Occult Texts 2: The Mosaic Magical Tradition

“...I admitted privately to some curiosity about the object of my host’s preoccupation, insofar as he had been given to reading the Seventh Book of Moses, which is a kind of Bible for the supposed hexes, since it purported to offer all manner of spells, incantations, and charms to those readers who were gullible enough to believe in them.”

August Derleth, “Wentworth’s Day”

What a mess. This is what happens when three different religions with (at least) three different languages and styles of writing use the same material across several different cultures to tell the same story and impart spiritual meaning to an identical series of events. The essence of the Moses legend is that he was the abandoned scion of an oppressed people who, having grown up amongst the oppressors, was able to lead them to freedom and into a covenanted lifestyle in a new land with a beneficent deity. In order to do this, he had to draw upon a magical repertoire which gave him the ability to defeat those in opposition to him. Historically, there is little evidence to support the notion that Moses existed at all; theologically, there is a wealth of writing - contributions from Jewish, Islamic and Christian writers - which delves into the source and nature of the mystical powers of Moses and those of his brother Aaron.

The predominant way of thinking regarding Moses was that he must have been given access to magical powers in order to call down the plagues upon Egypt, thus convincing Pharaoh to let his people go. In fact, most of the plagues are actually called down by Aaron, who is instructed by Moses accordingly. This suggested that whatever lore to which Moses was privy, he could share it with others. A theory emerged that Moses had inherited mystical knowledge from the patriarch Enoch, who had written down his magical procedures and passed them along to Moses via Noah; this lore, the Books of Enoch possibly allowed for the summoning of plagues, the parting of the Red Sea, the succouring of those lost in the Wilderness and the curing of the faithful.

Later in the narrative, Moses receives the Ten Commandments from God upon Mount Sinai. There are various interpretations as to what this incident actually entails, suffice it to say that, according to Jewish tradition, it is believed that God gave Moses a work called The Book of the Covenant – what would later become the Torah - or what Christians refer to as the Pentateuch, comprising the first five books of the Bible. Jews believe that the stone tablets accompanying this gift are simply a kind of elaborate ‘receipt’ of the transaction between God and Moses; Christians and Islamics place much greater emphasis on the tablets than on the books. These five books were thought to contain the secrets of the magic that Moses and Aaron used to escape Egypt; however, patently, as every Jewish male over a certain age can tell you, they do not. A belief arose that there were more books than were generally known about, circulating amongst a select group of cognoscenti and possibly kept hidden in the magical Ark of the Covenant.

The writers of Moses’ exploits in the earliest days were keen to emphasise that Moses’ magical powers were different from those of the Egyptians, who were seen at the time to be great and powerful sorcerers. Moses’ power came from God; in other words, a purer, cleaner source than the magic of the Egyptians which – speculation suggested – was based on murky, necromantic thinking. Later writers in the mediaeval period inverted this thinking, emphasising the fact that Moses had been raised as an Egyptian and therefore would have had access to their magical arsenal. Medieval thinkers re-invented Moses as a magical wunderkind and books of magic attributed to him swiftly appeared: a scroll, dating from the Second Century AD, was discovered in the Nineteenth Century discussing Moses’ puissance as a magician and notes the following texts attributed to him:

The Archangelical Teaching of Moses;

The Eighth Book of Moses;

The Key of Moses;

The Secret Moon Book of Moses; and

The Tenth & Hidden Book of Moses.

By the time of the later Roman Empire, the roots of magical power had removed from the Egyptian to the Jewish peoples and many Roman emperors had Jewish slaves in their households for the purposes of casting divinatory spells or countering evil influences. In the Dark Ages, Islamic and Jewish mystical lore filtered into Europe via Spain taking this notion of Mosaic writings with them: by the Eleventh Century, copies of a grubby little grimoire called the Harba de-Mosha (“The Sword of Moses”) were circulating there, with spells allowing the caster to walk on water rubbing along with the usual hexes and wards for avoiding the Evil Eye. In 1725 in Germany, a work entitled The Sixth and Seventh Book of Moses appeared and, despite the fact that the author is unlikely to have known about the posited Eighth Book, it became the most influential magical work to appear in modern times. In fact, its influence during the Twentieth Century is so overwhelming that we’ll turn from it now and discuss it in depth later.

Tablets of Moses

Also known as the Ten Commandments, these two slabs of stone were given to Moses at the climax of his meeting with God atop Mount Sinai. Most people know that the stones were then broken when Moses came down from the mountain and discovered that the Children of Israel had fallen into wicked ways; a second trip to the summit garnered him a second set. In amongst the making and breaking, the Golden Calf and the fact that this incident is of prime importance to a handful of modern faiths, there is a lot which is generally unknown. Let us sift...

According to Jewish tradition, the stone tablets were an accompaniment – possibly a type of receipt, along the lines of similar tablets given to the various parties in an Egyptian treaty - to another document called The Book of the Covenant. This may have been the original of what would later become the Torah, with the tablets being the signs of an accord between Moses and God. The tablets themselves, objects of greater focus for the Islamic and Christian faiths, have some rather peculiar qualities:

Firstly, ancient theologians have determined (given the textual evidence) that the carving on the tablets was done by God’s finger; further, the carving went right through the stone, so that the letters left holes in the tablets (from which we gather that God probably breaks a lot of pencils). It was also determined that pieces of stone, which would have fallen away from this carving process, miraculously remained floating in place – imagine cutting a letter ‘O’ out of a bit of paper and somehow being able to keep that central circle of paper in position. More amazing still, the writing was said to be completely legible regardless of whether the viewer was facing the recto, or verso side of the slab – reading backwards was not necessary if you were looking at the tablets from behind. Miraculous indeed!

A final point of interest is that, in America since the time of Cecil B. De Mille, it is regarded as an affront to the First Amendment of the Constitution of the United States of America to display the Ten Commandments with the commandments numbered: since different faiths number and observe the strictures differently, confirming a particular order is an implicit denial of those belief systems for which it doesn’t cover.

A strong focus concerning the Tablets of Moses in fiction is its method of transportation in the fabled Ark of the Covenant. According to Indiana Jones (and George Lucas) the tablets are simply dust within this contraption, but some feel otherwise. Other faiths believe that, along with the stone tablets, the Ark contains Aaron’s Rod, a pot which held the manna with which God fed the Children of Israel in the Wilderness, along with the robes, hats, belts and shoes of Moses and his brother Aaron. Erich von Daniken, in his book Chariots of the Gods? believes that the description of the construction of the Ark, if followed explicitly, will create a generator capable of producing gigawatts of electrical energy (he also says that the costumes worn by the keepers of the Ark were designed as a kind of insulation from this power).The Moslems refer to the Ark as the Cask of the Shekinah, the Shekinah traditionally being God’s feminine aspect, according to Cabbalistic thinking.

So: where is it? This is a question which is going to be asked without any satisfactory answer and which, like the nature of the Tablets themselves, depends on your own way of thinking. Some Islamics believe that the Mahdi (“the One Foretold”) will find the Ark near Lake Tiberias at the “End of Times”; other legends place the Ark variously in the South of France, Ireland (beneath the Hill of Tara), Southern Africa, Ethiopia, Egypt (but not where Indy found it!), Warwickshire in England and in caves beneath Mt. Tsurugi in Japan, where it has become the focus of a local faith, blending Shintoism and Buddhism. One faith places the Ark in Sanpete County in Utah, where it is supposedly guarded by three immortals: further details can be found in the Book of Mormon.

The Book of Mormon

“The Book of Mormon: An Account Written by the Hand of Mormon upon Plates Taken from the Plates of Nephi”, to give it its full title, is the holy text of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, otherwise known as the Mormon faith. The text was given to the religion’s founder – Joseph Smith, Jr. – after four years of tutelage by the Angel Moroni, in the form of a set of golden plates bound together by gold wire. According to Smith, the Book was originally written in “reformed Egyptian” and he was blessed with the ability to translate this language by his angel guide.

Getting the Book to print was not without its issues: Smith enlisted his neighbour, Martin Harris, as a scribe in the process and Harris’ wife connived to steal, and lose, the first draft of the initial 116 pages. As punishment for this indiscretion, the Angel Moroni took back the golden plates and withdrew Smith’s gift of translation until after he had observed a fitting penance. When this had been performed, the ‘plates were returned and the work began once more, although without the help of Harris, who nevertheless, mortgaged his farm to help pay for the publishing. When the ms. was ready to go to the printers, the golden plates went back to Moroni to be hidden away once more and The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints was good to go.

The golden plates consist of several sections: the “Small Plates of Nephi”; “Mormon’s Contribution, comprising his Words, his Abridgement of the Large Plates of Nephi” and the “Book of Mormon”; and additional material provided by the Angel Moroni. There are also copies of signed affidavits by those who saw and handled the plates during the translation process called the “Testimony of the Three Witnesses” and (post Harris) the “Testimony of the Eight Witnesses”. Certain sections of the engraved text according to Smith were ‘sealed’ and could not be translated; these along with the stolen 116 pages are the only sections of the plates unrecorded.

The plates tell of the lost tribes of the Children of Israel who wandered to the North American mainland around 600 BC and established communities there along lines similar to those of the Middle East at the same time. These communities grew and alternately fought and lived in peaceful harmony, especially during a phase when Jesus Christ miraculously appeared among them for an extended period. The tribes converted and integrated with existing Native Americans, even with indigenous Christians who had arisen some 2,500 years before the arrival of the Israelites. One of these, Mormon, was chosen to be the keeper of records of the lost tribes and it was he who hid the gold plates in a stone box buried beneath a hill in Manchester, New York. His son Moroni was chosen to guard this cache after his father’s death.

The debate as to whether a Levantine society once existed on the North American mainland has been long and heated and, as can be expected, boils down to a matter of faith. Of interest to Mythos aficionados is the notion of a “subterranean” (or at least, sub fusc) society, able to hide its presence (K’n Yan, anyone?), and the presence of powerful artefacts hidden in the US. According to the Book, the Ark of the Covenant is supposed to be buried in Sanpete County in Utah, and guarded by the Three Nephi, descendants of the Nephite tribe, indigenous American Christians blessed with this immortal duty by Christ himself. The construction of the Book itself – the gold (or simply just golden?) plates – also has interesting implications for another Mythos work: the Turner Codex.