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

  The new diabolical Faustus would cause an unnamed monastery to be haunted with the Devil’s aid and would die savagely at the hands of his master in the work of Johannes Gast (d.1552), Protestant theologian and Deacon of St Martin’s in Basel. Writing in 1548, he amplified the diabolical connection, adding an entreaty against becoming ‘slaves of the Devil’. Although published after Faustus’s lifetime, we must not exclude the likelihood that Gast was telling these stories as part of an oral tradition long before they found their way into print. As a Protestant clergyman, Gast could not help but be influenced by Luther’s focus on the active role of the Devil and may have heard from others some account of that ‘table talk’ about Faustus. His Sermones Convivales were immensely popular and played a key role in cementing the image of the diabolical Faustus.

  Count Froben Christoph von Zimmern (1519–1566/7) told a similar story of monastic bedevilment caused by the ‘black magician’ Faustus in his Zimmerische Chronik, written around 1565. As a reliable source, the Chronik has its supporters and detractors.6 However, Froben’s personal involvement in the black arts suggests that he knew what he was talking about and he supplied a level of detail concerning Faustus’s end that we find nowhere else. As to Faustus’s worsening reputation, Froben did nothing to ameliorate it.

  The Dutch born physician and demonologist Johannes Wierus (Wier or Weyer, 1515–1588) would also contribute much to the growing legend of Faustus. Wierus was a former student of the physician and occultist Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa von Nettesheim (1486–1535), who was himself an erstwhile disciple of Trithemius. Agrippa introduced him to the works of his master and no doubt to some of his opinions on other matters too. It is this connection that one feels strongly in what Wierus had to say about the magician in his De Praestigiis Daemonum (‘On the Illusions of the Demons’ or ‘On Witchcraft’). First published in 1563, it was in the fourth edition of 1568 that Wierus raised the topic of Faustus. Arguing against the crime of witchcraft and in particular that old women could be capable of it, Wierus stressed the culpability of the learnéd magicians – another reason why he was not sympathetic towards Faustus. His turn of phrase also implies that he could have said more. He added important information on where Faustus was supposedly born and died, but elected to concentrate on a comical beard-burning incident, probably because it took place near his own hometown of Graves on the River Meuse (Maas), and adds that Faustus called the Devil his brother-in-law.

  Around 1570 or 1575 a Nuremberg schoolmaster called Christoff Roshirt (or Rosshirt) the Elder collected his own tales about ‘Doctor Georgio Fausto dem Schwartzkünstler und Zauberer’ (‘Doctor George Faustus the Black Artist and Magician’) and added them as an appendix to Luther’s Tischreden for the years 1535–1542 – a period that encompassed Luther’s first recorded mention of Faustus. Roshirt unmistakably identified Faustus as a black magician, although he only mentioned the Devil twice.

  The next source is a chronicle begun in the mid to late sixteenth century by Reichmann. His brother-in-law Wolf Wambach was responsible for two sections referring to Faustus, written after 1570, probably around 1580. Unfortunately this so-called Reichmann-Wambach Chronicle is now lost and known only through the Chronicle of Thuringia and the City of Erfurt written by Zacharias Hogel (1611–1677). Because of this we cannot be certain whether and to what extent Hogel may have interpreted or otherwise changed the original.

  Adding shovelfuls of brimstone to his account of Faustus, Hogel/Wambach amplified the diabolical connection more than ever before. Where Roshirt had sprinkled his text with two references to the Devil and Gast with three, Hogel/ Wambach saturated his with eleven, adding such other terms as ‘black magician’ and the piquant ‘hellbrand’.

  Whilst stories like Gast’s and Roshirt’s were no doubt told around stove and hearth in taverns and homes across the country, with occasional references creeping into the chronicles of the period, the first full account of Faustus emerged some forty years after his death. It is only in the work of a Nuremberg scribe written around 1580, the Historia vnd Geschicht Doctor Johannis Faustj des Zauberers (‘History and Story of Doctor Johannes Faust the Magician’), that we have the first surviving Faustbook,7 the so-called Wolfenbüttel Manuscript, now preserved in the Herzog-August Bibliothek in Wolfenbüttel. However, the relatively good condition of this manuscript suggests that it did not go through many hands.

  In 1587 pacts with the Devil were hot news. A widow called Walpurga Hausmännin had been tried in Dillingen that year and ‘upon kindly questioning and also torture’ confessed to having revelled with the ‘Evil One’ and committed innumerable blasphemies and forty-three counts of infanticide in his name. She told the judge that events first began in 1556 when, after a night of carnality with the Devil, he commanded her to sign her soul over to him and for ink scratched her below the left shoulder, drawing blood: ‘To this end he gave her a quill and, whereas she could not write, the Evil One guided her hand...’8 The unfortunate Walpurga was torn with red-hot irons before being burnt at the stake. Such was the climate in which the later legends of Faustus were forged. The generosity of the Humanist spirit that had informed the early years of the sixteenth century had given way towards its end to a religiously embattled anxiety that seemed to find release in the persecution of witchcraft.

  In 1587 a different kind of ‘hot metal’ was busy in nearby Frankfurt am Main. The Zangmeister (‘song master’) Ludolphus Lüders, writing from Brunswick on 30 October 1587, recorded that an edition of what he called doctoris Johannis Fausti historia was being sold at the Frankfurt Fair for nine Saxon ‘gute groschen’ and was quickly selling out.9 This Historia von D. Johann Fausten, dem weitbeschreyten Zauberer und Schwarzkünstler – literally, the ‘History of D[r] Johann Faust’ the famous Magician and Black Artist’ – was printed by Johann Spies (d.1623) in Frankfurt.10

  Although published anonymously, Spies himself is often credited with authorship. Spies, however, identified a mysterious ‘friend in Speyer’ as the source for the book. Spies said that he had written to him enquiring about material on Faustus and that this friend had replied with all or part of the manuscript that Spies printed. Despite the attribution of the ‘friend in Speyer’ as the source, he intended Faustus to be seen as the author. The subtitle read ‘Compiled and Printed, Mostly from His Own Writings’. The Historia is highly derivative and clearly more of a compilation than an original creation. There is no ‘author’ as such. There are obvious borrowings from Sebastian Brant’s Narrenschiff (‘Ship of Fools’), Hartmann Schedel’s Buch der Chroniken (‘Book of the Chronicles’), Martin Luther’s Tischreden and Augustin Lercheimer’s Christlich bedencken (‘Christian Concern’), and a telling similarity with the Wolfenbüttel Manuscript.11

  The book is chaotic by today’s standards and weakly plotted. There is little regard for any sort of chronology other than following the obvious progression from birth to death. After setting the scene of the scholarly road to ruin, the book sermonises relentlessly on the sin of transgressing the Reformation worldview, but also has didactic interests revealed in the discussion of astronomy and the travel guide loosely appended to Faustus’s life. It entertains the reader with a number of anecdotes about duping peasants and Jews, and playing tricks on noblemen.

  Now seen as fiction, the book presents itself as the biography and occasionally autobiography of a real person. This was an age when strict divisions between fiction and non-fiction were not applied and the writer or compiler had no qualms about presenting imaginative creations as truths. However, we cannot see it entirely as a work of entertainment as some have done.12 Spies’s express purpose in printing this book – as he revealed in its dedication – was to warn others against the dangers of straying from the path of Christianity as redefined by Luther. To this extent it was an old-fashioned morality play with a new subject, shot-through with didacticism and sharpened by the propagandist into a diatribe against the Church.

  The Historia ridiculed the Pope in Rome and the Sulta
n in ‘Constantinople’. It named the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V as a patron of the black arts and defamed nobles like Fabian von Dohna and the Prince of Anhalt. However, von Dohna and Anhalt were not Catholics, they were Calvinists. Augustin Lercheimer – the pseudonym of Hermann Witekind (1522–1603) – another Heidelberg Calvinist, immediately picked up on this and interpreted the Historia as an attack on Calvinism. In 1597 he called it a libellous book that encouraged curious young men to follow Faustus’s example. In 1596 a case involving the student David Lipsius (Leipziger), whom we shall meet again later, brought to light exactly such a misuse. Lercheimer was himself instrumental in transmitting stories about Faustus in his Christlich bedencken of 1585 – even before it influenced the Historia – and here, in particular, he believed that Luther and Melanchthon had been defamed.13 The most interesting thing in Lercheimer’s reaction is how Spies’s warning against diabolical magic was also seen as an incitement to practice it and that, in one sense, has always been the literary appeal of Faustus as a subject.

  Spies brought out a second edition of the Historia in 1589 with six new chapters derived from the Erfurt legends of Faustus’s invocation of the Homeric heroes, the offer to restore the lost comedies of Plautus and Terence, the demonic flying horse, the production of wine from holes in a table, Doctor Klinge, and the Leipzig legend of Auerbach’s Cellar. Like a snowball rolling down a hillside, Faustus accrued tales as he passed through subsequent editions. In all, it went through twenty-two editions, spawned a sequel, and was adapted and translated into several languages. Even before he could issue a second edition, the Historia was pirated. Carolus Battus (Karl Batten, 1540–1617) produced a Dutch translation in 1592 – with the addition of some helpful dates to the various incidents described. When Victor Palma Cayet (1525–1610), professor of Hebrew at the Collège de Navarre in Paris, brought out a French edition in 1598 (spiced with some of his own anti-Protestant remarks), he was accused of having made a pact with the Devil himself and tried for witchcraft. In 1599 Georg Rudolf Widmann (also Widman, fl. 1560–1600), a councillor in Schwäbisch Hall, published three volumes totalling 671 pages, almost three times the size of Spies’s original, adding more stories from Roshirt and Luther.

  Whilst Widmann’s version – successively condensed into more readable forms, first by Johann Nikolaus Pfitzer (1674) and then anonymously (1725) – would eventually inspire Goethe, it was the English edition of Spies that would lead Marlowe to produce his most famous work. Printed in London in 1592, the translator was simply identified as ‘P.F. Gent’ (i.e. ‘Gentleman’) and to this day his identity has not been discovered. P.F., however, was not content to merely translate. With all the swagger and bravado of the stereotypical Elizabethan, he produced a very free translation, or more accurately, adaptation. He threw out some of the dull theological material, elaborated and contracted as he saw fit, interjecting his own anecdotes and descriptions. In particular, P.F. frequently gave us his unflattering opinion of the Germans.

  In this welter of different stories, many of them also told about other magicians at different times, there are references to contemporary events and to things Faustus might have done, or was believed to have done. Most significantly many of these stories, so often carelessly dismissed as ‘legendary’ and hence untrue, are exactly the sorts of things that were not only attributed to magicians, but, more importantly, claimed by them as well. As we will see, many of the legends about magicians, and Faustus in particular, often derive from or are paralleled in their own discourse – the texts on magic written by or for the magicians themselves.

  Finally, there is a large body of work bearing the name of ‘Faust’ as author. The first of these was Doctor Faustens dreyfacher Höllenzwang (‘Doctor Faust’s Threefold Harrowing of Hell’) supposedly published in Passau at the unfeasibly early date of 1407. Eighteen examples referred to in this book are included in the bibliography, but more might be counted. The best research has so far revealed forty-five works in manuscript and another forty in print, not all of which are extant.14 Centres of origination or publication are most commonly Lyon, Passau and Rome, but surprising examples, such as London and Wittenberg, are also found.

  An immediately recognisable feature of these Faustian books of magic or grimoires is the dramatic titling. The persistent use and re-use of such phrases as the ‘Threefold Harrowing of Hell’ and the ‘Black Raven’ make these names almost as important as that of their reputed author in identifying this particular magical discourse. As exciting as these texts seem in authenticating the existence and career of Faustus, it is beyond doubt that they are the work of later authors cashing in on the legend.

  Most of the texts use the later form of ‘Johannes’ or a variation of it in the title and none use the authentic ‘Georgius’, which suggests a post-Faustus date of composition – after 1538. Most of the texts use the name ‘Faust’ as an advert and incentive in a way that is usually alien to authentic works – Agrippa did not call his most famous book Cornelius Agrippa’s Occult Philosophy – but are symptomatic of what we call ‘celebrity tie-ins’ today. The earliest printed work is dated 1607, whilst the earliest manuscript is dated to around 1650. Based on their palaeography the majority of the manuscripts have been ascribed to the eighteenth century, while a great many of the printed works appeared in the antiquarian Johannes Scheible’s vast compendium Das Kloster of 1845–9. We will discuss the more interesting of these texts as they occur in the chronology of Faustus as a way in which to see how a Faustian grimoire genre was developing and being retrospectively fed back into the life of their alleged author.

  All of the sources concerning Faustus that have come down to us have to be handled cautiously. What defines an event as either history or legend is the extent to which its occurrence can be verified, but our proof rests entirely on what has been said and written down, and what we can read between the lines. There is little hard truth to be found – there rarely is in any human life – and so this work must also be an evaluation of the possibilities.

  The contemporary and near-contemporary sources were, for the most part, all written by scholarly men who enjoyed the respect of their peers. The temptation then is to trust their opinion, but as will become apparent, they were not above ruining the reputations of others as it suited them, especially those writers influenced by Trithemius. Their arguments against Faustus were all ad hominem, ‘to the man’, and in no way objective. Faustus represented something antithetical to their worldview, and if there was no explicit conspiracy against him, then, in sociological terms, the ‘in-group’ was at the very least closing ranks on an outsider. This was done in a manner reminiscent of the general outrage that attended Philippus Aureolus Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim (1493–1541), the man known more simply by his assumed title of Paracelsus.

  Today, through the confusion of later legends about Faustus, it is only too easy to lose sight of the man. Myths grow like weeds in the path of one’s career. I should know. I have seen those legends grow in my own path, albeit on a less dramatic scale than Faustus. It began one year at a garden party held to celebrate a neighbour’s birthday in the late 1990s. At such events the question always arises of ‘And what do you do?’ Naturally I told the curious of my PhD work on modern witchcraft. The next year on the same occasion one guest was overheard to say to another that she should be careful about what she said because a ‘wizard’ lived next door. Within a year a perfectly harmless conversation about academic research had turned me into a practitioner of magic. When an academic in our own ‘enlightened’ age can so easily become a magician, then how much more so a wandering scholar in the Deviltormented period five hundred years ago? It is a final caution to sensitise us to the problems of deciphering the life of Faustus.

  In writing this biography I have taken a new approach. I have tried to see Faustus and his world from the magician’s perspective as much as possible, and not that of the modern literary specialist, as has so frequently been the case in the past. Here especially
I think of the Cambridge don E.M. Butler who pioneered research on the subject in English, but who allowed a sceptical perspective as well as an uncritical approach to the sources to colour her interpretation with sarcasm and disparagement.

  This does not mean that I do not look for rational explanations, especially as a means of allowing the modern reader to see into the complex world of the times. Much of what Faustus is supposed to have done can be interpreted as trickery, and such techniques were certainly known in Faustus’s age. Whereas today we have a far more sophisticated understanding of the magical entertainer’s trade, in the sixteenth century only the small elite initiated into the secrets thought such deceptions were anything other than a display of ‘real’ supernatural magic. Gali-gali men in Egypt still perform the same trick of turning staffs into snakes that Moses and Aaron used to amaze the Pharaoh, and we do not think it a miracle. When Faustus apparently caused people to think that their noses were bunches of grapes we can either dismiss it as ‘legendary’ as has been the norm so far, or realise that any stage hypnotist today could do the same and that, therefore, Faustus could also have accomplished such an illusion. Both Paracelsus and Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592) were particularly aware of the apparently magical power of the imagination. That said, we should not see Faustus as simply the sixteenth-century version of a Copperfield or a Blaine, because his alleged self-representation was on a higher level than that of a fairground conjurer, putting him at the forefront of the ‘science’ of his day – Hermeticism, alchemy and astrology – and directly into competition with the Church’s interpretation of reality.