#walkenried abbey

[illustratus]

The Ruins of Walkenried Abbey in Winter by Carl Hasenpflug

[postcard-from-the-past]

Cloister of the 13th-century Cistercian Walkenried Abbey, Lower Saxony, Germany

German vintage postcard

[skepticaloccultist]

Maggi’s Sufurino

"The Book of St Cyprian" "Jonas Sufurino", attribution.

 The history of fictional magicians is long and tawdry, often evolving out of folktales related to actual historic figures there are those who were created whole cloth for the purpose of selling books.

While we may have record of those occultists like Michael Scot, Johann Faust, and others who were in fact real people, there are some figures who defy historic documentation. St Cyprian himself is supposed to have existed in the 3rd century of the common era, but even the Catholic Church has been hard pressed to provide any hard evidence for a Cyprian of Antioch.

Jonas Sufurino seems to be a character who was created as part of the evolving Cyprian mythologies, possibly by a Spanish publisher, to give a more modern context to a supposedly ancient text.

As the story goes, Sufurino was a German monk at the Abbey of Walkenried near Mount Brocken, a location famous for its legends of witches and devils meeting there each year on Walpurgisnacht. He claims to have gotten Cyprian's book from the Devil himself after conjuring him forth.

The book we have at hand goes even deeper into the abyss of speculative authorship as we are presented with a version of the book that is said to be translated from the German of Sufurino's hand, apparently a copy/translation Sufurino made of the Hebrew original written by St Cyprian, to the Spanish that has been translated by Humberto Maggi.

That no German version of the work ever existed is more than likely, but the path of authorship is convoluted to say the least, although no credit is given for the translator who was supposed to have brought the work from German to Spanish.

Maggi's earlier translation of the "Book of St Cyprian" was drawn from a Mexican edition published in 1920. That earlier volume is a tome of a work that covers the ground of hodgepodge occult sources. Each Cyprianos seems to be tailored to the local reader's interests, culled from a list of sources nearest to hand to each publisher in question.

While Maggi's earlier Cyprian takes most of its content from the "Le Véritable Magie Noire" the Sufurino, an edition published in Spanish in Barcelona, casts an even wider net, taking from the "Grand Grimoire" and the "Black Pullet" as well. Maggi speculates, based on scholarship by Félix Castro Vincente, that the Sufurino was copied in part from earlier Portuguese editions. It does contain a series of charms that involve the torture of animals that is found in the Portuguese Cyprians, but lacks the treasure hunting aspects.

The work is a mixed bag of ceremonial magic whose roots ultimately come to us, via the hand of many editors over many years, from the Greek Magical Papyri. It contains versions of the "Key of Solomon", "The Red Dragon", "The Grand Grimoire", as well as sections on magic candles, "Chaldean and Egyptian" philters, enchantments and sorceries.

Maggi has done a splendid job bringing this work into an English translation. It is a handsome volume, beautifully bound in black (faux?) leather with metallic red stamping to the spine and a metallic red devil in the corner of the cover. The paper is a nice thicker quality of cream with a rougher tooth, giving it an old book feel. The endpapers are printed with a splendid artwork by Daniele Valeriani.

For any scholar of Cyprian literature this is a must have edition in one's collection. Nephilim Press have provided an important part of the puzzle of St Cyprian the Magician as an Iberian folk character and focal point of an evolving magical tradition that has spanned centuries.

Get yourself a copy from Nephilim Press here:

Sufurino Humberto Maggi

[letstheblackandwhiterainbow]

Carl Georg Adolph Hasenpflug, Ruins of an Abbey in Winter with a View of Walkenried

[workspc04]

"the name of the rose"