I am a Doctoral Candidate at the Department for the Study of Religion, University of Toronto. My SSHRC-funded research centers around St. Cyprian of Antioch, an enigmatic saint traversing through myriad worlds of meaning, bounded in a discordance of tensions, affects, and identities. I am interested in pursuing questions related to the way the character of the “saint of sorcerers” is deployed, codified, and positioned as both a voice of ancestral authority on magical traditions, and as a conduit for the cultural transmission of diverse magical technologies.
Key research interests: saint veneration in Christianity, Western Occultism and Esotericism, spirit possession, witchcraft and magic in South-Eastern Europe, grimoire history, Afro-Brazilian religions, Hermetic Neoplatonism and Kabbalah studies, Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK)
Key research interests: saint veneration in Christianity, Western Occultism and Esotericism, spirit possession, witchcraft and magic in South-Eastern Europe, grimoire history, Afro-Brazilian religions, Hermetic Neoplatonism and Kabbalah studies, Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK)
Sts. Cyprian and Justina of Antioch
Who is this mercurial figure, this unofficial “patron saint” of magic? Martyr and magician, saint and sorcerer, pagan and priest: the enigmatic St. Cyprian of Antioch has stood at the crossroads of myriad conflicting identities since his earliest account. His three principal hagiographies are dated to 350 C.E., and while none have survived intact, fragments and retellings spread across Europe throughout the Middle Ages, most famously in Jacobus de Voragine’s The Golden Legend. A legendary pagan magician, renowned for his initiations in numerous Mediterranean mystery schools, he converted to Christianity after his lustful sorcery was repelled by the virgin Justina he sought to bewitch. Though his stories claim he burned his books of magic upon conversion, popular imaginings maintained that he continued his practice from within the church, with numerous grimoires or manuals of magic existing to this day claiming to be the one "true" book he spared from the fires.
Early scholarship on Cyprian largely grew out of Germany, centering around debates concerning his historicity, his frequent conflation with the historical Cyprian of Carthage, and whether his obviously polemical hagiographies were purely an invention, or if there really existed a historical magician by the name of Cyprian who converted to Christianity (Zahn 1882; Reitzenstein 1917, 1920). Presently, there exists ample scholarship on the pseudepigraphic genre of Cyprian grimoires in Scandinavia (Ohrvik 2018), Cyprian as the forebearer of Faust in Germany (Radermacher 1927), and the Cyprianic grimoires of the Iberian Peninsula (Leitão 2014, 2017). My project seeks to catalogue some of the robust, oral histories that have been preserved of his legends; his presence in contemporary religious and occult communities where he appears as a site of negotiation, permission, and meaning-making that make even more ephemeral the boundaries between what is “religion” and what is “sorcery”.
Following the work of Charles Stewart's ground-breaking Demons and the Devil: Moral Imagination in Modern Greek Culture, my thesis engages in several ethnographic vignettes, interviewing priests, pilgrims, folk healers, mounts (those who become possessed by spirits within their cultural frameworks), and ritual specialists across two worlds: Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches of Sts. Cyprian and Justina in Croatia, Greece, and Cyprus, and initiates and disciples of St. Cyprian within the Afro-Brazilian traditions of Quimbanda and Candomblé. In interviewing various informants and gathering oral lore and histories of these saints, my project seeks to understand how the figures of Sts. Cyprian and Justina continually disturb, unquiet, agitate, make unstable, and yet still reify and uphold divided notions of culturally-approved licit and illicit displays of ritual power, orthodoxy and heterodoxy, miracle and sorcery, "religion" and "magic".
This project has been generously funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) of Canada.
Early scholarship on Cyprian largely grew out of Germany, centering around debates concerning his historicity, his frequent conflation with the historical Cyprian of Carthage, and whether his obviously polemical hagiographies were purely an invention, or if there really existed a historical magician by the name of Cyprian who converted to Christianity (Zahn 1882; Reitzenstein 1917, 1920). Presently, there exists ample scholarship on the pseudepigraphic genre of Cyprian grimoires in Scandinavia (Ohrvik 2018), Cyprian as the forebearer of Faust in Germany (Radermacher 1927), and the Cyprianic grimoires of the Iberian Peninsula (Leitão 2014, 2017). My project seeks to catalogue some of the robust, oral histories that have been preserved of his legends; his presence in contemporary religious and occult communities where he appears as a site of negotiation, permission, and meaning-making that make even more ephemeral the boundaries between what is “religion” and what is “sorcery”.
Following the work of Charles Stewart's ground-breaking Demons and the Devil: Moral Imagination in Modern Greek Culture, my thesis engages in several ethnographic vignettes, interviewing priests, pilgrims, folk healers, mounts (those who become possessed by spirits within their cultural frameworks), and ritual specialists across two worlds: Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches of Sts. Cyprian and Justina in Croatia, Greece, and Cyprus, and initiates and disciples of St. Cyprian within the Afro-Brazilian traditions of Quimbanda and Candomblé. In interviewing various informants and gathering oral lore and histories of these saints, my project seeks to understand how the figures of Sts. Cyprian and Justina continually disturb, unquiet, agitate, make unstable, and yet still reify and uphold divided notions of culturally-approved licit and illicit displays of ritual power, orthodoxy and heterodoxy, miracle and sorcery, "religion" and "magic".
This project has been generously funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) of Canada.
Research Interests and Engagement
In addition to my work on St. Cyprian, I write grimoire history, the anthropology of folk Christianities, Western occultism, and traditions of divination, witchcraft, and healing in Eastern Europe. I have presented across numerous academic conferences, and have taught widely on aspects of Balkan folk magic and Serbian folk Orthodox expressions of healing, spirit possession, Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK), oral charms and charming, and histories of witchcraft across Eastern Orthodox communities in the Balkan Peninsula in workshops, online symposiums, conferences, and gatherings within scholarly and occult communities. I am passionate about continually interrogating the role of the ethnographer and their gaze in understanding not only my own positionality in my work, but also the dual streams of my training which inform my scholarship: my education within the scholarly community, and my continued advocacy for and education within systems of traditional healing and spirit veneration.