“All things will result to your entire satisfaction”: The Sixth and Seventh Books of Moses as Instrumental Ephemera

This thesis considers the 19th-century German grimoire, The Sixth and Seventh Books of Moses (1880), through a theoretical framework that synthesizes Killingsworth and Gilbertson’s tripartite schema in Signs, Genres, and Communities in Technical Communication with the historical approach of Elizabeth Tebeaux. This thesis is organized around three rhetorical concepts: communities, genres, and signs. The first section treats material and discursive conditions that allowed The Sixth and Seventh Books of Moses to transverse cultural and linguistic boundaries. The roles of printing technologies, copyright protections, and direct mail marketing are examined. In the second section, The Sixth and Seventh Books of Moses is read as a technical manual and compared to two contemporary works, The Long-Lost Friend (1850) and The Egyptian Secrets of Albertus Magnus (1900). In this section, the roles of Biblical intertextuality, Mosaic attribution, and opaque organization are considered as explanatory factors for The Sixth and Seventh Books of Moses’ influence on Southern hoodoo practices. The third section examines the seals and tables of "The Sixth Book of Moses" and "The Seventh Book of Moses" and characterizes them as hybrid symbolic-iconic signs, a designation that may prove useful for future consideration of images in magical texts.