, were recontextualized as "sigil mantras" or "enchantment loops Simple, but easy to overlook..
Today, the text occupies a unique bifurcated existence. In botánicas and spiritual supply shops from Miami to Detroit, the Seventh Book (often the Hohman or de Laurence extracts) remains a living, breathing manual—pages greased with Florida Water and candle wax, used exactly as intended in 1750: to get a lover back, to win a court case, to uncross a hex. In academic circles (the study of Esotericism and History of Magic), it serves as a primary source for the "vernacularization of the
