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Field Report Friday: Cyprian, Lucifer, and Sovereignty

Sometimes it’s not so much about ensorcelling all the little details, but rather exposing ourselves to forces that trigger growth. Often the very forces we were raised to fear are exactly the ones that are the biggest game changers. In this report a good Catholic girl took control of her own sovereignty and stopped letting people push her around. With a little help from Cyprian and eventually Lucifer, she broke the chains holding her back and lit the flames of liberation.

Because of her job I suggested she use her magical name: Sister Crow in the report. She is a student in the Strategic Sorcery and Black School courses, both of which played a role in her work here. 

Field Report: Cyprian, Lucifer, and Sovereignty

“I returned to practicing magic in 2013, though I’d begun in earnest in the early 90s. Over the decades, my path has twisted around boulders of doubt, thickets of conformity, and swampy ponds of toxic positivity culture. My early practice was mostly stock 1990s eclectic Wicca. For a time, it blended with yoga. And then I became a wife and mother; my practice sank deep under the demands of the culture of “intensive mothering”. My daughter was born at the height of white middle class obsessions with “attachment parenting” and the sublimation of self that it demands of women. I even left a career as a counselor for abused women and started working with families with infants. I still do that work now.

I started working with Jason’s material almost a year into my return, first with “Protection and Reversal Magick”. I had felt that I needed some structure and I wanted to explore different ways of working. Intrigued by what I’d read, I signed up for Strategic Sorcery a day or two before a cycle was to begin. I was scared! But one of the things I appreciate most about how Jason teaches is that there is a tremendous amount of room to move within the structure of the courses. There is no one way to do the work, which allowed me to set my own pace and make my practice my own.

Enter Saint Cyprian.

Shortly after starting Strategic Sorcery, Jason posted about the Days of the Cyprian. Intrigued, I completed the novena. This marked a turning point, though it would be a couple of years before I saw full manifestation of this work.

The time I restarted my magical practice was defined by chaos. It was the Tower card writ large. My father’s dementia made it unsafe for him to live alone, especially given that I live 3 hours away. I had to put him into long-term care, along with my aunt who also has dementia. I became responsible for things I had no idea how to deal with. I almost died from sepsis from undiagnosed appendicitis. I worked in a very toxic, cult-like clinical environment. I developed physical issues that cause me chronic pain even now. I grapple with depression and anxiety. Did I mention that I was raising a daughter at the same time? The result of these struggles was a sense of inertia. A holding pattern. I feared that any move I made would make it worse. Things were “bearable” and so I resigned myself to the devil I knew. This extended into my magical practice.

I was drifting off to sleep one night during that first novena, ruminating on my very Catholic fears about working with spirits. A clear message popped into my head. “You are sovereign”. I made sure I wrote it down. And though I’d been practicing for years, at that point I’d not yet heard this framed in such a way. I didn’t even realize how profound a statement it was at the time. And it changed everything.

Over those next years, my sovereignty was put to the test multiple times. Something rose within me that forced me to confront a number of aspects of my life that were no longer serving me, or never had. This was not a comfortable process. It’s still not a comfortable process.

Breaking The Chains

The most dramatic example of this happened in 2017. I had worked my way up in my job over the years. I was not only a senior clinician, but faculty in the clinical education program, as well as a primary student mentor. A couple years into my tenure there,  I was hired to be clinical coordinator after a big shake up in the organization. It’s worth noting that the founder of the clinic is known world wide as a pioneer in the field. Given his status, he has a lot of power within the organization. And he’s a narcissist.

I had always had the role of negotiator and peacemaker in the organization. An issue emerged regarding favoritism and pay, and I represented a number of employees in challenging this, particularly with regards to the fact that we hadn’t had a raise in years, no benefits, and no paid sick days. This caused me to become his target. In one instance, I had disagreed with him regarding a clinical assessment. We saw the exact same thing, but he stuck to his dogmatic interpretation of the case, while I agreed with what the patient saw to be the issue. He ended up cornering me in my office, blocking the open door, and screaming at me in front of colleagues, patients, students, and visiting clinicians. All of a sudden I was 10 years old again, feeling trapped and terrified. I was barely able to drive home.

During that period, two of my colleagues and I had been planning to start a side business for private consultations. We had partnered with another pediatric office. This caused my boss to take every opportunity to try to thwart that initiative, including calling me Pontius Pilate when I walked in one morning. The stress was making me sick. I’d worked so hard to make the clinic the best it could be.  Even though almost everyone in my life was encouraging me to go out on my own (including Jason, though he framed it more as a question during a consultation), I stubbornly clung to the idea that the clinic needed me and that it was imperative that I stay. But I’d become so burned out that I requested an unpaid leave of absence for a month. I no longer felt safe at work, and I’d expressed that concern to the HR manager. Every day, I’d been bracing myself in anticipation of being bullied and shouted at. It was like my childhood all over again.

I do believe that Cyprian was the trigger in my becoming sovereign. Throughout that whole time, I was doing my regular offerings and rituals every Saturday. I don’t think there was any specific beyond that at the time (mainly because of the inertia I was dealing with), but I can pinpoint sovereignty as being central to the situation. I felt like I was compromising my morals, ethics, common sense, and commitment to patient care every time I went into work after a couple of years of working there. The cognitive dissonance was preventing me from accessing my own power, because I was denying what I knew to be true. Also, a few times when I’d asked him for help when I was spooked by a spirit, he told me to handle it myself, that I could do it on my own. Cultivating that inner fortitude
certainly didn’t hurt.

Two weeks into my leave, I received a registered letter terminating my employment.

Starting Over at 44

Thus began a new chapter. I had to start over, at age 44. The initiative with my colleagues was now my priority, though nothing had been solidified beyond a loose agreement with the paediatric clinic. One partner was on maternity leave and had been quite ill throughout her pregnancy, while the other continued to work at my former place of employment. It eventually became clear where her loyalties lay. Building the business was now all on me. I had good support from the clinic that I’d partnered with. There were many days where I sat and twiddled my thumbs. But eventually, I started having regular patients, and standing clinical days with two of the doctors.

In the spring of 2018, I started seeing mention of The Black School, a course Jason was offering for the first time that focused on working with Saint Cyprian. I’d continued my Cyprianic work over the years, with regular offerings and novenas. He already occupied a spot on my altar. The night before it was to begin, I signed up because something keep pushing me in that direction even though, at the time, I had been reluctant given the level of exhaustion and overwhelm I was coping with.

At the same time, I had been exploring Luciferianism and Goetic magick through a variety of sources. My Catholic upbringing caused me to be exceedingly cautious. I’d been doing more reading than actual workings. The version of Lucifer that I had in my head visited a few times but I hadn’t been ready. I said as much, and it was ok. That my boundary had been respected was revolutionary for me; it riefied my sense of sovereignty.

A few weeks into the course, we started working with Lucifer in earnest within the context of Cyprianic magick. It was not anything like I’d read elsewhere. For one, it was embodied. Two, it was respectful without resorting to supplication. There was a defined structure that was strong yet fluid, which allowed for individual experience and interpretation. The first time I worked that specific prayer, I felt an visceral shift inside, a quickening. The power spoken of in the invocation manifested inside me as a flame within my heart. And then things started changing rapidly.

Binding Bad Actors

And that flame grew and grew. In life, as in my spiritual practice, I’d given up so much of my power. I’d allowed my locus of control to be external. I mistakenly believed that my “flexibility” and “generous” nature was a strength. It isn’t. It’s a maladaptive way of coping with shitty power dynamics that requires no confrontation. It meant that I absorbed the emotional hit of a given conflict, rather than standing up for myself. It also meant that my relationships with the spirits weren’t as deep or engaging as they could be because I wasn’t working from my own power, but depending on theirs.

And I started to see it everywhere, the ways that I sabotage myself by ceding ground. In almost every interaction, I could see it, both on this mortal coil and in the more ethereal sense. I took steps to remedy some of the more obvious issues, like ending my affiliation with my former colleague. I decided to do some magical workings to smooth her exit, necessary because she’s a hot tempered narcissist. I took a blackcloth, some of her handwriting, a demonic seal (pretty sure it was Raum), some hot foot powder and some scorched earth powder (both from Wolf and Goat), cut and clear oil, and some baneful herbs. I did this on a Saturday after doing my regular offerings to Saint Cyprian and performed the Skull and Cross, Father of the First Flame, and the self-annointing rites from the Black School Course. I folded it all into a triangle over and over until I couldn’t anymore (for Saturn, and binding), wrapped it in red string, burned it, and left it at a crossroads out in the sticks. We informed her shortly after that we were removing her from our website, and she complied with no argument. Binding successful.

Father of the First Flame

The work brought me back to myself as a healer. There is something about that label that I had felt required me to be soft and yielding always. I work with newborns, after all; my hands and heart and mind ensure that those new to the Earth are nourished and thriving. I take this work very seriously; it was handed directly to me from my ancestors. What was missing, though, was that that softness requires strong boundaries if it’s to be sustainable. And I was never the recipient of that healing care that I offered so freely to others.

Since completing the course, my focus has been on cultivating that rebel spirit, “fallen for freedom’s sake”. I realize now that the flame was ever present, though small, functioning as a pilot light for much of my life. Similar to my work with Lucifer, my Lilith work has required me to get out from under people and situations where I have given away my power.

Our spiritual growth isn’t linear, but more like a spiral. We return to the same issues over and over in life, but we hopefully go deeper in our work with each recurring challenge that we face. I have been in therapy for decades to deal with my dysfunctional response to childhood trauma, and yet it was this work that finally shone the light on my own participation in giving away my power, dignity, and sovereignty. With the First Flame burning within, the illusions that have bound me lie in ashes; the path ahead awaits, unobscured and luminous.

– Sister Crow

NOTES

A few things to highlight in the report: 

1. By beginning a regular magical practice Sister Crow moved from doing spells to fix this or that little thing, to an overall shift in life conditions. This is key and is the difference between someone actively engaged in meaningful work and strategic sorcery every day vs someone who does spells or “workings” every now and then in between arguing on the internet. 
2. In cases where she was getting freaked out by strange occurrences, which often accompany magic, Cyprian’s answer to her plea’s was “Do it yourself”. We are spirits and often the spirits we summon or commune with work best if we have our own skills to apply as well. Cyprian being a pretty blunt kind of guy will just boot you out of the nest when it’s time. 
3. Later on, when she has to get rid of a partner from her new business, she first sets up her own work, then involves a demon to help it along. This is good sorcery and led to almost immediate success. 
4. Sister Crow is also involved in other paths. She mentions Lilith for instance, and I don’t cover her in any courses. This is GOOD. I don’t expect to be anyones only source, and it is up to the student to integrate teachings together into a single meaningful practice. 

Well done! 

 

BLACK SCHOOL STARTS JUNE 25th – Get the details here.