Cyprianus: St. Cyprian and the Black Book in Scandinavian Folklore – Simone Kotva (Hadean)

Description

Cyprianus is the name of an infamous grimoire in Scandinavian folk magic — and a byword for sorcery in its own right. While dozens of Cyprianus texts have now been translated into English, revealing operations akin to those of the Iberian Cyprian tradition, the folklore surrounding the book itself has been largely absent from that literature. This volume fills that gap, presenting Simone Kotva’s translation of Danish legends about the Cyprianus, originally collected in the second half of the 19th century by folklorist Evald Tang Kristensen.

Most of the legends concern the Cyprianus as an object — its powers, its familiar spirits, and the bold or foolish who dared read from its pages — while others recount the exploits of its shape-shifting, gender-fluid eponymous author, and methods for outsmarting or banishing the Devil entirely. José Leitão, author of The Book of St Cyprian: The Sorcerer’s Treasure, calls it “a gem for scholar and layperson alike.”