Sixth and Seventh Books of Moses

The Sixth and Seventh Books of Moses is an 18th- or 19th-century magical text allegedly written by Moses, and passed down as hidden (or lost) books of the Christian Old Testament. A grimoire, a text of magical incantations and seals, it purports to instruct the reader in the spells used to create the miracles portrayed in the Bible. The work was printed with annexes of reputed Talmudic magic names, words and incantation, many taken from Christian biblical passages. It shows diagrams of "Seals": magical drawings accompanied by incantations intended to perform various tasks, from controlling weather or people to contacting the dead or Christian religious figures.

Copies have been traced to 18th-century German pamphlets, but an 1849 printing, aided by the appearance of the popular press in the 19th century, spread the text through Germany and Northern Europe to German Americans and eventually helped popularize the texts among African Americans in the Southern United States and the Caribbean and Anglophone West Africa. It influenced European Occult Spiritualism as well as folk religion in the American South (Hoodoo), the Caribbean (Rastafari), and West Africa.

An older magical text, a fourth-century Greek papyrus entitled Eighth Book of Moses otherwise unrelated to the Sixth and Seventh Books, was found in Thebes in the 19th century and published as part of the Greek Magical Papyri.

No first version of this work has been established, but early versions began to appear as inexpensive pamphlets in Germany in the 18th century. Elements of the "Seventh Book", such as “The Seven Semiphoras of Adam” and “The Seven Semiphoras of Moses” appear to have come from the seventh book of the earlier European copies of the Sefer Raziel HaMalakh. The work came to wide prominence when published as volume 6 of Das Kloster in 1849 in Stuttgart by antiquarian Johann Scheible.

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