Faustus: The Life and Times of a Renaissance Magician Read online

  FAUSTUS

  FAUSTUS

  THE LIFE AND TIMES OF

  A RENAISSANCE MAGICIAN

  LEO RUICKBIE

  I will tell thee things to the terror of thy soul, if thou wilt abide the hearing.

  – P.F., The Damnable Life and Deserved Death of Doctor John Faustus, 15921

  To the girl in the graveyard.

  First published in 2009

  The History Press

  The Mill, Brimscombe Port

  Stroud, Gloucestershire, GL5 2QG

  www.thehistorypress.co.uk

  This ebook edition first published in 2012

  All rights reserved

  © Leo Ruickbie, 2009, 2012

  The right of Leo Ruickbie, to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyrights, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

  EPUB ISBN 978 0 7524 7346 8

  MOBI ISBN 978 0 7524 7345 1

  Original typesetting by The History Press

  Contents

  Acknowledgements

  1 A Renaissance Scandal

  2 Born of the Devil (1466)

  3 The Diabolical Faculty (1472–1489)

  4 The Magus Arrives (1500–1506)

  5 Sex Crimes in Kreuznach (1507)

  6 Harrowing Times (1507–1512)

  7 The Hellbrand of Erfurt (1513)

  8 Meeting Mephistopheles (1514)

  9 Deal with the Devil (1514)

  10 The Philosophers’ Stone (1516)

  11 The Court Magician (1519–1522)

  12 The Planets Collide (1523–1525)

  13 All the Victories in Italy (1521–1527)

  14 On the Road to Exile (1527–1528)

  15 Entertaining the Emperor (1529–1530)

  16 The Fugitive (1530–1534)

  17 Baptism of Blood (1534–1535)

  18 Beyond the Black Forest (1535–1536)

  19 The Wages of Sin (1537–1538?)

  Epilogue: A Damnable Life?

  Notes

  Select Bibliography

  Acknowledgements

  No book is just a book and this present work is no exception. It is the sum of many years of my life, the result of thousands of kilometres of field trips, the distillation of a million pages of centuries of research and writing, and the cause of my meeting many generous and interesting people. When I began I had no idea of the road ahead, but it has been a journey made significantly easier by the helpfulness of the people I encountered along the way, some of whom it is my pleasure to thank here.

  Mechthild Berkemeier, Stadtbibliothek, Bad Kreuznach; Vanessa Dippel, Büdingen; Uschi Flacke, Altweilnau; Rosa Gema, Historisches Dr Faust Haus, Bad Kreuznach; R. Haasenbruch, Halle-Wittenberg University; Heike Hamberger Director of the Faust Museum and Archive, Knittlingen; Susann Henker, SLUB/Deutsche Fotothek; Petra Hesse, Leipzig University; Mr and Mrs Hochwald, ‘Fausts Geburtshaus’, Knittlingen; Thorsten Hofrath, Verbandsgemeindeverwaltung Simmern-Hunsrück; Alexandra Ilginus, Herzog-August-Bibliothek, Wolfenbüttel;Vladimir Josipovic, Destinacije.com; Gudrun Kauck, Wächtersbach; Harald Kramer, Bürgermeister, Stadtroda; Günter Kroll, Universitätsbibliothek Frankfurt am Main; Tobias Küenzlen, Ephorus, Maulbronn Monastery; Heinrich Laun, Bad Kreuznach;Valeria Maria Leonardi, Sovereign Military Order of Malta; Tim Lörke, Faust Museum and Archive, Knittlingen; Edyta Paruch, Dr Franz Moegle-Hofacker, Hauptstaatsarchiv, Stuttgart, Jagiellonian University, Kraków; Petra Pauly, Stadtbibliothek, Bad Kreuznach; Kristin Pietzner of Wittenberg-Information; Julius Reisek, Heimatwissenschaftliche Zentralbibliothek, Bad Kreuznach; Hans-Rudolf Ruppel, Stadtarchiv Korbach; Dr Klaus Rupprecht, Staatsarchiv Bamberg; Dr Schieck, Helmstadt; Dr Edith Schipper, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Munich; Dr Beatrix Schönewald, Stadtmuseum, Ingolstadt; Prof. Dr Wilfried Schöntag, Stuttgart; Dr Steffen Schürle, Boxberg; Sylke Titzmann, Stadtverwaltung Stadtroda; the family Trch, Zum Löwen, Staufen; Dr Michael Vesper, Geschäftsführer, Bad Kreuznach Tourismus und Marketing; and U. Weck, Touristinformation Trittenheim.

  I wish to single out Professor Frank Baron of Kansas University for his generosity in taking the time and trouble to read my manuscript and discuss some of the finer points of interpretation. Especial thanks are also due to my friends Holger Kempkens and Cordula Krause. At the end of that trail, it is also my pleasure to thank my editors at The History Press, Sophie Bradshaw, Simon Hamlet and Jo Howe, who have all worked on the project with great enthusiasm. But most of all my greatest thanks are reserved for my wife, Dr Antje Bosselmann-Ruickbie, who has often and patiently travelled with me on this quest into a dark and disturbing corner of the past.

  1

  A Renaissance Scandal

  Lightning tears the sky asunder. Electric veins of heaven’s quicksilver beat a furious, fiery pulse. Thunder, like the demon’s drumroll, rumbles in the black, starless sky. The wind howls in the treetops like a chorus of the damned. His candles guttered and snuffed out, his carefully drawn circle spotted and smudged by rain, his nerves in shreds, the magician cries aloud in ancient tongues with names of gods forsaken and words unknown. In a fanfare of shrieks and moans – of the wind in the trees or souls in hell he cannot discern – in the flicker of thunderbolts hurled by a disapproving God, out of flames and grotesque shadows a figure resolves itself. He has delved into every science and mastered all human knowledge to bring himself willingly to this brink of madness and eternal damnation.

  A deal is struck between mortal man and infernal power. The parchment pact soaks up the bloody signature like an eager vampire, drawing out the soul to its ruin. In exchange for that insubstantial thing – so hard to find, so easily given – the magician is leased a demon to do his every bidding. Together they travel the world in a riot of adventures. The scholar has shed his study like a chrysalis and revels in the traditional hedonism of wine, women and song. He produces wonders for the entertainment of students, lords and even the Emperor himself. He enjoys fame and fortune, and the favours of a veritable harem, including the most beautiful woman of them all, Helen of Troy. Too late the wastrel laments as the hourglass runs out. He is damned. God has stopped up His ears and barred the gates of heaven. The Devil will redeem his pact.

  The seeker after forbidden knowledge is lured into signing a pact with the Devil. He enjoys the fruits of his deal, but cannot escape the clutches of Satan. The story is well known. It is so well known that it has spawned a whole genre, an industry even. The great names of every form of creative endeavour have turned their keen minds to Faustus. From unrivalled dramatists such as Shakespeare’s contemporary, Christopher Marlowe, and the giant of German literature Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, to artists such as Rembrandt and Eugène Delacroix, to musical geniuses such as Ludwig van Beethoven and Richard Wagner – all have been inspired by the story of Faustus to produce masterpieces. It was no exaggeration when the former Dean of Princeton Graduate School, Professor Theodore Ziolkowski, argued that the Faustus myth has been central to the formation of Western consciouness.1

  The number of written works is staggering. Alexander Tille’s monumental catalogue of references to Faustus runs to 1,152 closely printed pages, covering only the yea
rs up to the eighteenth century, whilst Hans Henning’s bibliography of works attributed to or about Faustus runs to two weighty volumes. It has been estimated that three million printed pages have been devoted to Faustus, approximating something like 20,000 books. Goethe’s Faust alone is believed to be one of the most quoted works of literature, as well as one of the most reprinted, reproduced and re-enacted. It has been claimed that every night around 300 productions of Faust are performed on stages across the world. From German, French and British sources, Tille also catalogued a total of 700 artistic representations of Goethe’s Faust, and that was more than a hundred years ago.

  Almost 600 operas and pieces of classical music have been based on the story of Faustus. At least thirty modern recording artists spanning the genres from pop to death metal have released thirty-one songs or albums directly employing the name ‘Faust’. The story of Faustus was quite possibly the first to be immortalised on the silver screen in 1896 and in the relatively brief history of cinema 67 directors in 13 different countries have produced a total of 81 films on the theme. Then there is a boardgame and more than ten video and computer games. Beyond reading, hearing, watching or playing things Faustian, one can wear Mephisto shoes, drink Faust beer, or eat ‘Faust Brand Choicest Sockeye Salmon’ from Washington State. In his influential Decline of the West (1918), Oswald Spengler even developed a social theory situating us in a Faustian Age.2

  Whilst the creative arts have often found paths to enlightenment and redemption in the modern ‘Faust’, popular usage of the term ‘Faustian’ is almost wholly negative. The connection between the Devil and the German roots of the story inevitably lead to references to the Nazi regime, exemplified by Klaus Mann’s Mephisto (1936), while others tap into the Spenglerian characterisation of modernity, which may not be so very different. The idea of the ‘Faustian bargain’ has even found its way into treatments of US foreign policy and genetics. ‘Faust’ has become the metaphor for everything modern, from modernity’s great achievements to its darkest horrors.

  The story of Faustus has, like a Renaissance magician’s homunculus, assumed a life of its own. But is it the real story? After following the trail of Faustus through the historical references to him and the places he supposedly visited I have come to believe that the man – the legend we call ‘Faust’ today – is not the same as the Faustus who lived some five hundred years ago. The image made famous through the works of the great artists and reproduced in myriad forms is false.

  From out of the shifting morass of legend emerges a will-o’-the-wisp as illusory as the great spirit he claims as companion and familiar. At the very moment Faustus appears in recorded history he is given the worst sort of reputation, and as with the dog with the bad name he is hung ever after. Look up any dictionary or encyclopedia and what does one read about Faustus? That single word ‘charlatan’, again and again.

  There can be no denying that Faustus was a sixteenth-century scandal. He claimed to be the greatest living master of the forbidden art of necromancy who, with his magic, could rival all of the miracles allegedly performed by Jesus. He caused uproar amongst his contemporaries and was accused of the worst crimes and character flaws they could imagine. Their reaction was also a scandal. Ever since the judgement of history has been against him and it has been wrong. Just what evidence is there for the invocation of Mephistopheles, the pact with the Devil and all the other outrages he is alleged to have committed? To be sure, he was no saint, but the Devil is not always as black as he is painted. Whilst a full biography may be overdue by some five hundred years, so also is a critical, unbiased examination of his life.

  Not only is the person of Faustus misunderstood, but any re-evaluation of him is also a re-evaluation of the Renaissance. Since Dame Frances Yates’ pioneering study of Giordano Bruno in 1964, placing the occult at the heart of any understanding of the Renaissance, little work has been undertaken to develop this insight, especially as regards the early years of the Northern Renaissance. Although recognised as an ‘icon of modern culture’ by Professor Osman Durrani in 2004, Faustus is absent from general histories of his own times and poorly represented in even more specialist works.3 Writing in 1979 Professor Wayne Shumaker of the University of California at Berkeley remarked ‘I have come to believe that the traditional understanding of Renaissance thought is, if not wrong, no more than half right’. Faustus is part of that other half. Faustus represents the forgotten and even hidden side of his age. To find the real Faustus is to find the real history of that period.

  Although critical to developing a keener understanding of these complex times, it is no easy task. As a biographical subject Faustus presents several challenging problems. We know of him entirely through the words of others, few of whom were even remotely sympathetic and most downright hostile. Everything we know of him is either secondhand and biased, or clearly fabulous. This has given rise to two approaches to Faustus: to take him almost entirely as a literary creation, or to strip him down to only that which can be proven. Both approaches have their drawbacks and ultimately fail to reveal the complex character of both the person called Faustus and the times in which he lived.

  Evidence for the life of Faustus is found in a handful of historically authenticated sources. In the last hundred or so years of serious research into the figure of Faustus, only seven contemporary references to him have been discovered. He was first mentioned in 1507 by the Abbot Johannes Trithemius (1462–1516), and by the Abbot’s friend Conradus Mutianus Rufus (conventionally just Mutianus, 1471–1526), in 1513. His name then appeared in the account book of Georg III Schenk von Limburg (1470–1522), Bishop of Bamberg, in 1520, but it was eight years before the next references emerged, both coming within days of each other. The first appeared in an entry in the meteorological journal of Prior Kilian Leib (1471–1553) for 5 June 1528, the second in the official records of the city of Ingolstadt for 15 June 1528. Nuremberg made note of him in its records for 1532. Finally, Joachim Camerarius (Joachim Liebhard, 1500–1574) referred to him in a letter dated 1536. When the physician Philipp Begardi came to write of him in his Index Sanitatis (published 1539) he stated that Faustus was already dead.

  The author of the first reference to Faustus, Abbot Trithemius, is an interesting and complicated case. He was simultaneously a leading magician and a high-ranking churchman, who both condemned and practiced astrology, and who was accused of necromancy and criticised others for it. At a time when aristocratic patronage was paramount, Trithemius was not slow in playing the game, including mounting political attacks against rivals. As much as he condemned those who ‘noisily catch the attention of kings and princes’ he repeatedly presented his credentials to the great and the good with a boastfulness unbecoming in a monk.4 He was also a consummate networker who at one time had the ear of Emperor Maximilian I and could count amongst his friends and acquaintances many of those who later expressed ill will towards Faustus, such as Mutianus. He was a mass of contradictions.

  Trithemius’s letter was a singularity. It was the only time in his voluminous writings that he spoke of Faustus. The initial enquiry and response – if they were made – of his correspondent Johannes Virdung von Haßfurt (c.1463–c.1538) have been lost. But Trithemius did make references that extended beyond the written page. He referred in his letter to a list or document – a sort of business card – that Faustus conveyed to him and had already sent to Virdung. Trithemius could not just invent what he liked about Faustus, since Virdung already had some account of him, significantly from Faustus himself. This does not mean that Trithemius pulled his punches. His invective was strident. However, to convince Virdung, Trithemius would find it difficult to stray from the details about Faustus that they both shared. This is what makes his letter the single most important historical source.

  Whilst most of the references to Faustus are hostile, others show different aspects of his reception; together they present a complicated mosaic only imperfectly preserved. A further reference from the matriculation recor
ds of the University of Heidelberg of 1509 has been discounted for reasons that will be outlined later. In addition to these there are several more references in the writings of contemporaries – some of whom may have met him – and near-contemporaries published up to the close of the sixteenth century. These are a collection of stories, the Tischreden (‘Table Talk’) of the Reformation leader Martin Luther (1483–1546), the lectures of his disciple Philipp Melanchthon (1497–1560), a letter from the aristocratic adventurer Philipp von Hutten (1511–1546), various semi-historical chronicles, a demonological treatise and a bill of sale for a house in his possible hometown. Even in this small pile of paper there are innumerable clues to the wider sphere of Faustus’s life and the trajectory of his career.

  The legend began with the first written reference. At the moment he entered recorded history, Faustus entered into legend. It started with Trithemius’s poison pen and was shaped through the mounting negative reports of others. However, the lineaments of what we might call the classical legend were not sketched until after the Devil had collected his due.

  Luther and his circle were discussing the question of Faustus at least as early as the mid-1530s. Nicolaus Medler noted Luther’s reaction when Faustus was mentioned during one of their conversations between 1533 and 1535, but Luther chose to talk about the Devil rather than the magician.5 Antonius Lauterbach (1502–1569) recorded a conversation of 1537 about magicians and the magic art, and ‘how Satan blinded men’, in which Faustus was mentioned as being connected with the Devil. Of course Luther immediately saw Faustus as an agent of Satan – there is nothing too surprising in that – and turned the conversation round so as to be able to boast about himself. What is of interest is that Luther was the first person on record to link Faustus with the Devil. Trithemius may have started the legend, but he kept Old Nick out of it. Johannes Aurifaber (1519–1575), who published Luther’s comments in 1566, introduced Faustus as a black magician – the first known use of the description. Medler had earlier simply called him a magician. Faustus himself had apparently been styling himself as a necromancer since 1506 – as noted by Trithemius in 1507 – and the term nigromancer (‘Nigromantico’) was recorded for the first time in the Nuremberg city records of 1532. The widespread confusion between necromancy (divination by the dead) and nigromancy (black magic) makes these terms less straightforward and less damning than ‘black magician’. The earliest references in the letters of Trithemius (1507) and Mutianus (1513) employed the Humanist rhetoric of folly against Faustus. It took the Devil-haunted Luther to involve him in the Teufelspolemik. It is here in the Tischreden of Luther that we can locate the transformation of Faustus from learnéd magician into diabolist.