An English title can make the Sixth and Seventh Books seem like one stable text. The University of Michigan’s 1880 copy and the Library of Congress’s 1910 de Laurence edition instead preserve different contents, lengths, and publishing contexts.
- English witness
- 1880, 192 pages
- Chicago edition
- 1910, 190 pages
- Digitized holding
- Library of Congress
The 1880 English witness
The University of Michigan copy catalogued through Google Books bears the long English title The Sixth and Seventh Books of Moses; or, Moses’ Magical Spirit-Art. Its title says the text was translated from German “word for word” according to old writings. That is the edition’s own description of its method, not a guarantee established by a side-by-side collation. Its catalog gives 1880 and 192 pages.
Davies reports an English translation appearing in 1880 as German-language print crossed the Atlantic. The American edition sits within a larger movement of inexpensive books among immigrant and English-language readers. Its English title and altered context mark a new stage of reception rather than a transparent reproduction of the German book.
The 1910 Chicago copy
The Library of Congress catalogues a de Laurence, Scott & Co. edition printed in Chicago in 1910. Its bibliographic description gives 190 pages and illustrations; the digitized object has a longer image sequence that includes covers and preliminaries. Those two numbers describe different counting conventions. The catalogue also identifies L. W. de Laurence as a contributor.
This is a particularly accessible witness because the Library of Congress hosts a page-by-page scan and marks the volume public domain and free to reuse. The guide links the source rather than showing a loosely labelled picture of a “Moses manuscript.” A printed twentieth-century page remains evidence for that edition even when its own prose asserts far older origins.
What an edition comparison can show
Title pages, tables of contents, section breaks, appendices, and plate placement differ across the surviving editions. The 1849 German record is much shorter than the enlarged 1854 German copy, and the English volumes have their own lengths. The shared title alone cannot establish whether a given seal, appendix, historical introduction, or explanatory paragraph was present in the earliest named printing.
These records do not amount to a full textual collation. They establish that distinct dated witnesses exist and make their material differences visible. The digitized copies preserve printed page labels and the placement of passages within each edition, while unverified differences remain unresolved.
Worked reading: how the 1910 plates govern the operation
The 1910 volume organizes its operation through a gallery of seals. Its opening extract names a breastplate and helmet of Moses, a breastplate of Aaron, a “Magical Law,” a chalice, and several citations, with short captions assigning a power to each figure. After the translator’s preface, a “Vestibule” and “Laws of Entrance” return to the same ritual furniture inside a longer sequence of purification, prayer, horn, breastplate, and circle. Repetition changes the reader’s job: the first appearance identifies the objects, while the second embeds them in an ordered performance.
The “General Citation of Moses” makes voice, direction, and the horn into a repeated response pattern. The later “Seven Great Princes” sequence then presents a circle, seven named citations, a run of figure plates, and a note on the use of the seals. Prose points forward to figures and figures point back to named sections. The plates therefore work as indexed equipment inside the book’s ritual grammar; separating them into an unlabeled image gallery would erase the sequence the edition builds.
This close reading belongs securely to the scanned 1910 witness. The 1880 catalogue proves an earlier English-language book of 192 pages and preserves its translation claim, but page count and title alone do not prove that every 1910 preface, repetition, caption, or plate occupied the same place in 1880. A real edition comparison begins with this named sequence and then checks it leaf by leaf, rather than treating the two dates as interchangeable labels for one timeless text.
Publication is part of the story
The change from Stuttgart 1849 to an 1880 English text and a 1910 Chicago edition is a documented print sequence. Davies’s study describes German reprints for immigrants in the 1850s and 1860s and the 1880 translation in American cities. The Library of Congress record supplies a later named Chicago imprint. Together, they demonstrate circulation through editions rather than a single timeless object.
The catalogue records document the book’s publishing history. They do not by themselves establish how particular communities used it in later folk traditions, which had their own settings and vocabulary.
Source records and witness notes
- University of Michigan copy of the 1880 English edition, via Google Books ↗The catalog identifies an English text, a “word for word” translation claim, and a 192-page volume.
- Library of Congress, de Laurence, Scott & Co. 1910 edition ↗A 190-page Chicago edition with a digitized 202-image sequence. The Library marks this book public domain and free to reuse.
- Bavarian State Library copy of Scheible’s 1849 German printing, via Google Books ↗The catalog gives the Stuttgart publisher, year, 46-page length, and series position. The old-manuscript claim is on the historical title, not independently verified.
- Bavarian State Library copy of the enlarged 1854 German edition, via Google Books ↗The catalog describes a 400-page edition with 23 plates and an important appendix. Its length differs sharply from the 1849 item.
- Owen Davies, “The dissemination of magical knowledge,” in Beyond the Witch Trials ↗Scholarly study of Scheible’s print history, variant forms, Pennsylvania circulation, and the 1880 English translation.