A while back, I was at my local botanica and looking through their baskets of prayer cards, pamphlets, and prayer books. To my surprise, I found a small booklet written by Father Eliseo Porras Rojas of the Iglesia Ortodoxa de Latinoamerica in Bogota, Columbia; the name wasn’t important, nor was it even written in full in the booklet, but what caught my eye was that it was a novena to Saint Cyprian of Antioch along with Saint Justina. I finally got around to translating it from Spanish, and I have to say that it’s certainly an odd novena. Yes, it has prayers to be done over nine days, and there’s a place every day for you to make a request of the good Saints Cyprian and Justina, but it’s focused more on contemplation and meditation rather than on reciting prayers and making offerings. It’s an unusual text, and I plan to try it out in the near future.
Of course, this isn’t the first time I’ve translated something from Spanish for Saint Cyprian. He’s widely renowned (famously or infamously, depending on whom you ask) in Central and South America, and is called on primarily for defense against demons and black magic, and secondarily for love. There’s plenty of material written in Spanish in pamphlets, prayer cards, or whole books, and much of it is out of reach of many Anglophones. To that end, I’ve decided to gather a bunch of prayers I’ve found from botanicas and online and translate them into English into a new ebook, the Vademecum Cypriani, or “Handbook of Cyprian”, including four novenas and several other prayers that have never been translated before (or, if they have, I certainly can’t find reference to them), as well another prayer and the Chaplet of Saint Cyprian written by yours truly all combined into one document. You can get a PDF copy for US$9.00 off my Etsy page at this link. Go on and get it; it’ll be a useful thing to get, what with the Feast of Saint Cyprian coming up on September 26!
Of course, there are plenty of other prayers you can find to the good saint across the internet, and while I have them all copied down in my personal notes, I didn’t want to include them in the ebook, since…well, why should you have to pay for something you can find for free, and why should I profit off the creation of others without reason? So, since I like sharing knowledge, here’s a list of links with prayers and other resources for the good saint that I’ve collected over the months:
- Verus Jesuitarum Libellus on Esoteric Archives, which contains the Conjuration of Saint Cyprian used to work with demons
- Myth Woodling’s Praying to Saints and Folk Magic: San Cipriani di Antiocha for an Italian stregheria point of view on working with the saint
- Shadow’s post on Saint Cyprian and Justina in religion and spiritual work
- The Orthodox Church in America’s page on hymns for Saint Cyprian used in liturgy
- Jason Miller’s blog post from about this time last year on Saint Cyprian, with another follow-up on working with the saint written the day after
- A much older post from Jason Miller’s LiveJournal (really?) with a prayer he himself wrote
- Wolf and Goat’s Jesse Hathaway’s blog posts (one, two) on the Days of the Cyprians he started last year but, regrettably, never completed (though it had excellent promise; maybe he’ll start up again this year?)
- Docteur Cæli D’anto’s blog post on Saint Cyprian with a few prayers of his own
Besides that, I highly recommend getting copies of Conjureman Ali’s Saint Cyprian: Saint of Necromancers and Nicholaj de Mattos Frisvold’s Saint Cyprian & the Sorcerous Transmutation, both of which are available from Hadean Press for UK£3.00 and are fantastic resources for working with this good saint; Conjureman Ali’s book is a good worker’s introduction to setting up an altar and performing work with the saint, and Frisvold’s excellent exposition of Saint Cyprian concludes with a Quimbandero’s litany-esque prayer to Saint Cyprian. Don’t forget the more expensive books that came out on Saint Cyprian earlier this year, too: Jake Stratton Kent’s excellent Testament of Saint Cyprian and José Leitão’s translation of the Book of Saint Cyprian are nothing to scoff at, and only add to the awesome corpus of literature on this saint.
