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Chapter One contextualizes Joseph Smith's use of a "seer stone" to compose the Book of Mormon within contemporary folk magic practices, the philosophies of Western esotericism, and Christian occultism. The seer stone (sometimes described as a "Urim and Thummim") represented one of several folk magic practices that the Smith family pursued, most notably in relation to "money digging" or treasure hunting with mystical objects as guides. Such mystical pursuits entangled esoteric thought with religious efforts to discover God's mysteries, and Smith's practices reflected this magical worldview.

This chapter discusses elements from Russia’s esoteric tradition that reappear in new form in the writings of the Cosmists. Topics include the search for “Deep Wisdom” in medieval Russia; popular superstition and folk magic; alchemy, Freemasonry, and Rosicrucianism during and after the time of Peter the Great; Theosophy, Anthroposophy, and other nineteenth- and twentieth-century esoteric movements.

The introduction situates Joseph Smith's oral composition of the Book of Mormon within the religious and rhetorical culture of early nineteenth-century America. In an extended oral performance, Smith gazed into a seer stone and dictated the Book of Mormon to his scribes. The study focuses on orality, oral performance, and the oral composition techniques that Smith used to dictate the work. The introduction also includes a brief summary of the Book of Mormon narratives, along with a discussion on the academic framework for understanding seer stones in the context of Western esotericism and folk magic.

This chapter talks about the role humoral pathology played in Jewish medicine. Humans were created from four elements: earth, wind, fire, and water. And the fact that someone, God forbid, falls ill is due to an imbalance of these elements. One becomes dominant over another and there is no peace between them. In both Jewish medicine and rabbinic literature, views on the elements, the humours, and the temperaments were concordant with the dominant conceptions across Europe and in the Middle East. Humoral theory in Jewish folk beliefs was a significant element of most popular publications cited in traditional health and medical manuals. However, with the rise of biomedicine, memory of the origins of many views and practices derived from humoral pathology faded. Nonetheless, like the temperaments, they remained a presence in colloquial phraseology. As humoral pathology filtered down into folk culture it began to interact with magic and religion, even offering grounds for speculation on the extrasensory world, angels, and so on.

There are a number of places in which earth is ingested or topically applied because of its purported religious properties. This chapter presents stories of modern-day religious geophagy from around the world, in Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, and hoodoo folk magic. Although it may at first seem tangential to the main storyline, since religiously prescribed geophagy is not pica, the healing properties frequently ascribed to earth allude to the potential curative powers of geophagy. They also help shift geophagic earth away from its lingering “dirty” connotations; in many of the examples in this chapter, earth is considered pure and holy.