I am delighted to have been invited by Hexen Press to develop two titles over the next few years: one on the Greek St. Cyprian, and the other on the Greek evil eye tradition. The synopses follow and the books are projected for 2029.
The Greek St Cyprian: The Forgotten Magician-Saint and the Missing Key to Western Magic
In Western occultism, Cyprian is best known through the Iberian Books of Saint Cyprian, the Scandinavian Cyprianus black books, and later modern esoteric reinterpretations.
Yet in the Greek world his name belongs to a far older and more continuous ritual tradition, preserved across Byzantine and post-Byzantine liturgical, para-liturgical, and vernacular sources. This Greek tradition remains largely absent from modern occult discussions, with the Western branches often treated as though they were primary, self-contained, or representative of the whole.
The book demonstrates how the Greek tradition is the missing key to the later Western history of St Cyprian. In Greek sources and practice, Cyprian is the magician-saint: a figure whose authority extends across exorcism, protection, healing, and the ritual management of magical harm. His name appears in official prayers, monastic and lay healing traditions, vernacular charms, and popular grimoires, surviving as part of a living continuum of ritual use. Restoring this material adds depth to the Western Cyprianic traditions by setting them within their fuller historical frame.
At the heart of the book is a broader intervention into the study of Western magic. The Greek evidence reveals a world in which exorcisms, blessings, charms, protective substances, and adjurations operate within a sacramental and vernacular tradition rather than outside religion. Cyprian’s knowledge of daimones is transformed into saintly authority over affliction and disorder. Later Western traditions, shaped by different theological and magical assumptions, recast him in strikingly different ways: as arch-sorcerer, guardian of secret books, or patron of forbidden knowledge. The book therefore explores, contrasts, and interrogates two distinct ritual and cosmological receptions of the same late antique figure, tracing the connections and transformations that have shaped them.
Preliminary work on the Greek St Cyprian:
Vaskania: The Greek Evil Eye in History and Practice
While the evil eye is widely recognised across the Mediterranean, the Greek tradition preserves an especially rich and continuous body of material, ranging from ancient personifications and Byzantine demonological thought to vernacular prayers, household rites, and living methods still used today.
Rather than offering a broad comparative survey of the evil eye across many cultures, this book focuses on the situated Greek tradition. Its wider Mediterranean parallels and especially its Jewish influences are used for framing and context, but the focus throughout remains on the Greek tradition and its afterlives: how the evil eye is imagined, how it acts, how it is diagnosed, and how it is addressed through ritual means. Neither an abstract superstition nor a social metaphor, in the Greek world Vaskania may appear as envy, glance, intrusion, depletion, misfortune, or afflicting force, and at times as something close to a personified daemonic presence.
The book combines history, commentary, and selected practical materials. It traces the Greek evil eye through ancient and Byzantine sources, vernacular belief, and modern practice, while also presenting translated spells, diagnostic formulae, and ritual methods where these illuminate the tradition. Part historical survey and part practical handbook, it aims to provide a serious account of how the evil eye has been understood and handled in Greek ritual life across time.
Follow my Substack, Thyrathen, for snippets of work in progress, including first-time translations and insights as the books take shape.
