Cyprianus into a typical Faust figure; some said that Cyprianus was a wicked Norwegian or Dane who learned magic through his dealings with the Devil; one version makes Cyprianus so evil that the Devil threw him out of Hell; Cyprianus wrote the text to have his revenge. A different and strongly contradictory version explains that Cyprianus was a student who discovered he was attending a diabolical "black school", and wrote the text to explain how to undo all the witchcraft he learned there. An anachronistic tale told in the printed Danish spell collection Oldtidens Sortebog ("Old Time Magic Book") makes Cyprianus to have been a pious and beautiful Mexican nun from the fourteenth century. In a gothic tale, Oldtidens Sortebog has Cyprianus cast into a dungeon in 1351. While imprisoned in the dungeon, Cyprianus rends her clothing and commits her magical knowledge to the rags, written in her own blood. Her text was then found in an old castle. The spells The spells in the Cyprianus tradition are typical Germanic folk magic: a mixed bag of folk remedies, prayers, and actual magic. They resemble the spells of the German language , "pow-wow", and The Long Lost Friend traditions. One typical spell to heal a sprained ankle went: "Jesus rode over a stony plain.His horse stumbled, its leg it did sprain.Jesus dismounted to cure the painAnd made he injury good again.In the name of God the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost." The methods of contagion and transference are in use here; a sacred personage in an apocryphal story is confronted with a problem similar to that faced by the actual sufferer, who avails himself of their supernatural aid. An important aspect of the magical tradition was the performance of divination, often by pouring molten lead through a hole in a piece of flatbread into cold water, a practice called ("molybdomancy"). Lead scraped from the windows of churches was often used for this purpose. This was done to divine the cause of rickets, which was often thought to be the result of a changeling, a or , left in the place of a healthy child by the malicious huldra-folk. The diviner in this ritual was called a , a "blessing crone". Inexperienced use of the Black Book The Inexperienced Use of the Black Book is a motif in Scandinavian folklore. In such legends, a servant, maid or someone else unexpectedly happens to