My current project studies the circulation, usages, and regulation of the occult books of Lauron William de Laurence across North America, the Caribbean, and West Africa since 1900. Based in Chicago, De Laurence was a book pirate, who copyrighted books such as The Sixth and Seventh Books of Moses (1910) and The Great Book of Magical Art, Hindu Magic, and Indian Occultism (1915). People of wildly diverse religious and cultural backgrounds--from Hindus in Trinidad to hoodoo specialists in the US, and from obeah practitioners in Jamaica to mami wata worshippers in Ghana--used these books, in highly creative and innovative ways. Advertised in newspapers and bought through mail order, these books were at once immensely popular and frequently criminalized. In times of post/colonialism, racialized subjugation, and Christian hegemony, their circulation, adoption, appropriation, adaptation, and regulation shaped religion, identity- and community formation, and knowledge production across the Atlantic. The first comprehensive, transatlantic study of occultism in North America, the Caribbean, and West Africa, this project intends to provide new knowledge about the regions’ social and religious histories, and a new understanding of the globally entangled nature of occultism and its relation to colonialism and emancipation.