Confessions of Cyprianus, the Penitent Sorcerer of Antioch

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Black versus White Magic Series · 5 pages

Five pages, and a translation rather than an essay: excerpts from the confessions of the pagan magician of Antioch, rendered into English by Blavatsky herself from the French of Jules de Mirville. Cyprian, later canonised, had been a sorcerer before his conversion, and his account of what he had practised is the reason the text has survived — a first-person description of operations that the tradition otherwise records only from the outside.

Blavatsky's framing sets him against Manes, the Persian prophet and founder of Manichaeism, as his antipode. Her commentary is chiefly concerned with what happened to the Gnostic hierarchy in Christian hands: the Aiōns or Stellar Spirits, emanated from the Unknown and identical in her reading with the Dhyāni-Chohans of the esoteric doctrine, transformed by the Greek and Latin churches into archangels and Spirits of the Presence, so that the prototypes lost caste and the Plērōma was renamed. A short document, but one that shows the translation work underlying much of her larger writing. Frontispiece by Ilene Meyer.

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