---
title: "Portuguese Magic, Saint Cyprian and the Lost History of Iberian Grimoires: An Interview with José Leitão"
url: https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/post/portuguese-magic-saint-cyprian-interview-with-jose-leitao/
date: 2026-08-06
modified: 2026-08-07
lang: en
author: "Perseus Arcane Academy"
description: "Introduction Historian José Leitão explores Portuguese magic, Saint Cyprian, grimoires, the Inquisition, learned and folk magic, treasure hunting and the hidden history of Iberian esoteric traditions. Learn more about his..."
categories:
  - "Interviews"
tags:
  - "Folk Magic"
  - "Magic"
image: https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/12-13-1024x756.jpg
word_count: 9072
---

# Portuguese Magic, Saint Cyprian and the Lost History of Iberian Grimoires: An Interview with José Leitão

## Introduction

Historian José Leitão explores Portuguese magic, Saint Cyprian, grimoires, the Inquisition, learned and folk magic, treasure hunting and the hidden history of Iberian esoteric traditions.

Learn more about his work.

[Academia.edu (research papers, books & publications)](https://coimbra.academia.edu/Jos%C3%A9VieiraLeit%C3%A3o?)

[Hadean Press (many of José's books)](https://hadean.press/search?q=Jose+Leitao)

[The Immaterial Book of St. Cyprian](https://revelore.press/product/immaterial-book-st-cyprian/)

---

![](https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/12-13-1024x756.jpg)

**PAA: Your recent doctoral thesis is called Learned Magic in Early Modern Portugal. To begin with, what exactly was “learned magic,” and who would have had access to it in Portugal at that time?**

Alright, we’re starting with definition; as a scholar, I have to say I appreciate this.

What we call ‘learned magic’ is, first and foremost, an academic category: a sort of artifice and tool used in an academic context in order to create a delineation to make our lives easier. You see, to speak of ‘magic’ from a historical position, in what we usually refer to as methodological agnosticism, can be complicated. There is a great deal of talk on and about magic throughout history, but this is rarely approached from a neutral perspective. Frequently, formalized magic schools or systems, particularly those after the nineteenth century, tend to have their own definitions of magic, its border and cosmological implications and how to engage with it. This means that such an idea of magic is contextual and specific and, from a broad or global historical perspective, of non-valid universal applicability. So, if we remove ourselves from any implicit or explicit belief in any magico-religious system and its definitions, we are left with a huge problem when we wish to speak about ‘magic’ because what do we even mean when we say ‘magic’? That word has been used in many contexts, it has meant many things, it has been used as a badge of pride and a mark of shame. So, as scholars, we need to carve out sections and distinctions within this vast ocean of ideas in order to make it circumscribable, discussable and historicizable. This is what the notion of ‘learned magic’ is.

Learned magic is what we may consider to be a general global tendency within magic, usually placed in contrast with ‘folk magic’. In simple terms, folk magic can be thought of as an oral tradition, a form of practice associated with uneducated, undereducated or non-formally educated individuals. It is essentially preoccupied with immediate human troubles, such as physical protection, the healing of illness and disease, insuring good crops (in rural settings), the health of animals or the growth of children. In the environments where ‘folk magic’ is common, this is frequently not distinguishable from ‘folk religion’ or ‘folk medicine’ (which are themselves also academic categories), and these practices belong to a local cultural continuum with every other aspect of life, such as farming, cooking, weaving or anything else. Folk magic might be learned, and it may be the result of ‘remarkable birth’ circumstances, and its practitioners tend to exist without major social tensions and provide semi-normalized services to their communities, even if these might sometimes clash with each other or local representatives of learned culture.

Learned magic is the other side of this coin. This is essentially a literary tradition, perpetuated and communicated through books and text. Logically, individuals who engage with this form of magic tend to be educated and somewhat affluent; typical social groups associated with this style of magic are clerics/priests, noblemen/courtiers, students and masters, graduates, wealthy merchants or artisans. This is a typically cosmopolitan tradition, mostly present in large cities. Every classical magic book, such the Clavicula Salomonis or any other medieval and early modern grimoire belong to this category due to their simple existence as written texts. Authors such as Agrippa or Paracelsus in the early modern period, Lévi, Mathers, Crowley or Bardon in the contemporary, equally contribute and formalize this literary tradition as a thing in itself.

Having said all of that, like I stated right at the beginning, learned magic and folk magic are academic categories, with no inherent reality to themselves, and it is largely impossible to draw a line determining where learned magic ends and folk magic begins, or vice versa. While these are two general tendencies within magic, there are many overlaps between them, and historical magic practitioners will frequently not concern themselves with any such distinctions and will participate in whatever magic is available to them without any considerations on implicit cosmologies or the internal logic of the several practices they might engage with.

Arriving here… well… the people involved with learned magic in early-modern Portugal, would be pretty much the same as those involved with it anywhere else: noblemen, clerics, students, medics, diplomats… literate individuals with formal learning and the resources and contacts necessary to acquire expensive forbidden literature and perform the rites described within this. There are, of course, nuances and idiosyncrasies in Portugal, as there are in France, England or in any environment, be them related to historical or cultural circumstances. For example, in the Portuguese kingdom, in the sixteenth and seventeenth century, you can find a marked absence of courtiers associated with magic, largely due to Portugal not having a royal court during much of this time period (the Portuguese crown was held by the Castilian king in Madrid). On the other hand, this same proximity between Portugal and Castile allowed the easy travel of Castilian theater troupes through Portugal, and there seems to be a marked recurrence of magic practitioners among these. But overall, learned magic tends to follow similar patterns of readership in most European regions.

**PAA: You have said that Portuguese archives contain a great deal of material about magic, but learned magic has received less attention than folk practices. Why do you think this part of Portuguese history has been so overlooked?**

I think, at the end of the day, it’s simply a matter of availability. I mostly work on the Portuguese Inquisition, and in this folk magic trials and documentation tend to be a lot more abundant, particularly in the eighteenth century. There are a few reasons for this, most of which are mundane, to be honest.

Firstly, if we are talking from within a divide between the educated and the uneducated, historically, there have always been a greater number of uneducated people, and by that fact we should always expect to find a greater representation of people practicing folk magic than learned magic. Then there are other factors, the principal of which that the Iberian Inquisitions actually did not care too much about magic or magic practitioners. This means that, while magic was a crime, and if a magic practitioner was found he would be tried, there weren’t any individuals we could call ‘witchfinders’ in this country, nor individuals roaming the streets and fields actively looking for magicians or witches. Side by side with this, what is also observed is that Iberian society was not particularly concerned with magicians either, and at times this can even be seen as somewhat uncooperative with legal authorities in denouncing magicians. This is the situation for most of the history of the Inquisition, but it does change in the eighteenth century.

Portugal can be said to have had a late Enlightenment, and only around the halfway point on the eighteenth century does one note a clear and systematic reformation of academic curriculum and a change in intellectual culture. This was particularly noticeable in medicine, with Galenism only being excluded from the curriculums of the University of Coimbra with the 1772 reforms. Leading up to this moment, you have a new generation of medical doctors pushing towards an increased openness to new and external medical notion as derived from Paracelsianism and chemical medicine. One of the things that can be understood by analyzing Coimbra Inquisition trials was that this new generation of medics was not only pushing for intellectual reform but actively instrumentalizing the Inquisition to suppress some of their competition, namely, folk healers/magicians, which then causes a sharp increase in the overall representation of folk magic trials in the Portuguese Inquisition overall.

Looking at the other side of the social scales, it should also be understood that the persecution of learned magic carried some difficulties from a practical standpoint. Individuals associated with this tended to be well-connected, often times extremely well established and positioned. Not that the Inquisition was particularly frightened of an important or heavy name (particularly during the dynastic union, when they were probably the most powerful and well-organized institution in the country), but there were other issues at hand which aren’t always entirely evident, such as unspoken social obligation, favor trading and the overlaps of secular and ecclesiastic power structures. These are all things we can look at today as being clear instances of corruption, but the standards of the time were indeed very distinct from our own, and some of these things were just part of how things functioned. Also, learned magic is something which is not uncommonly practiced in an isolated context, or among a tight group of collaborators, and this makes it a lot less visible than folk magic, which tends to be more open and socially integrated.

These are the historical reasons one can point out, but then you also have the academic reasons. I’m not disparaging anyone, but the fact is that the history of magic, as an academic discipline, is rather undeveloped in Portugal. This means that a lot of the work produced in the past decades was done from a position of partial unfamiliarity of the complicated nuances that exist within magic from a historical perspective. Furthermore, there isn’t much familiarity with the complicated varieties and genealogies of magic books which formalize learned magic as a thing in itself. While there are scholars who do notice clear differences between the magic being performed by illiterate individuals and educated elites, this observation falls short of these considering that they might be looking at two different and distinguishable forms of magic. So, under these conditions, obviously people will tend to gravitate towards the more abundant and comprehensive documents, namely those on folk magic.

**PAA: You mentioned that most of your evidence comes from the records of the Portuguese Inquisition. Since these accounts were written by people investigating and prosecuting others, how do you separate what someone actually believed or did from the Inquisition’s interpretation of it?**

Yeah… that is an eternal question when dealing with any Inquisition, or any legal proceedings, and there isn’t a final or easy answer for it. Unavoidably, any document the Inquisition produces, independently of its nature, topic or form, primarily informs us about the Inquisition itself: its social and economic context, its legal and political significance, its spheres of influence, the men who where a part of it and sustained it, and a variety of other aspects. Only under all of this do you have the defendant and their words.

This isn’t a fatalistic observation, but it is something you need to keep in mind anytime you work with this sort of historical documentation. The words that are in front of you were not written by the person being questioned; they were written by a scribe, and this scribe could have his own biases, could mishear statements or could make mistakes. Much more serious than that, he was under the instruction of an inquisitor who could have him ignore and change statements.

Looking at the other side, one also needs to remember that defendants weren’t all passive helpless victims, and many carefully selected their words in order to shift blame, redirect the inquisitor’s attention to a minor crime or even cater to the inquisitor’s expectations in order to provide him with a believable narrative of regret. And some simply lied for their self-preservation.

I suppose navigating this is something that is only doable with experience, and even then, there is always a significant portion of uncertainty. But, as you read this type of documentation you start to understand and have a grasp on the typical avenues of questioning the Inquisition tended to follow, the stereotypical questions and the expected answers, and you can pretty much figure out where the defendant’s words stop and the inquisitorial projection begin. And more importantly, after you figure out the patterns, you also begin to see when the pattern is broken, when the inquisitor loses control of the conversation and, if you have a solid background in the history of magic and the history of the definition of heresy, when somebody is bullshiting or not.

Also, most people don’t realize that an Inquisitorial tribunal was still a court of law. There was a clear and complex legal procedure to be followed. The Inquisition’s definition of crime might be somewhat arbitrary by our standards, but the legal procedure certainly wasn’t. There were several types of sessions, and the opening ones were usually given to the defendant, who was allowed to tell the entirety of his side of the story without leading questions. Again, such statements were not exempt from pressure, but you can extract a lot from them, from the original denunciations and the occasional voluntary confession.

Furthermore, Inquisitors needed to work in order to prove heresy, they had to find actual evidence, question several witnesses, hear multiple versions of the same stories, allow the formulation of a defense, question the credibility of denouncers and witnesses. It’s rather an interesting experience, after a while, being able to follow the several sessions and retrace the several steps of a trial. I’ve had the experience of catching Inquisitors making logical mistakes, missing important evidence and defendants letting something slip the inquisitor didn’t catch up on… I’m not entirely sure, because those documents vanished during the 1755 earthquake, but I think I managed to solve a seventeenth century murder case a while ago.

So, in sum… it’s all training, habit and familiarity, and, importantly, it’s knowing what an Inquisition did, what an inquisitor’s job was, what the definition of a heresy is and be able to put yourself on that side of the trench and understand why what is being said is being said, why an individual was being led to the house of torment. And it’s also being able to admit that there are things which these documents will never be able to tell you.

**PAA: You mentioned that there was no real border between ‘learned magic’ and ‘folk magic’. Did books, oral traditions and local customs regularly mix together?**

Yeah, sometimes. I think the best and most visible examples of this are some grimoire genealogical lines.

It’s usually not a problem identifying when you are looking at learned magic, since this is a literary tradition. So, whenever anything is placed on paper, by definition, it becomes a learned object that requires education in order to be approached and interacted with. However, while the nature of a book is always learned, its content might not be so.

You have plenty of instances, be it in Portugal or not, where your occasional literate farmer or local village priest will collect a number of local folk remedies or random practices into a notebook, making up what might be considered a ‘transitional’ object: somethings that bridges both these social and cultural extremes. In a way, the Iberian Books of Saint Cyprian, a type of local grimoire, seem to be created by this type of process: an accumulation of prayers, folk magic recipes, practices and procedures that builds itself into a literary tradition. Interestingly, the same can be seen to happen in the Scandinavian Cyprian books and in a few other grimoire genealogical lines.

While rarer, the opposite is also known to happen, with there being circumstances where elements of learned culture manage to seep into the folk side of things. There are a few attested ways this could happen, such as through theatrical representation of learned magic practices, the very action of the Inquisition when this pressed defendants into admitting to practices and engagement with cosmological notions outside of their own environment, or when the crimes and penitence of its condemned were read aloud in the autos-da-fé (a type of public spectacle organized by the Inquisition to advertise its action and effectiveness). Also, we tend to think of reading as a solitary activity, but in the early modern period this could be a communal event, where a literate member of a group would read aloud to his companions and friends. There are known instances of the transmission of erudite medical notions into folk circles in this way and, in theory, should such a group have access to a learned magic book, the same could be done with it. However, it’s a lot easier to track the learned appropriations of folk culture, since these tend to leave a material track in history (the book), while the folk side, existing mostly in an oral form, often does not leave much of a mark which can be analyzed.

**PAA: When European books on magic arrived in Portugal, were they preserved in something close to their original form, or were they translated, shortened and mixed with Portuguese material?**

That’s very hard to say…

Firstly, very few historical magic books have anything which we may call an ‘original form’. Some do have this, namely those written from scratch by one author, such as Agrippa’s Three Books of Occult Philosophy, or grimoires which we actually know their general origin and production date, like the Arbatel. But other than that, it’s all a constantly shifting, flowing set of ideas, practices and instructions, coming together and coming apart throughout centuries. We shouldn’t look at grimoires and magic books like fixed sets of information, but rather as historical products of a sprawling and constantly evolving tradition.

But having said that, while I have found several instances of European magic books being present and used in the Portuguese territory, I haven’t found many actual manuscripts I could analyze… just an eighteenth century Italian Heptameron. The other books seemed to have been destroyed, and some simply disappeared while under the custody of the Inquisition (which is a whole other story). So, we are mostly limited to the descriptions of these books as given either by witnesses, defendants or Inquisition qualifiers (a specialized reader who would analyze suspicious statements, documents or books in order to ascertain if they contained any heretical implications), and these are often not very complete.

However, in some instances, there are clear mentions of ‘composite’ magic books. Personal notebooks individual magicians could produce which could contain sections from various European magic books, loose folk magic procedures and other such material. But even in these instances, one thing that is noticeable is that, while European magic literature would be frequently transported into Portugal, this never seems to establish any roots here. Meaning, books would circulate, they could be copied and used, but these never entered long-lasting cycles of reproduction which would allow them to intermix with local magic ideas in a sustainable way; this seems to mostly happen in an isolated manner. This establishes a strange contrast with Castile, for example, a kingdom very close to Portugal both in geographic and cultural terms, and where you do have apparent frequent reproduction of European magic books and even the creation of local variations on these, particularly of the Solomonic kind. This then means that, in Portugal, you actually have two distinct traditions of learned magic: a cosmopolitan and outward looking one, dependent on the importation of books from outside of this territory, and the local one, produced in Portugal, by Portuguese individuals and largely corresponding to local Portuguese preoccupations, such as the Books of Saint Cyprian. And for most of history, these two traditions do not seem to interact with each other apart from these isolated incidents of partial overlap.

And to complicate the matter, Castile, besides being a center of reproduction of magic books, was also the source of a few original lineages of texts, particularly those related to astral magic, and these could also be found in Portugal, but once again, they do not seem to be taken hold by local magic practicers and enter into local reproduction loops.

**PAA: When you examine an original manuscript, what can you learn that would be lost in a modern transcription? Can the handwriting, corrections, diagrams or signs of use sometimes tell their own story?**

Well… that depends on the transcription, but yes to those other things.

This might sound odd, but when you find a manuscript, from a historical perspective, its content is not its most important aspect. The discovery of an unknown manuscript immediately forces a series of questions: what is this manuscript doing here, who brought it, who wrote it, who used it, why did it survive, what preoccupation is it responding to? When you are concerned with the history of magic, or the history of the practice of magic, these are the relevant questions to be answered. Also, the direct handling of manuscript allows for many other insights, such as material composition, errors and mistakes by the author, evidence of material fatigue, such as folding or degradation on specific pages, or the existence of marginalia or personal notes.

Now, I’m obviously not disparaging the relevance of content, particularly when we are talking about an entirely new and unknown text. But even then, a new text primarily offers clues for the establishment of literary clusters and genealogies or the history of magic ideas. While some perennialism might disagree, the content of a magic manuscript does not exist by its own virtue; content is a result of a constant dialogue with social, cultural and personal context. For example: if I find a treasure hunting manuscript (as I have), this implies a cultural context of treasure hunting, an interaction with local folkloric ideas on land and territory, local notions of history, ideas on the nature of treasure guardian spirits, legal land rights, ethical and morality problems on the nature of wealth and fortune. On top of these questions, content might pose others: if the book is in Latin or vernacular this implies a different target readership; if the book mentions the use of liturgical literature, this implies a group of individuals, one of which will likely need to be a priest; if the book mentions specific cultural notions, such as specific treasure guardians, spirit names or geographic locations, this tells us from which culture and location it likely originates from; if it quotes another text, this offers its time frame, and all of this might then point towards an author or readership group.

Now, I also understand if all of this sounds dull from a practitioner perspective that mostly cares about text and applicability. However, the answering of all of these questions invariably provides an exponentially richer approach to magic and a deeper understanding of the concrete actions and words involved in such a practice.

**PAA: Saint Cyprian seems to have several different identities: a Christian martyr, a legendary former magician and the supposed author of magical books. How did these different versions of Cyprian become joined together?**

It’s not so much as how they came together, but how they came apart…

The identity of Cyprian as a saint, magician and martyr stems from his original narratives: the Conversion of Cyprian, the Confession of Cyprian and the Martyrdom of Cyprian, collectively referred to as the Acts of Saint Cyprian of Antioch, all of which are fictional narrative from the 4th century. So, right from the beginning, we need to always have present that Saint Cyprian of Antioch, the magician-saint to which the Books of Saint Cyprian are attributed to, is not a historical character.

The stories from where this character is constructed are essentially Christian polemical texts, highlighting the inherent superiority of Christianity in relation to other religious practices, here portrayed as demonic. These texts describe Cyprian as a gifted pagan child, dedicated from an early age to several pagan gods and initiated into several mystery schools and who eventually offers himself to the Devil. As he reaches adulthood, Cyprian establishes himself in the city of Antioch as a magician for hire, being eventually contacted by a young man named Aglaïdas who desires to marry a young Christian damsel named Justa or Justina. As Cyprian attempts to use his demonic magic to inflame Justa’s love/lust for his client, he finds all his efforts fruitless, resulting in him eventually summoning the Devil to ask for an explanation for these failures.

Being compelled by God, the Devil confesses the truth, that Justa’s God is the true God, and he, and all his cunnings and all his minions, are powerless against the sign of the cross. Being informed of this reality, Cyprian shuns the Devil, burns his magic books, abandons his old sinful ways and converts, which eventually leads to his and Justa’s martyrdom by order of Emperor Diocletian.

Now, what the Cyprian narrative effectively creates, in hagiographical terms, is the par-excellence patron saint against magic and sorcery. The tale of Cyprian is essentially one of victory against magic, and it is with this fame that his name gets initially disseminated through various other texts, sermons and works. However, as early as the 11th century, Cyprian’s name can also be found not so much as a protector against magic, but as an intermediary capable of aiding practicing magicians in their workings. How or why this happens is pretty much a mystery, but he very quickly becomes one of the central magic heroes in several European regions.

From here, several books, within their own narratives, start to claim Cyprian as their author, be it as a book that either escaped destruction, the one Cyprian thought was the most important and fundamental and decided to preserve, or even as a book produced by Cyprian after conversion, as a form of Christian magic. And these variations can be geographically or chronologically located as several regions where the tale of Cyprian became popular will have their own view of him. In Iberian he is extremely ambiguous, but he is mostly a patron of magic and aligned with ‘dark’ kinds of practices. On the other hand, in the orthodox world, Saint Cyprian is still in line with his hagiography, representing the victory of faith over demonic power, with ample devotional literature dedicated to him. All these distinctions are simply localized manifestations of what became a folk narrative. Its original purpose and plot became irrelevant, and Cyprian becomes what he needs to become when he enters any new environment and space.

**PAA: We usually speak about The Book of Saint Cyprian as though it were one particular book. Your research points to a much more complicated history involving different manuscripts, printed editions and collections of material. Is it really one book, or would it be more accurate to call it a family of books?**

The second, but I prefer to call it a literary tradition. There is no Cyprian ur-text, just like there isn’t one of the Clavicula Solomonis. It’s a lineage of books that are written, produced, put together and taken apart and manifest in several arrangements and branches. Some branches die out, others thrive, some lean on particular preoccupations, some get to the printing press and others don’t. However, I will say that, currently, or at least since the mid- nineteenth century, when you are speaking of the Portuguese Book of Saint Cyprian, you are mostly talking about one single book that has stayed relatively stable for over a century, but this is actually the exception in the long history of these texts. And this one single book is itself the result of this same long and complicated story, containing elements from early modern urban folk magic, eighteenth century treasure hunting preoccupations, Portuguese imperial concerns, French occultism and a bunch of other things. But even this one current Portuguese version cannot be said to be the final product of this genealogical line, as, having been transported to Brazil really early in its history, this single version has given rise to a series of local variations and adaptations, and importantly, all of these are just as legitimate as any others. And then, you also have the Scandinavian Cyprian books, which mostly follow a similar pattern of non-centralized composition and variability.

So, you know, from the moment you realize Saint Cyprian is a fictional character, and that there is no evidence of a root text, then all variations on this are just as equally valid as all others.

**PAA: You mentioned the Portuguese printed Book of Saint Cyprian appeared relatively late, in the 19th century, although parts of its contents and the traditions surrounding it are much older. How far back can the Portuguese Cyprian tradition be traced?**

That’s a complex question. I firstly don’t think it’s entirely possible to distinguish between a Portuguese and a Spanish/Castilian Cyprian tradition before the nineteenth century. With that said, as far as I know, the first time a magic manuscript is referred to as a Book of Saint Cyprian is in a 1610 Toledo Inquisition denunciation (not a full trial). This document does not offer much information regarding the content and structure of this book, only that it was found in the possession of a certain Juan de Toledo and he used it to find treasure. After that, we have a Coimbra Inquisition trial from 1620 mentioning a Book of Saint Cyprian which had apparently been copied from an older version about thirty years before this trial commenced, placing it at the end of the sixteenth century. So, I would say that objects called ‘Books of Saint Cyprian’, from what we know, originate in this time period, however, Cyprian traditions, be them in written form or otherwise, are likely a lot older than that. In particular, it should be noted that these early Cyprian books seem to be accumulations of disparate material around one central text, usually referred to as the Prayer of Saint Cyprian, a talismanic magico-religious text belonging to a wider ‘Western’ magico-religious arsenal, recurrently used as a method for the banishment of evil spirits, sorcery, and the evil eye, known in regions as varied as Italy, Scandinavia, and the Arabic world, and extremely popular in early modern Iberia.

So, if you want to talk about a Cyprian literary tradition, this would be primarily tied to the dissemination of this prayer, and only later with the books. But regarding the origin or introduction of this prayer in Iberia, I don’t think there has been a solid proposal for this, so your guess is as good as mine.

Now, regarding concrete sections from the nineteenth century book, if we exclude the presence of the Prayer of Saint Cyprian (which it does contain), I’d say we can trace certain forms of divination and a few erotic/domination magic procedures present in this version of the Books of Saint Cyprian easily into the seventeenth century. In particular, the systems of cartomancy present in that book seem to be adaptations of hydromancy and favomancy techniques used in urban centres in Iberia and South America mentioned in a few dozens of Inquisition trials.

**PAA: Your recent book Cypriani Magici: Septem Horae Magicae examines a manuscript from the period when Cyprianic material was moving between handwritten manuscripts and printed books. What makes this particular text important?**

It’s not one particular aspect of the Septem Horae that makes it important, it’s the whole goddamn thing…

The Septem Horae is a Cyprian book, that much is not up for debate, but besides that, it goes against every convention I had come to expect from a magic book, particularly from a Cyprianic one. It breaks too many molds, it’s too uncomfortable. In terms of the understanding of the history and culture of these books, its discovery is a kind of watershed moment; just when I thought I had figured it out, something else comes along that challenges all conventions and theories.

I look at it as an icon of a transitional period which we know very little about. I mean, it is easy to imagine a history of the Books of Saint Cyprian if we know what these were in the seventeenth century, and what they are in the nineteenth, because you can draw a line between any two points, but a book like the Septem Horae demonstrate how crooked this line can be. It is linguistically complex, it directly mentions working with Lucifuge Rofocale, a Grand Grimoire spirit of the Solomonic tradition, while refusing the use of Solomonic methods, it introduces this spirit in a context of Iberian folklore and seems to describe a system of magic based on planetary influences meant to power an analogue mechanism that locates treasure. It’s really not linearizable with anything I’ve seen before.

I still maintain that the early modern Cyprian books evolved in relative isolation from the rest of European magic literature, but the Septem Horae demonstrates that this isolation ended a lot sooner than I through, and it took on shapes that I have never seen in any other magic book. To be completely honest, besides reaching the obvious conclusion that this book needed to be published as soon as I saw it, it’s still too strange for me to fully understand what its implication might be, or, if it even has implications. It’s a weird one, is what I’m saying.

And then… there is another aspect that is perhaps personal. The Septem Horae is somewhat of a legendary text. The first time it is mentioned anywhere seems to be in an 1888 article by an early Portuguese ethnographer in what is probably the first tentatively academic study of Portuguese Saint Cyprian traditions. Anybody who has ever attempted to study these books from an academic perspective has read about it, but, for about one hundred and forty years ago, no one has ever been able to locate the Septem Horae, much less read or analyze it. It means something to me that I was the one who found it. Death anxiety is something you have to overcome step by step, and finding this book and making it available to an interested readership was a big one for me.

**PAA: The manuscript includes a pact involving Lucifuge Rofocale, but, as you mentioned, it does not simply follow the familiar Solomonic system. What does this tell us about how Iberian writers adapted material from other European grimoires?**

This is really not an easy answer given the extremely particular and isolated nature of the Septem Horae. There are still a lot of unanswered questions about it, among which its ‘authenticity’, meaning: was this a book somebody put together in the expectation that its content would be put into practice, or was this some kind of practical joke/hoax, or an object created in a specific way in order to make it look magical and then sold at a high price. I truly don’t know how to answer this.

But then, it does tell us something about the integration and adaptation of non-Iberian magic material into Iberian magic culture. Taking a step back, there are other instances of the importation of late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth century European grimoires into Iberia which are a bit more palatable and understandable than the Septem Horae, and from which we can make some considerations. It should be firstly noted that these importations tend to happen within the Cyprian tradition, meaning: a specific grimoire is brought into Iberia, goes through a process of adaptation, and starts being referred to as a Book of Saint Cyprian. Furthermore, all of these instances I have so far analyzed seem to adapt these external grimoires for the purpose of magic treasure hunting. We have this happen with the Grand Grimoire, the Heptameron and the Grimoire of Pope Honorius.

Given that magic treasure hunting, while being a greatly disseminated form of magic practice, tends to present very clear local specificities, these grimoire adaptations to the Iberian territory operate a certain ‘folklorization’ of these same non-Iberian texts. Certain sections and ideas are replaced or retconned in order to make them fit the general Iberian idea of what a hidden or buried treasure is and how these are supposed to function in relation to this. So, in this sense, and looking back at the beginning of our conversation, while these texts never cease being learned magic texts, there is an approximation of their content and purpose to folk preoccupation and cosmologies, even if sometimes this is merely implicit.

**PAA: You’ve mentioned treasure hunting a few times, and this appears repeatedly in Iberian magical texts and in stories connected with Saint Cyprian. Why was hidden or enchanted treasure such an important subject in Portuguese and Spanish magic?**

Well, treasure hunting is a rather common magic preoccupation in all of Europe, particularly from the eighteenth century onward. Magic will often follow trends, fashions and general tendencies, and treasure hunting is one of the hot topics of the Enlightenment. You have magic treasure hunting books popping up a bit everywhere in Europe, an example of which is the Grand Grimoire.

Being that the Cyprian books before the nineteenth century never had a particularly solid form, and were themselves constantly responding to local preoccupations, treasure hunting quickly became associated with them. However, this does not seem to be a random or gratuitous event, and we can make some considerations on why this is the case.

Sidestepping the prevalence of treasure narratives in Iberian, the Prayer of Saint Cyprian, the central text around which the Books of Saint Cyprian crystalize, is considered to be an extremely efficient way of banishing evil influences and spirits. Looking at treasure hunting worldwide, one of its most common characteristics is the belief that buried treasure will be under the stewardship of a treasure guardian, some kind of spirit or entity who will actively protect the treasure and antagonize the would-be treasure hunter(s). This is the reason why you often need magic to hunt for treasure, as magic treasure hunting books will contain instructions and procedures to banish these treasure guardians. In Iberia, this banishment function seems to be taken by the Prayer of Saint Cyprian and so, treasure hunting books being produced in eighteenth century Iberia will frequently feature this prayer and be named and referred to as Books of Saint Cyprian due to this. It should also be noted that not all eighteenth century Books of Saint Cyprian are treasure hunting books, and not all Iberian eighteenth century treasure hunting books are Books of Saint Cyprian, simply, the prayer takes on a new role in this time period, and many new books follow suit.

Now, truth be said, even before the boom of magical treasure hunting Europe-wide, Iberia already had a complex culture of this same activity associated with certain mythical narratives of self-definition arising from the Reconquista, the lengthy historical process of conquest and establishment of the several Christian kingdoms of the Iberian Peninsula between the eighth and fifteenth centuries and which places a radical distinction between Christians and the previous Muslim rullership of the territory. The stark religious and racial distinction (often more imaginary than real) drawn in the Iberian ‘collective imaginary’ between Christians, as the current rulers of this territory, and ‘Moors’, as the previous rulers, effectively pushes the latter into a realm of chronological murkiness, associating their name and constructed image with all of the elements within the local landscape which cannot be accurately located within the collective memory of known historical time.

This means that buried treasure, riches left behind by other cultures and civilizations, unknown or unusual structures such as megalithic monuments, Roman or early medieval ruins, caverns, water basins or strange rock formations (equally the common targets of treasure hunters in the rest of Europe), become associated with the notion of the ‘Moor’ not so much as an ancestor but as a radical outsider and antagonist to Christian culture and society, making them into a sort of cosmological ‘other’. Besides pseudo-historical, this narrative will occasionally pain these same ‘Moors’ as a kind of fairy, mouros or moura encantadas, individuals who were placed under a magical enchantment by some unspecified powerful sorcerer and now exist in a kind of immaterial state, inhabiting underground palaces and kingdoms and who may also act as treasure guardians. More often than not, be it in the eighteenth century or any other, in Iberia, buried treasure is assumed to be mouro treasure.

So, once again, while magic treasure hunting books are learned objects, in Iberia they often have an undeniable folkloric aspect to themselves, as their own raison d’être is dependent on folk narratives, tales and legends. This holds true for the treasure hunting Cyprian book as also the external grimoires which are brought into this territory and reworked into treasure hunting manuals.

**PAA: Catholic prayers, saints and sacred objects appear throughout Portuguese magical material. Was the Christian language sometimes used to make magic look acceptable, or did the people involved genuinely understand these practices as part of their Catholic world?**

It’s more often the second option. Throughout the medieval and early modern period, the word ‘magic’ is actually most often used as an accusation. Something is labeled as magic, and not so much claims itself to be magic. Obviously, there are many exceptions to this, and there have always been people who will claim the title of magician, particularly in learned magic circles.

But on the folk side, where you find these prayers and saintly petitions, the situation is not really that. And like I mentioned before, folk magic is not an isolated practice and the people who practice it most often don’t consider what they are doing to be a delineated form of practice distinct from what ecclesiastic or theological authorities will call religion. It was an absolute part of their Catholic worldview, and this will hold true even for people who will claim special titles in folk environments, such as ‘seven born sons/daughter’. The notion of multiple coexisting cosmologies or mutually exclusive sources of power and authority does not exist in the early modern period, be it in a learned or folk environment. Every source of power and authority will exist and share its reality with every other source of power and authority; if the Christian God is the true source of power and goodness, then every exercise of power and goodness will be believed to be rooted in this same God.

This is the reason why folk magicians (or the individuals we, as academics and scholars, refer to as folk magicians) will frequently resist being labeled as ‘magicians’ or ‘witches’; these words were accusations, and most individuals did not perceive themselves as criminals by doing what they did.

**PAA: You mentioned cartomancy before. In Clearing the Waters, you traced Saint Cyprian divination through records from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century. Is this what you address in this book?**

Yeah. That book was basically me trying to resolve a few strange passages and cartomancy systems present in the contemporary nineteenth century Book of Saint Cyprian. Basically, that Cyprian book describes a few cartomancy methods, and these mostly rest on a few basic principles: you perform some ceremonies, consecrations and/or prayers, and you make a spread with playing cards. In this spread, the court cards stand for people and the pip cards for locations or events, and you then perform a reading by creating a narrative with all these elements in a specific order. This is interesting enough to warrant some consideration, but what makes this odd is that these same readings are frequently accompanied by the recitation of certain prayers and historiolae associating Saint Cyprian with the sea and with ships… which are elements that don’t really make sense in that context.

This became interesting when I began working on the Inquisition and started finding these same prayers and historiolae associated with hydromancy. Besides this, what was likely the most popular form of divination in the seventeenth century among urban folk magicians was the mentioned favomancy. The basis of this system was that you gathered a collection of fava beans and a few other objects; these would need to be consecrated in several ways and mixed and cast over a flat surface. Once this was done, the reader would construct a narrative based on the relative position and proximity of all of these things to each other, in which the fava beans would signify people, and the remaining objects signify locations or events. All in all, this was the same basic divination system present in the nineteenth century Cyprian books, but instead of court and pip cards it used fava beans and an assortment of trinkets.

Clearing the Waters is me tracking all of these systems through time and through several trials; explaining in detail how they worked, known variations on them, and the prayers and consecrations you are supposed to use with the ultimate aim of proposing a transmission of elements between these two early modern divination systems (hydromancy and favomancy) into cartomancy. And to be fully honest, while the theory holds solid, I cannot say that this is an entirely understood story, as the introduction of playing cards into this whole thing is not something I’m not particularly clear on. Obviously, cartomancy was already used in early modern divination, but this wasn’t particularly popular in Portugal, and you only start to see it pop up occasionally in the eighteenth century, and mostly through the influence of immigration from Castile (where cartomancy was indeed quite popular). So, this theory of transmission is still kind of a work in progress… at this point I have managed to collect a few more mentions of divination that seem to bear weight on this whole narrative of evolution of divination from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century, so, with any luck, I’ll be able to publish a sequel to Clearing the Waters if I manage to piece a few more things together.

**PAA: Portuguese Cyprianic traditions later travelled to Brazil and other places. As the books crossed the Atlantic, what changed and what remained recognizably Portuguese or Iberian?**

Before I get into this, let me just mention that, so far as I’ve researched, I haven’t found significant elaborations on the Cyprian literary tradition in Spanish-speaking South America, even if the nineteenth century Spanish Book of Saint Cyprian (which is distinct from the Portuguese version) is extremely popular over there. I don’t have an explanation for this, and it could even be that I am missing something.

Having said that, indeed Brazil does have a great and lively culture of Books of Saint Cyprian. For the most part, these seem to maintain a certain ‘core’, similar to the nineteenth century Portuguese ones. This is usually related to specific uses of the Prayer of Saint Cyprian present in the Portuguese book for exorcism and banishment of evil influences and treasure hunting. Some Brazilian books will include more material from the Portuguese edition, others less, but overall, most (if not all) will have very identifiable sections taken from it.

But… the variations you find in Brazilian books throughout the late- nineteenth and twentieth century aren’t fully linearizable. Some books will lean a lot more on the folk Catholic aspects, other will include new section from non-Iberian grimoires, like the Clavicula Salomonis or the Ars Goetia, other will include Brazilian specific practices, be them associated directly or indirectly with Quimbanda and Umbanda, or from more ambiguous systems, sometimes collectively referred to as macumba.

Now, besides this, from the twenty-first century on, you do start having Brazilian Cyprian books which do break this rough mold, and some do seem to be largely original works. Among these a few are clearly related to more spirit-inclined traditions, such as the already mentioned Umbanda, and you even have books which suggest themselves as having been texts received directly from Saint Cyprian, or some other related entity in the context of such magico-religious practices.

**PAA: During your years of research, did you find anything in the archives that made you seriously rethink your earlier understanding of Saint Cyprian or Portuguese magic?**

Yeah… a number of times, actually. While in the last fifteen years or so, our collective understanding of the Cyprian books has increased immensely, this is still a pretty frail field. We have a few mentions in the Inquisition, a few known manuscripts, but these are not so substantial that some kind of bulk number analysis and theorization can be made. This means that all our proposals and hypotheses are fragile by definition, and any new mention or manuscript we find risks casting everything down.

The finding of the Septem Horae was a particularly dramatic instance of this. While that book had been mentioned 1888 as existing, its description was outlandish, and the fact that it simply disappeared suggested some kind of hoax. Then, out of the blue, the thing turns out to be real. I thought Books of Saint Cyprian where always written in vernacular, that one is in Latin (I’m using this word very liberally… because calling that Latin is a bit of a stretch); I thought the Grand Grimoire was a nineteenth century influence on Spanish Cyprian books, but the Septem Horae also has this; I considered that for a Book of Saint Cyprian to be accepted as a Book of Saint Cyprian, it needed to contain the Prayer of Saint Cyprian, but that one doesn’t; I through Lucifuge was a Solomonic spirit, but here he is being dealt with in a non-Solomonic way. It challenged and redid any and all definitions I had put in order to delineate the Portuguese Cyprian tradition.

An event such as this is distressful, but it’s not tragic. In fact, it’s a blessing; it gives us, as academics, the chance to do it all again but better. More information is always a good thing, and if we feel otherwise, that’s just ego talking.

And at the end of the day, this was indeed a good thing, not because I found a new manuscript, but because I ended up finding additional Inquisition documentation describing a manuscript more in line with the Septem Horae than the other manuscripts and texts I had previously studied. Should I not have found the Septem Horae, I would have probably disregarded these new references as outliers, or an instance of somebody misidentifying a random magic book as a Book of Saint Cyprian. The Septem Horae gave me the foresight necessary to realize that these were actually rare representatives of a branch of the Portuguese Cyprian tradition that ended up dying out.

And regarding Portuguese magic in general, there wasn’t much information on that to begin with. We can now talk about traditions, lineages and genealogies, be them of practices, ideas or magical systems. We can talk about distinctions between urban and rural folk magic, between Iberian and European learned magic, between Portuguese and Castilian magic book production. Each of these differentiations and distinctions comes from a moment when whatever expectation we might have had regarding local magic practice got shattered and we were forced to reconsider and reconstruct a whole bunch of ideas.

While I fully identify as a historian and scholar, I did originally start working on this sort of material coming from more of a practitioner background and, like many others, I had been educated in the post-nineteenth century occultism mentality of what magic was or what it was supposed to be. Everything from that point on has been a rethinking of this, and it will continue to be so.

**PAA: Finally, what does the Portuguese evidence add to our understanding of European magic more generally? Is Portugal an unusual regional example, or does it reveal gaps in the way the wider history has been told?**

Humm… I don’t think Portugal is any more unusual or unique than any other place in this regard, so it’s not about that.

If we are engaging in a global discussion on the history and practice of magic, then this is simply another element to be added to this discussion. European magic, like Europe itself, is a complex space of continuities and fractures. You cannot tell a history of European anything if you don’t recognize the local idiosyncrasies of all the cultures and territories that make up this space.

My own conception of my work is to integrate the Portuguese territory and its local culture into the global map of magic, to contribute to our collective understanding of this phenomenon in both its common and specific aspects, be these banalities or exceptionalities. For example, one way I can say that my work has truly contributed to filling a gap in history, is in my identification of a common tradition of Ibero-American early modern urban folk magic that seems to suggest itself as one of the roots of current Brazilian magico-religious systems like Quimbanda. I did not set out to discover this, I did not set out to claim a Portuguese origin to Brazilian practices, this simply happened because this is the nature of an interconnected world.

In this same way, my studies of the Portuguese Cyprian books aim to accurately integrate these into the map of magic literature and grimoires. And in this I’m not a lone gun, and there are many scholars in several regions doing similar work as me, and it is due to this collective effort that, today, we can talk about Solomonic, Faustian, Iberian Cyprianic, Scandinavian Cyprianic, Paracelsian or Agrippan grimoires. That magic is not one thing, it is hundreds of things; that there is magic outside of orders, temples, and schools, that, like the authors of the thousands of grimoires that have been catalogue or are yet to be discovered, each individual has the legitimacy to put down his own grammar of magic and actively contribute this ever-changing culture.

More words and more definitions don’t limit our exploration of magic; a deeper understanding of ourselves does not segregate us from each other. All of this offers new articulation, new insights, new bridges, new ways for all of us to, collectively, better understand oneanother and recognize our specificity and that of our fellows; to realize that what might be unique in any of us right now is also a product of communication and the commerce and trading of ideas and cultures.

Portugal is not special, it is just another piece of the worldwide puzzle, but it just happens to be my piece.

**PAA: Thank you very much for sharing your insight. All the best with your work.**

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