Heather Freenan: The story of Saint Cyprian of Antioch is unusual. Peculiar even. It's the story of a famous pagan sorcerer in late third-century Europe, who eventually became a Catholic Saint.

Katarina Pejovic: Cyprian, as a young boy, traveled around the world and studied every imaginable form of magic.

Heather: Katarina Pejovic is a doctoral candidate in the Department for the Study of Religion at the University of Toronto. She's writing her dissertation on Cyprian of Antioch.

Katarina Pejovic: He learned how to conjure demons on Mount Olympus. He learned necromancy at Petropolis. He was initiated into the mysteries of alchemy and magic in Egypt. But eventually, he settles in Antioch, in Asia Minor, and begins to sell his services as a magician for hire.

Heather: Today, Antioch is the city Antakya in south-central Turkey near the Syrian border. In the early Christian context, performing magic was a sin, because the only true power could come from God. But Cyprian was a pagan – like many people in Europe at that time. So this wasn't a problem for him, and he soon became renowned for his highly successful spell work.

Now enter the second character in this story: Justina, also of Antioch. Justina was a beautiful young Christian woman. She was zealous in her faith and dedicated herself to a life of purity in the name of Christ. And one day Justina’s beauty attracted a suitor.

Katarina Pejovic: There's this man named, Agladius, who falls in love with Justina and tries to marry her. And when she rejects him, because she wants to be a virgin for Christ, he takes that very well by attempting to assault her. And so she manages to not only fend him off, but she beats him.

Heather: Thwarted and driven off by a young girl, Agladius seeks to buy a love spell from a sorcerer-for-hire – a service magician. Magicians often sold spells, charms, hexes, and counter-hexes to all sorts of people, from farmers to royalty. And so Agladius hired Cyprian for this love spell.

Katarina Pejovic: He goes to this famous magician, and asks him to essentially purchase his services as a sorcerer for hire to seduce Justina.

Heather: Magicians often employed the help of spirits to do their work. So Cyprian summons a demon. When the demon arrives, it offers Cyprian a convincing resume of his previous evil exploits.

Katarina Pejovic: He kind of boasts to Cyprian, saying he's very impressive, he could surely triumph over this virgin because he was the serpent that seduced Eve in the garden, he was the one who was able to get Cain to kill his brother Abel, and so on and so forth. He gives this entire litany of why he is the one that should be chosen to do this kind of work.

Heather: This all sounds good to Cyprian. So the demon tells Cyprian he has to run some logistics on the ground first, before the demon can seduce Justina.

Katarina Pejovic: The demon tells him to lay a pharmakon, like a powder, a magic potion, on Justina's doorstep and this would allow the demon to enter. Then he says, if you do this, I will enter and I will seduce her. Like a trance, she will obey you. And then she will go to Agladius.

Heather: So the diabolic duo gets to work. Now, this story is almost certainly fictional. It was told in many parts of Europe over the years, from Scandinavia, to the Balkans, to the Iberian Peninsula. And there’s different versions of how the demons try to seduce Justina.

But in all cases, Justina figures out the ruse. She realizes a demon is trying to trick her, and she'll have none of that. She simply performs the sign of the cross and fully repels the diabolic spirit.

Cyprian's plans are foiled. So he tries again with a different demon. And they're foiled again. By the second time, Cyprian is getting really frustrated. So he brings in the big gun: the Devil himself.

Katarina Pejovic: You know, Cyprian is like, this is kind of my last resort and his approach is very different. Instead of trying to enter into her room and seduce her in her sleep, the Devil confronts Justina in the form of a young girl posing as a Christian.

Heather: The Devil -- in the shape of a young Christian girl – tells Justina that she too wants to maintain her virginity and dedication to Christ. But she's not sure how to do that because it seems really difficult.

Katarina Pejovic: Justina basically says, well, no, I'm actually very happy being a virgin and there's a huge reward to doing this as a way of dedicating myself towards Christ. And the Devil says, you know, Adam and Eve were virgins, too, until God commanded them to be fruitful and multiply. And it seems like without Eve becoming pregnant, none of us would be here. And it seems like having sex is not a bad thing at all.

And at this point, it clicks to Justina that this is a demon again. And so she's able to repel him once more by forming the sign of the cross and, again, expels these spirits from the sanctity of her home.

Heather: The Devil himself is turned away by the piety of Justina. So he goes back to Cyprian and effectively says, sorry, buddy, you're out of luck.

Katarina Pejovic: The Devil tells him essentially that what he fears so much is the cross. What he fears is the power of Jesus. Cyprian is very frustrated because he's essentially summoned his biggest guns and they've all failed against just one girl.

And he's thinking how could it be possible when someone such as he who has studied all the magic that the Mediterranean world has to offer was utterly defeated by one virgin girl? Cyprian, realizing that Jesus’ power is triumphant, immediately wishes to convert.

Heather: In that moment, Cyprian sees Christianity as something even more powerful than his own magic, and he wants to convert. But to convert to Christianity, Cyprian has to confess. And Katrina explained to me that this confession directly targets the pagan audiences of this largely Christian propagandistic story.

Katarina Pejovic: He gives this long litany of his resume as an occultist, says that all of it essentially was for nothing, and what is the ultimate triumph is Christianity. In that way, Cyprian succeeds eventually and becomes a Christian.

Heather: Cyprian not only successfully converts to Christianity, but becomes a big advocate for the new religion. He eventually becomes a Bishop and spreads the Gospel with Justina, his partner in the Christian faith. And they're often depicted together on religious iconography to this very day.

But the world was largely hostile to Christians in the early fourth century. Cyprian and Justina are arrested by officials from the Roman empire and told to renounce their Christian faith or face death.

But they refuse to do any such thing. Cyprian of Antioch and Justina are eventually beheaded by the Romans and become martyrs to the Christian faith. They're later referenced as Saints in hagiographies, and their feast days are still observed in parts of the Eastern Orthodox Church.

For centuries, some Christians have prayed to Saint Cyprian and Saint Justina for help and protection against witches and magicians.

But in an ironic twist, Saint Cyprian eventually became the semi-underground patron to another group of people: Sorcerers, practitioners of the very magic Cyprian himself denounced. And today, that includes sorcerers in the United States.

This is Magic in the United States. I'm Heather Freeman.

In today's episode, The Sorcerous Saint, we'll look at the origin story of a spirit, Saint Cyprian of Antioch, and his partner in exorcism Saint Justina, who are honored and invoked by magical practitioners around the world. We'll learn about where the story of Saint Cyprian came from, how it migrated to Central and South America, and finally how he jumped across the border to the United States -- thanks to the Internet.

We'll be right back.

 [BREAK]

Heather: Welcome back to Magic in the United States. I'm Heather Freeman.

It's impossible to say why or how the story of Saint Cyprian first came to be, and how it evolved from something that was probably oral into something that was written down.

But we do have texts that refer to who would be Saint Cyprian or to Saint Cyprian's book of magic.

And one text in particular stands out among all this folklore: The Prayer of Saint Cyprian, which is used by magical practitioners around the world. Just as a trucker might say a prayer to Saint Christopher – patron of travelers – before hitting the road, a contemporary sorcerer might include a prayer to Saint Cyprian before performing a magical operation.

This prayer is spoken in first person as Cyprian, and he reaffirms his devotion to the Christian God and also lists his magical accomplishments. Here's an excerpt from his Orison:

"...Mighty and Holy God exists, praised be Thou forever. Thou who saw the malice of this Thy servant Cyprian!… I would bind women. Bind the clouds of the sky. Bind the waters of the sea, so as the fishermen could not sail, and could not fish the sustenance of men. For I, from my malice, my great evil doings, would bind pregnant women so as they could not give birth. And all things I would do in the name of the devil."

The magical practitioner could use this prayer as a spell by replacing Cyprian's name with their own.

José Leitão: The prayer of St Cyprian is both a magical utterance -- so something that you say that has power in the words that you say -- but also a talismanic text, something that if you have written it on a piece of paper and you carry it with you, it's supposed to protect you.

Heather: José Leitão is a historian and researcher with the Center for the History of Society and Culture at the University of Coimbra in Portugal, and has translated many Cyprianic texts – including the prayer I just shared.

José Leitão: It's used as an exorcism, and it's used for a variety of other magical purposes.

Heather: It's in this prayer that we begin to see Cyprian's power as a magician, how he can help you exorcize spirits –  and maybe also summon them.

Throughout much of Europe’s Christian history, you could get in serious trouble if you were caught practicing magic. So that's probably one reason why we don't have many physical copies of these texts today.

José Leitão: When certain authorities began paying attention to you, it was in your own best interest to destroy everything and confess everything. So very few things survived. So for a long time, we don't know what books of Saint Cyprian were beyond this, beyond this one example.

Heather: Still this prayer of Saint Cyprian was widely disseminated, and we have versions from across Europe, North Africa, and in many different languages.

The Prayer of Saint Cyprian spread – and so did the folklore surrounding it.  Many believed that a physical copy of the Book of Saint Cyprian was a powerful talisman in itself.

José Leitão: When we get to the late 16th century, early 17th century, we start having mentions of objects referred to as books of Saint Cyprian. It was based on the prayer of Saint Cyprian, to which other prayers or procedures were simply accumulated around it. It's simply a circumstantial collection of procedures and materials and recipes and prayers and the Prayer of Saint Cyprian endows this entire collection with a certain coherence, and the title, Book of Saint Cyprian. And that seems to be the general process by which Books of Saint Cyprian get created.

Heather: And then, roughly a hundred years later, the Book of Saint Cyprian starts being used as a sorcerous aid for a very specific purpose.

José Leitão: There is an immediate explosion of mentions to books of Saint Cyprian at least in the records of the Portuguese Inquisition. The overwhelming majority of these mentions are treasure-hunting books.

Heather: There are others studying Cyprianic texts in other parts of Europe, but it was primarily through Portugal that Cyprian came to the Americas, so our story focuses here.

The prayer of Saint Cyprian is still a central feature of the books of Saint Cyprian. But instead of a focus on conjuring demons or wooing unsuspecting love interests, the book is now primarily being used for gaining wealth.

José Leitão: The concept of treasure hunting as you have in the 18th century and all the way to the 19th century, is that frequently buried treasure will have a spirit guardian that prevents you from accessing it and this guardian needs to be banished.

Heather: José described for me one example of how this prayer would be used to banish the spirit guarding a treasure.

José Leitão: It's basically an extraordinarily repetitive utterance of the Prayer of Saint Cyprian. You pray it, I think like three or four times. And each time you add certain differences, you add Psalms, or you add certain hymns, but it is indeed a Book of Saint Cyprian specialized for treasure hunting.

Heather: As we learned in Episode 1 of this season - The Seer Stone and the Prophet, treasure hunting was a common practice in North America in the 18th and 19th centuries. And it was popular in Europe, too.

This might seem like a strange cultural fad. But at that time, the working class often stored their wealth in cash and objects – not banks. And if you had to flee quickly because of war or political persecution, it was often safer to stash your valuables in a hidden location. But sometimes exile, death, or even just forgetting the location of a store meant those valuables were never retrieved. So treasure hunting wasn't just a flight of fancy. It could actually work.

As Saint Cyprian’s book of magic was being used more and more for treasure hunting, printed books were becoming cheaper and more common. And it was in the 19th century that printed books really started hitting Portuguese markets. This included various versions of the Book of Saint Cyprian.

José Leitão: And these books will also have loose collections of folk magic and procedures and prayers and this, this, and that, which makes them extremely variable because these collections would also vary.

Heather: Over the 19th century, French and Italian magical texts are also printed -- these are the grimoires. A grimoire is a book of magic, and the word comes from French meaning ‘grammar.’ And these grimoires were quickly put to practical use - and they got lumped in with St Cyprian’s book of magic.

José Leitão: Again, these are French and Italian grimoires. They were imported into Portugal. They got reframed as treasure-hunting books and the populations would simply refer to them as Books of Saint Cyprian.

Heather: Even in the 19th century, print media was a competitive market. One particular Book of Saint Cyprian – from Lisbon – starts to dominate, and it permeates all of Portugal and starts being transported into Brazil.

José Leitão: As this book gets to Brazil throughout the 20th century, it generates its own versions. It gains a very interesting and substantial foothold within certain Brazilian associations and groups, particularly, Umbanda and Quimbanda.

Heather: Umbanda and Quimbanda are both Afro-Brazilian religions, so before we get to Saint Cyprian, we need to revisit African Diaspora Religions or ADRs.

In Season 2, Episode 2 The Church of Lukumi Babalu Aye, we learned about Lucumí, a religion that formed in Cuba from the meeting of West African, Catholic, and indigenous practices and ideas. Lucumí is community-based and initiatory, and this is largely true for African Diaspora Religions in Brazil as well --  to be intimately acquainted with a spirit you need to be initiated, and to be initiated you need to be deeply invested in that community.

But Saint Cyprian and his magical book blur some boundaries. Saint Cyprian is present in some of the initiatory practices of Umbanda and Quimbanda – but in early 20th century Brazil, Books of Saint Cyprian, with their spells and charms, could also be purchased by non-initiates.

Jesse Hathaway Diaz: They would print out notebooks and you would buy them, and you might not have anybody to teach you but these notebooks would tell you how to run a temple and how to do these seances. For better or worse, they kind of homogenized the various spirit traditions.

Heather: Jesse Hathaway Diaz is a practitioner who studies many connected topics, from performance theory to Quimbanda.

Jesse Hathaway Diaz: If you have the book, you can engage with Cyprian. If you have access to this within an initiatic context, you're still engaging with the book and with Cyprian. So it becomes synonymous with European magic in general in Brazil.

Heather: And Cyprian appears somewhere else in the 20th century too – Mexican Curanderismo. We talked about Curanderismo in the last episode. It’s a folk healing tradition that merges Indigenous practices from the borderlands with those of enslaved Africans, and Catholicism, and Cyprian comes into Mexico through printed texts as well. Jesse continues.

Jesse Hathaway Diaz: Within Mexico, there's so many versions of what is called a Cyprianio. A lot of times things are kind of republished and packaged in these penny formats, these cheap produced books. That is, this is the book of Saint Cyprian, this is the book of Saint Cyprian. So I think within Mexican culture and Chicano culture, borderland culture, a lot of what we refer to as books of Saint Cyprian, or just like almost any book of magic, becomes Saint Cyprian, all based on this lore that this is the patron of magic.

Heather: In Cyprian’s legend, he renounces his pagan ways and converts to Christianity, later becoming a martyr to the faith. Because he had been such an accomplished magician, he became the patron saint of sorcerers. And because Cyprian’s magic had been diabolic, it had a reputation for being dangerous.

Jesse Hathaway Diaz: Cyprian is the stuff that people are scared of, especially in, like, those of us that have ancestry in New Mexico and the Rio Grande Valley as you're going to Texas. It’s the Cyprianistas that were the shapeshifters, it's the Cyprianistas -- they could do all the dark magic and would boil animals alive and people alive. And they made deals with the devil down by the juniper tree, down by the river. And it's incorporating a lot of local lore, but it's also giving it a name as that ‘Cyprian stuff.’

Heather: We've been talking a lot about Saint Cyprian. But let's take a minute to consider Saint Justina. She was the beautiful, pious virgin who is able to repel all of Cyprian's demons and the Devil himself. And it was the power of her faith that convinced Cyprian to convert.

Whether his conversion was pious – or he just wanted the more powerful magic – is up for debate. But in either case, Cyprian and Justina are often invoked together. 

But is Saint Justina the femme equivalent of Saint Cyprian? Katarina Pejovic – who told us the story at the beginning – has some thoughts on this.

Katarina Pejovic: Justina doesn't quite play into that role very well, right? Because she's the one who defeats him. Like, she essentially humbles him. And, in fact, some of the ethnographic interviews I've conducted – with curanderos coming from a Mexican perspective, as well as, individuals initiated in Quimbanda in Brazil –  I've seen countless references to this idea that Justina is the one who really -- forgive my language -- but has his balls, you know, in her hand. Like, she's the one who is able to humble him again and again.

She serves only God, she doesn't serve Saint Cyprian. So she is a symbol of the discipline of purity. And I think, yes, there's an element to which she's sidelined because she's a woman. You know, she's not the sexy one out of the two of them. Justina is about the quiet observation of power.

And in many oral stories I've encountered coming out of the Mexican-Brazilian context, it's Justina that has all the knowledge. It's just that she knows everything that Cyprian knows and more. It's just that she doesn't really care too much about the demons and the things that he's doing. She cares more about her prayers, and her herbalism, and her ability to redeem souls, including redeeming the souls of demons, and redeeming the souls of past magicians, the disciples of Cyprian.

Heather: So, by the 20th century, Saints Cyprian and Justina were in Brazil and Mexico, and appear in different texts used by diverse folk practices, religious practices, and magical practices.

After the break, we'll learn what happened to Saint Cyprian after he returned to Portugal, and how practitioners in the United States are incorporating him into their magical practices today.

We’ll be right back.

[BREAK]

Heather: Welcome back to Magic in the United States. I'm Heather Freeman.

Saint Cyprian and Saint Justina continue to evolve in Central and South America. And their story continued in Europe as well. But by the mid-20th century, their stories had diverged quite a lot. José Leitão again.

José Leitão: So, in Portugal we have a few political revolutions and counter-revolutions and coups and counter-coups. We have a republic, the republic falls, there's a dictatorship, there's this, this, and that. Eventually, this whole thing crystallizes itself in the Portuguese regime of the Estado Novo --  the ‘New State.’

One of the things that the regime established was – obviously, as any right-wing regime does –  a censorship office. By 1939, there is a government order banishing and prohibiting books of Saint Cyprian from circulation. The book was banished until ‘74, which was when we had our revolution. And then the book, once again, becomes a legal object.

Heather: Cyprianic magic is for desperate people in desperate situations. Besides spells for treasure hunting, the Book of Saint Cyprian is full of spells to win love and to lose love. There are also spells to get pregnant– or to lose a pregnancy.

And José – who’s a book sleuth – noticed an important change in these Cyprianic spells when he was comparing pre- and post-revolution versions of the Book of Saint Cyprian.

José Leitão: The old books have a procedure for the performance of abortions. When we look at these post-seventy-four books, we notice that one of the abortion procedures disappears. And these differences in language can be identified as being closer to Brazilian Portuguese than European Portuguese, which suggests that publishers just picked up whatever was getting published in Brazil and published it here.

Heather: That is, earlier versions of the book had abortion procedures. The book traveled to Brazil and one of these procedures was removed, and other changes were made. When the book traveled back to Portugal, publishers printed this newer, more readily available version.

So we have Saint Cyprian well-established in Brazil and Mexico, and finally back – in a modified form – in Portugal. Yet he was still largely unknown in the Anglo-American world.

Heather: But then that changed in the early 2000s thanks to the Internet. Jesse Hathaway Diaz again.

Jesse Hathaway Diaz: I will credit, specifically, E. Bryant Holman. He was a businessman and amateur anthropologist who lived down in the Rio Grande Valley. And to my knowledge, his translations of Saint Cyprian candles, cards, and prayer books -- actual novenas and workings with him -- were some of the first ones in English.

Heather: E. Bryant Holman shared his research on a Yahoo group that served as an online community for those interested in curanderismo. And the information from this group was sold as an English-language pamphlet online. As the decade went on, things started to pick up speed. More and more texts began appearing in English, both by occult publishers and online.

And among these printed texts were José Leitão’s translations of the Book of Saint Cyprian. José grew up in Portugal, hearing stories of Saint Cyprian from his grandmother. And even though he eventually translated the book as an adult, as a kid, he was frightened of the diabolic sorcerer Cyprian of Antioch.

José Leitão: My grandmother was always very adamant that nobody should ever touch the Book of Saint Cyprian, should never become involved in it. It was the object of urban legends. So I was genuinely scared of it --  never touched it.

Heather: Despite this, José had always been interested in magic and mysticism, and as a young man he even participated in esoteric groups. But it wasn't until he was a young adult, getting a degree abroad, that Saint Cyprian reappeared in his life. He picked up an English language occult text and found Saint Cyprian’s name.

José Leitão: The books of Saint Cyprian had never left my mind, but I was rather surprised to ‘oh, damn, somebody knows about this besides us!’

Heather: Like many young adults who study abroad for the first time, it helped him see familiar things in new ways. So he decided to read the book and took proper precautions – just in case.

José Leitão:  I hadn't just bought the book, I also bought a statue of Saint Cyprian because if I was going to read the book, I was going to do this right. I was going to do this like a proper Catholic. So I bought the statue and I set up an altar and I said, ‘Look, I'm gonna read the book so, watch my back!’

Heather: José was fascinated by what he read. He kept the altar and statue, and his fascination with the Book of Saint Cyprian -- its structure, its history, and its folklore -- inspired him. In the 2010s he made several translations of Portuguese Cyprianic texts into English.

With readily available texts, and an audience hungry for more, some magical practitioners started teaching classes – online, in English – on how to work magically with the spirit Saint Cyprian.

English language texts certainly made Saint Cyprian accessible to magical practitioners in the Anglo-American context. But why exactly did he get so popular? Jesse has some theories.

Jesse Hathaway Diaz: I think there was this perfect storm of English material mentioning this saint, and the idea that there was a patron saint of necromancers and magicians was astounding to people. I also think there was already this more accepting, idea of, like, a looser Catholicism – this kind of dial-a-saint mentality, which already happens in Catholic magic forums all the time. Like Saint Anthony finds you lost things, and Saint Dymphna cures headaches, and Saint Barbara guards against fire, and Saint Cyprian makes your magic better. And that right there – to someone who says, well, I don't have to be initiated by anybody, I can talk to the saint directly, I can build this shrine and it will supposedly make my magic better – I think it's a very attractive thing.

Heather: Contemporary American magical practitioners might seek Saint Cyprian to amplify their magic – perhaps a bit like Cyprian might have converted to Christianity to access its more ‘powerful magic.’

But Saint Cyprian’s story has existed for centuries in different cultures: in Scandinavia, the Balkans – he’s even mentioned in early modern English magical texts.

He came to the United States via Iberia, Brazil, and Mexico. But for practitioners from these communities, Saint Cyprian and Saint Justina have been part of the cultural continuum for generations.

Jesse Hathaway Diaz: These very same traditions and families, whose family has been working with Saint Cyprian for three generations, four generations, five generations -- is like, if you need him, he'll come to you. Why do you have to go seeking?

Heather: But for contemporary American practitioners who do seek out this sorcerous Saint for the first time – perhaps Saint Cyprian’s history is just the inspiration. And the magic comes from the sorcerers themselves.

 …

Next week on Magic in the United States, we'll learn about the evolution of astrological practices and ideas in the United States, from farmers’ almanacs and planting by the signs, to using contemporary astronomical data for planetary talismans. It's written in the stars: you won't want to miss this episode.

Would you like to leave us a comment or thought on one of our episodes? Give us a ring 9 8 0 2 7 7 4 4 0 2. Or leave us a message or voicemail at magicintheunitedstates@gmail.com. We'd love to hear from you.

Magic in the United States was written and hosted by me, Heather Freeman. The show is produced by Amber Walker and edited by Lucy Perkins. Our associate producer is Noor Gill, and the show is mixed by Jennie Cataldo. Fact-checking by Dania Sulemon. The executive producer for PRX Productions is Jocelyn Gonzalez. The show's music is from APM music and Epidemic sound. And our project manager is Edwin Ochoa.

Thanks to series advisors, Helen Berger, Danielle Boaz, Yvonne Chireau, Chas Clifton, Abel Gomez, Daniel Harms, Corey Hutchison, Sean McCloud, Sabina Magliocco, Thorn Mooney, and Meg Whalen. Thanks to guests Jesse Hathaway Diaz, José Leitão, and Katarina Pejovic. This production was funded by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the University of North Carolina at Charlotte.

Wherever you are in the United States, the East, the West, the North, or the South, remember that magic is everywhere.

I'm Heather Freeman and I'll see you at the crossroads.