Days of the Cyprians: Simplicity and Silence
Today marks the first of the nine days leading to the feast of Saint Cyprian of Antioch. If you plan on praying a novena to the Sorcerer Saint, today is the day!
Every year at this time students in “The Black School of Saint Cyprian” program ask me for specific instructions for these days, and especially for the feast day. They already have significant daily work that the course teaches, as well as different modes of summoning and working with spirits. Yet they want to do MORE.
More Spirits
More Spells
More Rites and Rituals.
A few years ago, on his feast day, I asked our Martyr Magus what he thought I should instruct students to do on his feast day and during the days leading up.
“Do what you did to reach me” Is the answer I got, and it came with an understanding that it meant more simplicity and silence.
SIMPLICITY
More is not always better. Often its worse. Yet we tend to have a bias that interprets complexity and extreme effort as inherently better than simplicity. After all, why would someone do a longer ceremony, with hard to acquire materia unless it was better? There are a lot of reasons actually: preserving tradition, cultural expectation, artistic appreciation, exoticism, and so on. But perhaps the main reason is the bias itself. If longer and more complicated methods exist, they must be better or they woundn’t exist.
Except that when you look at peoples actual results, I don’t think it proves true. Not with food, not with art, not with science, and not with magic.
This is especially true when it comes to invoking more spirits. Students come to me all the time with very complex plans where five or six different spirits are called upon to solve one problem. This spirit stacking is fine if there really is something different for everyone to do, but not when its all aimed at the same thing.
Calling six demons to help you find a date is a bit like calling six plumbers to fix a toilet. One is all you need, two might give another perspective, but the rest will just start getting in the way of one another.
So the instruction that I give to my students for St Cyprians nine days is not to do more rituals, spells, and cere ceremonies. It’s to do ONLY those that really need to be done at this time and do to then well. Do them fully. Do them mindfully.
For most, nothing more than a prayer such as the Sorcerer’s Call of Saint Cyprian need be done.
SILENCE
Have trouble perceiving spirits? Did you read an invocation and get no response? Are you wondering what else you should do?
The answer St Cyprian gives is STFU for bit and listen.
I have talked to magicians that will perform a powerful and complex evocation for over 30 minutes, only to then dedicate 30 seconds of silence and observation before they decided they need to repreat the conjuration again. I wonder sometimes if these people are like this in conversation: so hell bent on talking that they have lost the ability to listen.
Spending time in spiritual silence isn’t just about giving time to hear the voice of Gods or Spirits though. Its also about releasing some of the mental attachment and clinging that drives us further away from spirit. Its about sublimation – becoming more subtle. More like the spirits we wish to converse with.
This is why the instructions I gave to the Confraternity of the Sorcerer Saint, involve spending an equal amount of time in silence as you do actively praying or invoking.
EFFORT AND EFFORTLESSNESS
Practice With Effort is doing more than you normally do in your mind and in your life.
Effortless Practice is releasing things that you normally do in your mind and in your life.
Both are vital to spiritual growth and magical practice.