Via Flickr:
Made with Paper
According to my friend C.T., who was one of my classmates in the online course we took with Rufus Opus, and with whom I recently had a great conversation about teaching, Saints Justina and Cyprian were martyred together by being boiled alive. He was some kind of a vagrant bishop, and a magician and a sorcerer. She was a virtuous Christian woman who defeated all his magic with the sign of the Cross.
C.T. is currently working on a paper on Cyprian, so I made him an icon. The fields and the waters around them are to commemorate Antioch, where he lived, but also Norway and Portugal — the ship at center-right commemorates the interest that he aroused among seafaring peoples.
Update: The Curious Curandera has a poem for dedicating a tarot deck to Cipriano, who I think is the same saint as Saint Cyprian of Antioch. As C.T. told me, though, Saint Cyprian is no longer an official saint of the Roman Catholic Church, although he still figures in the calendar of saints of Greek Orthodoxy.
Update (August 8, 2014): I’ve set the icon on Flickr to a Creative Commons license (this one in essence [this one, legally]), so if you click through to Flickr (by clicking on the image), you’ll be able to download a larger copy of the image and use it without royalties.
[…] (He also writes movingly today on the difference between a problem, a predicament, and a crisis). I’ve only made an icon, and a not very good one at that (although maybe this would be a good time to make, or re-make, a magical robe for yourself). […]
[…] mountains and a cloud-scape. My impression or intuition says that this is an alternate image of St. Cyprian, the magician-turned-bishop-saint who became so popular in Scandinavia for his grimoire on being a […]