The title promises ancient secrets handed down from a manuscript. The surviving item we can date is a Stuttgart printing of 1849. Reading that title as a publisher’s claim, while using the catalog record to date the object, is the first step toward a useful history of this book.
- Documented witness
- Stuttgart, 1849
- Publisher
- Johann Scheible
- Series
- Bibliothek der Zauber-, Geheimniß- und Offenbarungs-Bücher
What the 1849 title claims
Scheible’s German title announces the “sixth and seventh book of Moses,” describes Moses’s magical spirit art, and says the text is faithful in words and images to an old manuscript. Those phrases are part of the printed artifact’s presentation. They do not, by themselves, identify an extant ancient manuscript or establish Mosaic authorship. The Bavarian State Library copy, catalogued through Google Books, gives a 46-page 1849 item in the sixth division of Scheible’s series of magical, secret, and revelatory books.
The structure matters. A work packaged as one part of a commercial series was being offered to nineteenth-century readers alongside other curiosity literature. Its biblical name should be studied as a claim of authority used by the printed book, not silently converted into a statement about the Hebrew Bible. This reading room keeps the title as printed, while describing the dated witness as a German publication.
Worked reading: seven seals become twelve tables
The short 1849 book gives its claimed revelation a visible architecture. An opening “instruction” presents God speaking to Moses and promises command over spirits of the four elements and seven planets. It then announces seven seals and twelve tables. The first book repeatedly cycles through a numbered “secret,” a conjuration, a reference to the corresponding figure, a list of servant angels, and a specialized claim for the seal. That recurring frame makes each image function as one indexed component in a series rather than as free-standing occult decoration.
The seventh seal closes one unit and opens another. Its heading governs angels and spirits of the seven planets; the next book changes from seals to tables. Four elemental tables precede Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, Sun, Venus, Mercury, Moon, then the Schemhamphoras. This ladder of elements, planets, and divine-name authority organizes twenty-three figures. Mosaic antiquity remains a weak claim, but the editorial sequence is unmistakable.
This internal map also explains the unusual physical description. The Bavarian record counts thirty-one numbered pages plus twenty-three plate leaves, while another catalogue interface summarizes the item as forty-six pages. The plates are not incidental illustrations added to a continuous treatise; they carry half of the book’s serial argument. A later edition can retain the title while moving, relabelling, or surrounding those figures with new material, so the order in this 1849 witness matters.
The book did not stay one size
An enlarged German edition dated 1854 is catalogued at 400 pages, with 23 plates and an appendix named in its title. That record should not be substituted for the shorter 1849 object. The increase illustrates how later material could be assembled under the same familiar name. If a modern description gives one page count or one list of contents for “the book,” it may actually be describing a particular edition.
The plates are part of that publishing history, but a plate in one edition cannot establish the arrangement or wording of another. The catalogued copies below show how the figures appeared at different stages of the book’s circulation.
What the date does and does not prove
The 1849 date identifies a surviving print. It is not a proven creation date for every passage gathered into the work. Owen Davies describes printed variants and earlier circulating material in German-speaking Europe; the first printed object and its component traditions therefore require different questions. An old-sounding attribution can also coexist with a recent compilation.
The useful historical claim is narrow and strong: Scheible issued a printed text under this title in Stuttgart in 1849, and the later enlarged editions show an expanding printed tradition. Claims about a lost source manuscript, exact author, or unbroken transmission from biblical antiquity need separate evidence. Treating those as unresolved makes the documented history more legible.
A passage belongs to a particular edition
The English books of 1880 and 1910 cannot establish exactly how the 1849 German item read. Translation, publishing choices, and later illustrations may have changed the presentation. The catalogue records and digitized volumes below show the separate stages of this transatlantic print history.
The title’s claims, the catalogue’s description of a physical book, and later scholarship’s account of circulation describe different aspects of the work. Two copies with nearly identical titles can be materially different books, especially when plates or translated passages changed between printings.
Source records and witness notes
- 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 digital record and scan of the 1849 printing ↗The record describes 31 numbered pages plus 23 plate leaves. The scan makes the seven-seal and twelve-table sequence visible.
- 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.