Faustus: The Life and Times of a Renaissance Magician

by Leo Ruickbie

  Schottenloher connected this with a letter written by Mutianus to Heinrich Urbanus in 1513 where he called Faustus ‘Helmitheus Hedelbergensis’.11 This connection led him to suggest an entirely different place of birth. Mutianus’s letter only survives in the copy made by his correspondent Urbanus and the difficulty is that when he wrote ‘Helmitheus Hedelbergensis’ he appeared to invent two new words. As it stands the phrase is near unintelligible. In 1742 Heumann argued that ‘Helmitheus’ was a misspelling for ‘Hemitheus’, which he thought meant ‘half-god’. This view has tended to prevail and in English ‘Helmitheus’ is routinely translated as ‘demi-god’.12 Although probably unaware of Mutianus’s letter, Marlowe accidentally made poetry of the phrase when he had his Faustus exclaim: ‘A sound magician is a demi-god’ (1.1.63).

  Then there is the question of ‘Hedelbergensis’. In the nineteenth century the German philologist and historian of literature Johann Düntzer argued for an alternative reading of what he thought was ‘Hedebergensis’ as ‘Hedelbergensis’, which was what Mutianus had written in the first place, meaning ‘of Heidelberg’.13 This gives us the bizarre title of the ‘demigod of Heidelberg’ and based on the poor report of some of his contemporaries, most commentators from Heumann onwards have happily agreed that this indicates that Faustus was a confirmed charlatan.

  Schottenloher was rightly dissatisfied with the demigod interpretation. The crucial point is that Mutianus’s letter only survives as Urbanus’s copy. Thus what we have is Urbanus’s interpretation of what Mutianus wrote, leaving much room for speculation.14 Bringing the two parts of the riddle together Schottenloher suggested that the references to ‘helmstet’ and ‘Helmitheus Hedelbergensis’ meant that Faustus actually came from a town called Helmstedt near Heidelberg.15 The Heidelberg connection is independently supported by reference to ‘Haidlberg’, i.e. Heidelberg, in the Ingolstadt document of 1528. There is nowhere called Helmstet or Helmstedt today, but the town Helmstadt, which is indeed near Heidelberg, has historically been referred to as Helmstatt and Helmstet. In 1975 it became Helmstadt-Bargen.

  All this careful detective work is flatly contradicted by Johannes Manlius. In 1563 he published an account of what he said were the lectures of his teacher Melanchthon in which he is reported to have said that Faustus was born in Kundling. If one looks at a map of modern Germany there is no such place as Kundling to be found. The clue to its whereabouts again comes from Manlius. He said that Faustus came from Kundling near Melanchthon’s birthplace. It is well-documented that Melanchthon was born in the town of Bretten in the modern federal state of Baden-Württemberg. This Kundling near Bretten is unmistakably today’s Knittlingen. There was a tendency to treat place names casually by today’s standards. Many of the other variations of Faustus’s birthplace given in the sixteenth-century sources have been used for the modern town of Knittlingen at some time in the past. At least forty-five variations of the name Knittlingen have been recorded, including Kundling.

  When Manlius published Melanchthon’s words in 1563, Faustus was already long dead. None of the surviving contemporary sources made mention of Kundling (or similar) and all of the many later references to Kundling can be traced back to Manlius’s publication. The great weight of independent references to Kundling suddenly becomes one, so just how far can we rely on what Manlius claimed Melanchthon had said?

  Melanchthon’s reputation as one of the foremost theologians of the Reformation, second only to Luther, has tended to sway opinion from the last half of the sixteenth century to the present day, but his stories concerning Faustus are largely fantastic. Through Manlius he reports in all seriousness feats of flying in Venice and magicianeating in Vienna. Nor was Melanchthon unbiased, calling Faustus ‘a wicked beast and sewer of many devils’. Other information he gave on where Faustus supposedly went to university has also proven to be false. The motivation behind his Faustus stories was led by an agenda and told ‘for the sake of the young men that they may not readily give ear to such lying men’. Melanchthon is far from reliable, and through Manlius another layer of interpretation and potential manipulation is added.16

  It could be argued that even if Leib did write ‘helmstet’ and this did refer to Helmstadt-Bargen, then Knittlingen could still be implicated because in the fifteenth century many inhabitants of Knittlingen were serfs of the Palatinate lords of Helmstadt.17 Furthermore, Heidelberg, 56 kilometres away, could just as easily encompass Knittlingen as it could Helmstadt, because until 1504 Knittlingen lay within the borders of the Palatinate, which was ruled from Heidelberg. The lords of Helmstadt also owned land around Eichstätt near Leib’s monastery of Rebdorf.

  Another piece of evidence that has been presented is a bill of sale issued in Knittlingen in 1542 that uses the name Fausten (in the German text) to identify a house purchase. The bill of sale notes that the building in question was next to the house where Fausten had been born. It was discovered in a crate in the cellar of the town hall and authenticated by the mayor of Knittlingen himself on 3 March 1934. The original document was destroyed in World War II, but thanks to a copyist, a version remains and is now on display in the Faust Museum in Knittlingen.

  The bill of sale described the house ‘where Fausten was born’ as that of the late Jörgen Gerlach, which has given rise to the idea that Gerlach was his father. The authoritative Neue Deutsche Biographie reports this as fact with the additional details that Faustus’s alleged father was the wealthy farmer Johannes Christian Gerlach. However, the generally poor perception of Faustus has led to the rumour in Knittlingen that he was the illegitimate son of a lord and his maid, giving him a below stairs origin and a chip on his shoulder.18

  Knittlingen today is almost as it might have been then. Square, sturdy half-timbered houses of black-pitched beams and white-washed walls, their roofs raised high against the winter snows, crowd atop the crest of a hill along what used to be an important post and trade route since at least Roman times. In Faustus’s day it was on a major route linking the Low Countries and Italy. The size of the old post house still standing by the roadside is a testament to the town’s former importance. It now serves a rather good meal and a fine glass of hypocras. Around 1500 the town had 2,000 inhabitants, making it a sizeable community for the period.19

  A house still stands on the spot where Faustus was said to have been born, although several fires have swept the village since the late fifteenth century and consumed the original building. A plaque proudly proclaims ‘Birth-house of Doctor Faust’. Inside the owners showed me curious runes carved on the old oak beams that they believed were connected with the building’s reputation. A strange parchment, covered in magical symbols, was found hidden inside a crack in a doorframe and in pride of place a mysterious cabinet inlaid with alchemical signs hangs upon the wall. These unexpected and unique details, although undated, are taken as proofs that this must have been the house of the notorious Dr Faustus.

  Next to the building stands the Faust Archive. Across the road is the Faust Museum. Along the street from the old posthouse is the pharmacy, the Faust-Apotheke. The town’s old ‘Oberschule’ has been renamed the Dr Johannes Faust Schule. A dramatic statue of Faustus by Hans Schorp-Pflumm from 1954 stands outside the town hall. We see Faustus frozen in the midst of a conjuration, hands implying the Hermetic mantra ‘as above, so below’. There can be no doubt that today’s inhabitants of Knittlingen firmly believe that Faustus was born here.

  However, all of this speculation hinges upon what Manlius claimed Melanchthon had said, repeated by subsequent authorities until it seemed like unassailable fact. Even if Manlius had accurately reported what Melanchthon had said – and he is known to not always have done so20 – none of the other information given is provable, and in some cases clearly false. That the lords of Helmstadt owned serfs in Knittlingen proves little, since serfs generally did not go to university. Tax records or muster lists surviving from the first half of the sixteenth century give the names of three people surnamed ‘Faust’ living in
Knittlingen.21 We have demonstrated that ‘Faustus’ is an assumed title, so it is much more likely that the word Fausten in the bill of sale innocently refers to someone bearing the surname Faust and not to the magician.22

  The important thing about the journal entry of Prior Kilian Leib is that he was making a private record, it served no polemical purpose for him to falsify his information about Faustus, unlike Melanchthon and his scribe Manlius. To say that Faustus came from Melanchthon’s rival village is a way of implying that he was Melanchthon’s rival, an interpretation that entirely fits in with the general theme of Manlius’s account. Tellingly, Melanchthon or Manlius also got Faustus’s first name wrong, calling him Johannes. That Leib’s ‘helmstet’ is closely approximated by Mutianus’s ‘Helmitheus’ adds significant support to the alternative theory. Mutianus’s reference to ‘hedelbergensis’ is further supported by reference in the Ingolstadt record of 1528 to ‘Haidlberg’, both being variants of Heidelberg.

  Finally and conclusively, we have independent verification that someone with the first name of Georgius was connected with Helmstadt, studied at university and subsequently began to develop a career in magic. It was Schottenloher again who found him, tracking down university records of a student variously listed as Georgius Helmstetter, Jorio de Helmstat, Jeorius de Helmstat, Georio de Helmstadt and Jeorius Halmstadt.

  Significant new evidence of Helmstetter’s existence was published by Professor Frank Baron of Kansas University in 1989. In the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris he discovered an exchange of letters between Dr Petrus Seuter (also Suter, or Suitter) and Nikolaus Ellenbog. Seuter was a lawyer in Kempten and a graduate of Heidelberg; his friend Ellenbog (c.1480–1543), a monk in the monastery of Ottobeuren with Humanist interests who had also studied at Heidelberg (1497–1502).Although dated 1534, Seuter’s letter concerns Heidelberg in the early 1490s and a horoscope made by ‘magister Georgius Helmstetten’ or ‘Helmstetter’, astrologer, chiromancer and physiognomist. As we will see, these were all forms of divination practised by Magister Georgius Sabellicus Faustus.23

  The correspondence between Helmstetter and Faustus not only allows us to confidently state that ‘Sabillicus Faustus Junior’ was the title assumed by Helmstetter, but also solves the question of when he was born. The university records show that Helmstetter enrolled in 1483 and had to wait until 1487 when he reached the minimum age for graduation as a Master of twenty or twenty-one. He could not, therefore, have been born in 1478, but must have been born in the 1460s, leading us to that fateful conjunction on 23 April 1466.

  Thus the evidence leads us forty-six kilometres away from Knittlingen to Helmstadt-Bargen where there are no statues of the magician, no museums, no shops or schools named after him, just a small, unprepossessing village that stakes no claim to be the birthplace of Faustus. Was it out of this obscurity that the young Georgius Helmstetter, one of only a few hundred inhabitants, made his way to university and subsequently embarked on his career as the magician Faustus?

  It has been speculated that the student who matriculated in 1483 sought to hide his real surname by providing only his place of origin.24 However, there is a family that takes its name from Helmstadt, the noble house von Helmstatt. Descended from a knight of King Heinrich I called Rabanus, who flourished around 930, branches of the family were spread across the Kraichgau area that encompassed both Helmstadt and Knittlingen.

  Leib wrote ‘Georgius Faustus Helmstet’, he did not write ‘Helmstetensis’ as Schottenloher speculated. Leib was writing out Faustus’s full name, not that he was someone from somewhere, and he could not use the noble prefix ‘von’ because he was writing in Latin. Even when Mutianus wrote (according to Urbanus) ‘Georgius Faustus Helmitheus Hedelbergensis’, it is only the last word that gives the provenance of the man named and Hedelbergensis means of or from Heidelberg, not some other place near Heidelberg.

  There was indeed a Georg von Helmstetter of the Oberöwisheimer branch of the Helmstatt family who came into adulthood around 1483–1487; however, his father, also called Georg, died in 1457, either creating an embarrassing problem for his widow or ruling out this particular candidate. There are enough trailing vines on the family tree – unnamed offspring and their progeny – to provide ample scope for a match if the records were not lost in the fog of history.25

  It would also be tempting to suggest that this resolves the apparent contradiction between Helmstadt and Knittlingen. If Faustus was a von Helmstatt he could still be born in Knittlingen. The fly in the ointment is that Helmstetter was recorded as coming from the diocese of Worms, whilst Knittlingen itself was in the diocese of Speyer.26

  If Helmstet is part of his name and Knittlingen is in the wrong diocese, where does that leave? Both Mutianus and the Ingolstadt document said that Faustus came from Heidelberg. There are fifteen years between these references and no reason to suppose that the one influenced the other. The von Helmstatt family has historic connections to both Heidelberg town and university, so it is plausible at the very least to say that Faustus came from Heidelberg.

  The explanation that most eloquently resolves the contradictions in the material is that Faustus was of the noble family of von Helmstatt. It accounts for the various names and locations found in the contemporary sources and explains another curious piece of information that we learn from Leib: that Faustus held rank in one of the Christian military orders as a knight, a position that was seldom open to commoners. Incidentally, the coat of arms of von Helmstatt sports a black raven, a motif that would re-occur in the otherwise curiously named ‘Black Raven’ grimoire attributed to Faustus.

  The events of Faustus’s life suggest a younger son of a younger son, still noble, but far from the wealth and power. He was not so noble that he thought himself above submitting himself to such things as examinations, like the Bishop of Bamberg, as we will see later. There was just enough money for an education, perhaps with a mind to a career in the Church, but there was no high office, land or property to inherit.

  Faustus lived within the confines of the Holy Roman Empire that sprawled from the North Sea to the Mediterranean. It was not so dissimilar to the European Union of today, a patchwork of competitive, quarrelsome self-interests stitched together with treaties and fickle loyalties. An impressive enterprise on paper, but a ramshackle thing in operation and just as undemocratic. It was an unstable coalition of princes ruled over by an emperor whose powers were circumspect. In-fighting between the nobles, unrest amongst the commoners and conflict with the papacy added to the political tensions that stretched the empire taught. Its aggressive neighbours France and the Muslim Ottoman Empire would constantly test its political willpower and military might. France was the richest kingdom in Christendom and the Ottomans’ power was great. Against Christian vacillation and double-dealing was a strict theocratic regime whose core principles meant war against the infidel.

  As Voltaire succinctly put it in 1756, the Holy Roman Empire was ‘neither Holy, nor Roman, nor an Empire’. It was instead secular, mostly German, too wild to be under anyone’s sole authority and engaged in almost constant warfare that at any moment could spell its destruction. This was the world of Faustus.

  3

  The Diabolical Faculty (1472–1489)

  Until he is mentioned in 1507 by the hostile Trithemius, we hear nothing of ‘Faustus’, but what we do hear tells us something of Faustus’s early years. Trithemius wrote his letter in Latin and he had evidently seen Faustus’s calling card and it seems possible that the Latin was used by Faustus himself. Trithemius also says that Faustus made mention of Plato and Aristotle which hints at a university education and points to some schooling beforehand. The evidence later provided by Mutianus and Leib leads us to the person of Georg Helmstetter and his documented university career, but even if we did not know that Faustus was Helmstetter, the information provided by Trithemius indicates a university background.

  Education was theoretically available for everyone. Martin Luther was given a free edu
cation at the Franciscan school in Magdeburg, although like the young Johann Butzbach (c.1478–1526) he still had to beg for his bread.1 In practice only the sons of nobles and merchants could be spared from work and given the monetary investment necessary to pursue even a rudimentary education.

  If Faustus was educated, then this hints at his social class. In the Faustbooks he is portrayed as the son of a poor husbandman who is enabled by a wealthy uncle to attend university, but he would still need some grounding in Latin, something that a poor husbandman would have been unlikely to be able to provide. Later claims to nobility made by Faustus himself point to a relatively wealthy background.

  Education in the late fifteenth century would most likely have taken place in a day school, in a large class, perhaps of seventy or more pupils, and would have involved learning by rote. Faustus, like Butzbach, probably began his schooling at age six, which would give us the year 1472. Some schools had a Bursa or hostel attached to house students from afar, but that was not the norm and Butzbach travelled far to find one. Such accommodation as the students did find was guaranteed to be lousy, literally. The Swiss Humanist Thomas Platter (1499–1582) slept on the floor rather than risk being eaten alive by the lice in his bed and in Dresden he recalled hearing them rustle through the straw bedding in noisy swarms.

  It may have been the Renaissance, but the education was still medieval and school-books were in such short supply as to actively hamper learning. The curriculum taught the essential elements of the trivium of rhetoric, dialectic and grammar, but the principal Latin textbook was a grammar written in the fourth century CE. Butzbach was taught with such works as the Parables of Alan of Lille (fl. 1200), and the moral distichs of Cato and Aesop’s Fables. Christianity would be instilled through study of the Lord’s Prayer, the Apostle’s Creed, the lives of the saints and the Ten Commandments. It was a point on which the Fifth Lateran Council was particularly insistent in 1514, warning that ‘every generation inclines to evil from its youth’.2