The Cyranides (also Kyranides or Kiranides) is a compilation of
magico-medical works in
Greek first put together in the 4th century.[1]Latin and
Arabic translations also exists. It has been described as a "
farrago" and a texte vivant,[2] owing to the complexities of its
transmission: it has been abridged, rearranged, and supplemented. The resulting compilation covers the magical properties and practical uses of gemstones, plants, and animals, and is a virtual encyclopedia of
amulets;[3] it also contains material pertinent to the history of western
alchemy,[4] and to
New Testament studies, particularly in illuminating meanings of words and
magico-religious practices.[5] As a medical text, the Cyranides was held in relatively low esteem even in
antiquity and the
Middle Ages because of its use of
vernacular language and reliance on
lore rather than
Hippocratic or
Galenic medical theory.[6]
In the Pseudodoxia Epidemica,
Thomas Browne described the Cyranides as "a collection out of
Harpocration the Greek and sundry
Arabick writers delivering not only the Naturall but Magicall propriety of things."[7] Although the Cyranides was considered "dangerous and disreputable" in the Middle Ages, it was translated into Latin by
Pascalis Romanus, a
clergyman with medical expertise who was the Latin interpreter for Emperor
Manuel I Komnenos. The 14th-century
clericDemetrios Chloros was put on trial because he transcribed magical texts, including what was referred to as the Coeranis.[8]
Form and structure
The original 4th-century Cyranides comprised three books, to which a
redactor added a fourth. The original first book of the Cyranides, the Κυρανίς (Kuranis), was the second component of a two-part work, the first part of which was the Ἀρχαϊκἠ (Archaikê). Books 2–4 are a
bestiary. The
edition of Kaimakis (see below) contains a fifth and sixth book which were not transmitted under the name Cyranides but which were included with the work in a limited number of manuscripts. A medieval
Arabic translation of the first book exists, and portions of it are "reflected" in the
Old French work Le livre des secrez de nature (The Book of Nature's Secrets).
The Cyranides begins by instructing the reader to keep its contents secret, and with a fictional narrative of how the work was discovered.[9] In one 15th-century manuscript, the author of the work is said to be Kyranos (Κοίρανος), king of
Persia.[10]
Sample remedies and spells
The Cyranides devotes a chapter to the healing powers of the water snake; its
bezoar is used to cure
dropsy.[11] Fish
gall is recommended for healing white spots in the eye; fish liver is supposed to cure blindness.[12] For a "large and pleasurable"
erection, a mixture of
arugula, spices, and honey is recommended, as is carrying the tail of a lizard or the right
molar of a
skink.[13] The fumigation or wearing of
bear hair turns away evil spirits and fever.[14]
Daniel Ogden, a specialist in magic and the supernatural in antiquity, has gathered several references from the Cyranides on the use of gemstones and amulets.[15] The collection offers spells to avert the child-harming demon
Gello, who was blamed for
miscarriages and
infant mortality, and says that
aetite can be worn as an amulet against miscarriage.[16]
Magico-religious tradition
Olympidorus provides a summary of a passage from the work, not part of the abridged version now extant, that has
cosmological as well as alchemical implications:
Again in KyranisHermes, speaking riddlingly of the egg, said that it is properly the substance of gold-
solder and the moon. For the egg challenges the golden-haired cosmos: the
cockerel, Hermes says, was once a man, cursed by the sun. This he says in the book called Ancient (archaike). In it he also makes mention of the
mole, saying that it too was once a man. It was cursed by god for revealing the secrets of the sun. And the sun made it blind and if it happens to be observed by the sun, the earth does not receive it till evening. He says '<the sun made it blind> as it knew as well what was the shape of the sun.' He exiled it in the melanitis land [black earth?],[17] as a law-breaker and divulger of his secret to the human race.[18]
In the extant version, the Cyranides contains a description of the heliodromus, a
phoenix-like bird from
India which, upon hatching, flies to the rising sun and then goes west when the sun passes the
zenith. It lives only a year, and, according to some interpretations of an unreliable text, leaves behind an
androgynous progeny.[19]
Editions and translations
Delatte, Louis (1942). Textes latins et vieux français relatifs aux Cyranides. Paris: Droz.
OCLC901714095. The Latin translation.
Kaimakis, Dimitris (1976). Die Kyraniden. Meisenheim am Glan: Hain.
ISBN9783445013347. (NB: Kaimakis did not consult the Latin text while making this edition).
Ruelle, M. Ch.-Ém. (1898). Les lapidaires de l'antiquité et du moyen-âge 2. Les lapidaires grecs, Tome 2, Fascicule 1. Paris.{{
cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (
link) Partial Greek text.
Toral-Niehoff, Isabel (2004). Kitab Giranis. Die arabische Übersetzung der ersten Kyranis des Hermes Trismegistos und die griechischen Parallelen. München: Herbert Utz.
ISBN3-8316-0413-4. Arabic translation and partial Greek text; Greek text contains many typographical errors.
Bain, David. "Μελανῖτις γῆ in the Cyranides and Related Texts: New Evidence for the Origins and Etymology of Alchemy." In Magic in the Biblical World: From the
Rod of Aaron to the
Ring of Solomon. T&T Clark International, 2003, pp. 191–218. Limited preview
online.
Bain, David. "περιγίνεσθαι as a Medical Term and a Conjecture in the Cyranides." In Ethics and Rhetoric: Classical Essays for Donald Russell on His Seventy-Fifth Birthday. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995, pp. 281–286. Limited preview
online.
Faraone, Christopher A. Ancient Greek Love Magic. Harvard University Press, 2001. Limited preview
online.
Mavroudi, Maria. "Occult Science and Society in Byzantium: Considerations for Future Research." University of California, Berkeley. Full text
downloadable. Also published in The Occult Sciences in Byzantium (La Pomme d'or, 2006), limited preview
online.
References
^David Bain, "περιγίνεσθαι as a Medical Term and a Conjecture in the Cyranides," in Ethics and Rhetoric: Classical Essays for Donald Russell on His Seventy-Fifth Birthday (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), p. 283
online.Christopher A. Faraone, Ancient Greek Love Magic p. 121, dates the work to the 1st century.
^French, "living text"; that is, an "open" document or text undergoing continuing revision by multiple hands and existing in no one authoritative form; see
Wikipedia.
^Faraone, Ancient Greek Love Magic, pp. 11 and 121.
^David Bain, "Μελανῖτις γῆ in the Cyranides and Related Texts: New Evidence for the Origins and Etymology of Alchemy," in Magic in the Biblical World: From the
Rod of Aaron to the
Ring of Solomon (T&T Clark International, 2003), pp. 209–210, especially note 64.
^Jeffrey B. Gibson, Temptations of Jesus in Early Christianity (Continuum International Publishing, 2004), p. 246
online; used as a source by James A. Kelhoffer, The Diet of
John the Baptist: "Locusts and Wild Honey" in Synoptic and Patristic Interpretation (Mohr Siebeck, 2005), passim.
^Maria Mavroudi, "Occult Science and Society in Byzantium: Considerations for Future Research," University of California, Berkeley, p. 84, full text
downloadable.[dead link]
^Bain, "Μελανῖτις γῆ," p. 208, note 61; Mavroudi, "Occult Science and Society in Byzantium," p. 84.
^Bain, "Μελανῖτις γῆ," pp. 195
online, 203 and 209; "περιγίνεσθαι as a Medical Term," p. 283; "Some Textual and Lexical Notes on Cyranides 'Books Five and Six'," Classica et Mediaevalia 47 (1996), pp. 151–168
online.
^Mavroudi, "Occult Science and Society in Byzantium," p. 74.
^Erich S. Gruen, Diaspora: Jews Amidst Greeks and Romans (Harvard University Press, 2004), p. 319
online.
^Faraone, Ancient Greek Love Magic, p. 21, note 93. The possession of a molar by a skink seems not to be questioned; one wonders whether the translation is accurate.
^Mavroudi, "Occult Science and Society in Byzantium," p. 84, note 137.
^Daniel Ogden, Magic, Witchcraft, and Ghosts in the Greek and Roman Worlds: A Sourcebook (Oxford University Press, 2002), passim, limited preview
online.
^Sarah Iles Johnston, Restless Dead: Encounters Between the Living and the Dead in Ancient Greece (University of California Press, 1999), pp. 166–167
online.
^Based on the Latin translation and a poor text of the Greek,
E.H.F. Meyer thought that μελανῖτις γῆ referred to southern
Syria; others have thought
Ethiopia;
Egypt is now the standard view.
^R. van den Broek, The Myth of the Phoenix According to Classical and Early Christian Traditions (Brill, N.D.), pp. 286–287
online.. On the sex of the phoenix, see F. Lecocq, «‘Le sexe incertain du phénix’: de la zoologie à la théologie», Le phénix et son autre: poétique d'un mythe des origines au XVIe s., ed. L. Gosserez, Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2013, p. 177-199, (
ISBN978-2-7535-2735-5)