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for occult and numerological symbols. The front and back encapsulated Noble Drew Ali’s philosophy: that all people mistakenly labeled black, Negro, or colored were, in fact, “Asiatic” or Moorish–Americans whose natural form of worship was found in a monotheistic mystical Eastern faith that he called Islam. To Noble Drew Ali, Islam meant an unspoiled esoteric religion that extolled the holiness of Confucius, Jesus, Buddha, Zoroaster, and Noble Drew Ali himself. Jesus in particular, Fauset noted, “figures prominently” in his secretive text—a fact that may have helped Moorish Science appear reassuringly familiar to Southern migrants raised within the Baptist Church. It was not until many years later that outsiders finally detected the actual contents of the long-concealed holy book.

Its forty-eight chapters—packed into sixty-four tightly set pages—contained a dramatic narrative of the “lost years” of Jesus. It depicted the young carpenter as a great seeker of wisdom, traversing Tibet, India, and Egypt in search of self-knowledge and universal truth. The portrait of Jesus as a master adept or great initiate occurred frequently in occult and mystical literature of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. And in this instance, the depiction was one that Noble Drew Ali lifted nearly word for word from sections of a 1908 work that would go on to become a New Age classic. It was The Aquarian Gospel of Jesus the Christ by “Levi,” actually Levi H. Dowling of Ohio, a former Civil War chaplain, homeopathic healer, publisher of Sunday-school materials, and progressive Church of Christ pastor. Dowling, “the messenger,” psychically received his epic of Jesus’s “lost years” through contact with the “Akashic Records,” an ethereal hall of records that figured prominently in modern occultism and about which more will be heard. Dowling’s Aquarian Gospel was, in its way, the most ambitious and endearing of all self-generated literature about the life of Christ. It had a moral heart and message of universality in which all religions were part of a great wide table. In the hands of Noble Drew Ali, it became repurposed—and uncredited—as the prime narrative of the so-called Circle 7 Koran.

Portions of the Circle 7 Koran not copied from Dowling amounted to lessons in good living—fundamentals of self-sufficiency and moral conduct that later resurfaced in Elijah Muhammad’s Nation of Islam and other black-nationalist groups. Many of these passages were borrowed from a peculiar “ancient” wisdom book published in 1925 through the San Jose, California-based Rosicrucian group Ancient and Mystical Order Rosae Crucis, or AMORC. The book was called Unto Thee I Grant. AMORC billed it as the “Secret Teachings of Tibet,” a land that assumed Oz-like proportions in the minds of early-twentieth-century occultists. The Rosicrucian publishers ultimately credited the work to manuscripts written by Pharaoh Amenhotep IV around 1360 to 1350 B.C., an association that must have attracted their fellow Egyptophile Noble Drew Ali.

In actuality, Unto Thee I Grant was copied not from pharaonic manuscripts but from an eighteenth-century English instructional guide to manners and morals. It first appeared in 1750 under the title The Economy of Human Life. The book of moral aphorisms had always been intended to provoke intrigue. Attributed by its English publishers to nameless sources, The Economy of Human Life was mystical in conceit: TRANSLATED FROM AN INDIAN MANUSCRIPT WRITTEN BY AN ANCIENT BRAHMIN, read its title page. But it was distinctly bourgeois and Anglican in tone and content. Alternately rumored to be the work of Lord Chesterfield or an English bibliophile named Robert Dodsley, the book appeared in expanded versions over time, including from a Scottish press in 1785, which is one of the earliest editions in general circulation. The question of who wrote The Economy of Human Life—and who added to it along the way—provoked a literary debate in nineteenth-century Britain, culminating in an ultimately inconclusive work of sleuthing in 1854 by one “W. Cramp”