Faustus: The Life and Times of a Renaissance Magician

by Leo Ruickbie

  We also find Alchemical Sayings, again from the fifteenth century, a single folio sheet that shows in a large coloured design what appears to be a furnace surrounded by the figure of a king on his throne, with the sun and moon, and a lion.10 In 1433 Johannes von Bayreuth, the eldest son of Friedrich von Brandenburg, commissioned an edition of the Book of the Holy Trinity, which is found again in copies from c.1467 and 1492.11 Alchemical recipes attributed to Arnold of Villa Nova and Andreas de Farlinio were circulating in manuscript form,12 as well as Raymond Lull’s Animae transmutationis metallorum13 and the Vom silber und vom golde of Nicolaus of Paris.14 One could scour the 147 paragraphs of the Omne bonum a Domino deo est of the mid-fifteenth century for clues of the secret of the philosophers,15 or leaf through the so-called alchemy book of Martin Vreter and read the famous Tabula smaragdina of Hermes Trismegistus and the Rosary of the Philosophers.16 Faustus would not have been stuck for alchemical texts; sixteenth-century Germany was all but carpeted with them, but which one would lead him to the prize?

  Faustus may have followed the same sort of procedure so elaborately detailed in Ripley’s The Compound of Alchymy (1471).17 Ripley had studied in Rome and Louvain, travelled through Germany, and reputedly made gold for the Knights of St John on Rhodes. Ripley’s process was a lengthy one and if Entenfuß expected a speedy result he would be disappointed. The art of alchemy was not to be rushed. Equipment would need to be bought – could we really expect Faustus to have dragged his own apparatus from Erfurt, even with a demonic supersteed for transport? Chemicals would need to be purchased, and if Entenfuß thought all it took was a lump of lead, he would need to be reminded of the alchemists’ maxim: ‘to make gold, take gold’, or, in this case, gulden and lots of it. Did Entenfuß open his monastery coffers, eyes shining with the thought of super-abundant wealth, or did he pull on the purse-strings of Ulrich von Württemberg?

  Although Ripley advised that ‘one thing, one glass, one furnace, and no more’ was sufficient, the list of apparatus could be a long one and, of course, an expensive one.18 As an example of what was required, we might consider the archaeological excavations at Oberstockstall/Kirchberg am Wagram in Austria. Here, beneath the sacristy of a church adjoining the town hall, a rubbish dump of alchemical equipment was uncovered containing fragments of some eight hundred artefacts all dating from the sixteenth century. Working at high temperatures with corrosive substances in an environment devoid of health and safety regulations, Faustus, or any other alchemist of his day, was bound to go through a great deal of equipment.

  Equipping an alchemist’s laboratory was not something that could be done with much secrecy. Everything would have to be made to order. Special glass vessels, high quality ceramics and furnaces were required; glass-blowers and potters would be commissioned to produce the bizarrely shaped instruments. Even if these commissions were carried out in Maulbronn’s own workshops, the monks and lay brothers, and the villagers living outside the walls, could hardly be unaware of these preparations. Travellers along the Reichsstraße would catch whispers of what was going on and pass them on to the next village and the next, and so rumours would spread. A sudden energy would enthuse the torpid monastery as mysterious deliveries from local artisans arrived and the monks were put to work cleaning out the tower, or the secret room, and carrying all the fabulous gear to and fro.

  We might imagine his laboratory arranged after Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s The Alchemist of 1558. We see a room crowded with instruments, the robed alchemist sitting at a table reading out instructions from his book, whilst his plainly-attired assistant sits before the fireplace, dropping some substance into a beaker. We see tubs of strange substances with spoons sticking out of them. A large still bubbles behind the assistant, whilst in front of him thick black smoke rushes up the chimney. If he decided to distil aqua vitae after Hieronymus Braunschweig’s description in his Book of Distillation of 1512, then he would have had to set up a complicated system of glass pipes woven through a central upright cylinder where they were fed by the vapours of two alembics heated on their own furnaces. In Braunschweig’s woodcut the alchemist hangs rather limply on the apparatus, hands seeming to caress the glass, whilst his assistant, as flamboyant as any Landsknecht, draws off the magical liquid from a dragon-headed tap at the base of the main pipe.

  The historical model of an alchemist’s laboratory in the Faust Museum, Knittlingen, shows again the typical scene of long-necked glassware, large and bizarrely shaped stills (one apparently modelled after Braunschweig’s description), and no less than three assistants busy about their work. The alchemist himself is in his tented oratory, consulting the books of his art. A stuffed crocodile hangs from the wooden beams – a mainstay of the alchemical scene – and a human skeleton swings from a stand.

  Bruegel’s purpose was, however, satirical. Between the alchemist and his assistant we see a woman and a fool, clearly up to no good. The woman is emptying a purse into her hand and her sly look seems to say that it is not her own, whilst the fool, hiding behind the alchemist’s table, puffs furiously with bellows on some overturned vessels, sending a cloud of smoke up the woman’s skirts. Behind them a child with a cauldron on his head helps two others to climb up into a cupboard. The alchemist strikes an authoritative pose and his assistant looks busy, but it is a scene of chaos and an hourglass by the assistant’s elbow suggests time wasted.

  In contrast, Jan van Straten’s Die Alchemie of 1570, like Bruegel, shows another busy scene, but this time the impression is one of order. The alchemist in his fur-trimmed doctor’s robe and spectacles directs his assistants. In the foreground a boy pounds a mortar. A man with a spoon in some compound stares intently at a glass vessel, whilst another, a sixteenth-century Vulcan in red doublet and hose, is busy at the furnace with a look askance. However, the alchemist is not the centre of attention. Drawing the viewer’s gaze is an effete-looking young man clutching a large, bulbous vessel. To the alchemical eye he is the hermaphrodite, the child born of the union of the sun and moon. His white shirt speaks of luna and mercury and his golden hair signals sol and even the elixir itself. From under his elbow a cat stares, wide-eyed with a look somewhere between terror and madness. We see a labour-intensive operation requiring many hands and much apparatus, but the steam, fumes and noise are resolved in the mannered, classical pose of the central figure, the hermaphrodite.

  Both the Faustturm and the secret chamber at Maulbronn are too small to cater to tented oratories or decorative crocodiles. The available space would have concentrated Faustus’s mind upon the essentials: the still and the furnace. The still, called an alembic in the alchemists’ jargon, could be as complicated as Braunschweig’s or simpler after Geber’s designs. The name alembic comes from the Arabic al-anbiq, which is in turn from the Greek ambix, meaning a cup or beaker, and strictly speaking meant only the head of the still, but was used popularly for the whole apparatus. The furnace, called an athanor, was the other essential piece of equipment. The name comes from the Arabic al-tannur and refers to the so-called digesting furnace in which constant heat is supplied by a fire with a self-feeding supply of charcoal housed in a tower.

  In addition to these, Faustus would require a number of bolt-heads – globular glass vessels with long necks that led to them being compared with ostriches or giraffes – retorts – another globular glass vessel but whose long neck was bent to curve round, making it look like a stork – and crucibles – pottery vessels made to withstand immense heat, usually with a narrow base widening into a round or triangular body.

  Crucibles were traded across Europe in huge quantities at that time: three hundred triangular crucibles were recovered from the Oberstockstall excavations alone. Despite this we know relatively little about their manufacture and the reasons they were so highly valued. Using optical and energy-dispersive scanning electron microscopy (SEM-EDX) of cross-sections of the ceramics found at Oberstockstall, researchers at University College, London, were able to discover that all the crucibles were made fro
m the same type of clay mixture, which was significantly different from other ceramics. The highly refractory clay was mixed with varying amounts of sand, grog and sometimes crushed graphite to improve the heat and chemical resistant properties of the vessels. The graphite in particular gave the crucibles improved conductivity and higher resistance to corrosive substances. The crucibles were then deliberately fired in a smoky potter’s kiln that gave them a strikingly black sooty surface.19

  With the bolt-heads and retorts Faustus would distil his chemicals, and in the crucible he would liquefy metals. He would most probably also have on hand several small glass phials for coagulation and solution, perhaps a circulatory still with two side-arms called a pelican (because of an imagined resemblance to that bird), and a urinal or ursale named after the bear (ursa) it was thought to resemble, which was another glass vessel, this time with a figure of eight shape and a projecting narrow glass snout in the upper globe. Shallow ceramic plates known as scorifers would also come in useful for a range of less demanding operations, such as the oxidation of lead bullion, or the initial melting of a metal before further refining.

  Whilst the apparatus and techniques of alchemy were sometimes openly depicted and often in some detail – as in Braunschweig or the Alchemiae Gebri Arabis – the texts themselves were almost always inscrutable. Even the greatest amongst them like Nicholas Flamel could sympathise when he said ‘this operation is indeed a Labyrinth’.20 With all his equipment set up in the tower or the secret chamber, surrounded by gleaming glass and unburnt charcoal, just how was Faustus going to proceed? It was time to fire-up the athanor.

  The Great Work

  Armed with his thurible and retort, versed in the arcana of Geber and Arnoldus, begrimed with blackened residues, eyes stinging with acidic vaporisations, and reeking of sulphurous fumigations, what did the alchemist hope to achieve bent over his furnace late into the night? Gold? Immortality? The secrets of the universe? Greed and genius, glory and gain, knowledge and power; such desires drove the alchemist on through the mystical, maddening texts with their allegories of red kings and green lions, and on through endless experiments, part scientific, part spiritual exploration. The Great Work, the magnum opus, promised everything and concentrated into the single expression of the lapis philosophorum, the Philosophers’ Stone. It was thought to produce a substance of universal transformative power. Its application purified base metal into gold, purified man from death, purified the soul from sin, and made perfect all that was imperfect.

  What sort of man was the alchemist?21 Part proto-scientist, the alchemist was also a mystic. Working before the advent of science as we know it (and before the word was used as such) the alchemist was also experimenting with the chemistry of the spirit. Just as he sought to purify his metals, so he also sought to purify his soul. Seen as a spiritual process, alchemy approaches the status of religion. While Roger Bacon (c.1214–c.1294) distinguished between ‘operative’ and ‘speculative’ alchemy, in practice the alchemist could make little separation between the sacred and profane in his operations; there was not spirituality on the one hand and secular science on the other. All of his experiments were concerned with the sacred, the sacred in nature and the sacred in man. A.E. Waite famously called the more exalted forms of alchemy the Yoga of the West in 1908, yet with its strong sexual metaphor I am inclined to think of it as the Tantra of Chemistry.

  Did any alchemist achieve such spectacular goals? Some claimed they did. After ‘years of unremitting labour’, Flamel recorded how he achieved the impossible in 1382 and produced what he called ‘pure gold’.22 Nearer Faustus’s own time an unknown German of the fifteenth century wrote The Book of Alze in which he confessed, ‘I was almost on the point of giving up the whole thing in despair … I communicated my discovery to a friend, who faithfully executed my instructions, and brought the work to a successful issue.’23 Faustus’s contemporary, Paracelsus, also claimed to have made gold. The alchemists’ experiments are not readily repeatable in the usual scientific manner. They tantalise us with possibilities whose secrets lie locked in the past, sealed with the twisting conundrums of their jargon.

  For all his high talk, Faustus now had to produce something if he was not going to outstay his welcome in Maulbronn Monastery. All the equipment was in place with Entenfuß on the threshold of the laboratory demanding his gold. With Ripley’s Compound of Alchymy, or something like it, there was an established procedure Faustus could follow. The process was described by Ripley in twelve stages, or as he called them ‘gates’ leading into an imagined Castle of the Philosophers. It would take over a year to complete. Faustus sets light to his charcoal, the athanor glows into life, the operation of alchemy has begun.

  1. Faustus would begin with calcination or what Ripley also called ‘the purgation of our Stone’, a process that alone could take up to a year or more. The alchemist is instructed to turn earth into water, water into air, air into fire, to reverse the process and repeat it twice. If successful Faustus would be rewarded with what was variously called ‘the head of the Crow’, the crow’s bill, the ashes of Hermes’s tree, ‘Our Toad of the Earth which eateth his fill’, or ‘the spirit with venom intoxicated’.24

  At the end of the year, before Faustus could have had time to complete calcination, that great thorn in his side was plucked: Trithemius was dead. He had passed away in his monastery at Würzburg on the feast day of St Lucia (23 December 1516). Johannes Butzbach was at his internment to orate a eulogy to his friend as they lowered the body into the cold clay of the Schottenkirche. Carved above his body was a portrait from the workshop of Tilman Riemenschneider with an inscription as pompous as the man they commemorated. Part of it read ‘May he be far from suspicion concerning the magical art of the Demon.’25 Those would not have been Faustus’s final words for him.

  2. Faustus now subjects the ‘hard and dry compaction’ to the process of solution or dissolution where ‘we dissolve into water which wets no hand’ until it becomes ‘intenuate’, meaning thin, or liquid. ‘Every metal,’ explained Ripley, ‘was once a Water mineral, therefore with Water they turn to Water all.’

  3. Next Faustus turns to separation to divide ‘the Subtle from the gross, from the thick the thin’. This should give Faustus water, the ‘thin’, and oil, the ‘thick’, and be repeated ‘oft times’ until ‘Earth remain beneath in colour blue’. Faustus must now add distilled water seven times. This stage is often pictured as raising the birds from their nest as in the Viridarium chymicum published at Frankfurt in 1624. As Ripley rhymes it, ‘Raise up the birds out of their nest, And after again bring them to rest.’

  4. Faustus must now unite the four elements, earth, water, air and fire, through the process of conjunction, which is ‘of deserved qualities a Copulation’. The ‘Woman’ is impregnated by the ‘Man’, meaning mercury is united with sulphur. The silver-coloured, flowing mercury, called quicksilver by the medieval alchemists, meaning literally, ‘living silver’, was depicted by Ripley as ‘in her working … full wild’, referring to the metal’s volatility. According to the chemical theory of the period, mercury was the mother of metals, sulphur was their father. The Rosarium philosophorum (Frankfurt, 1550) depicts their union literally as intercourse between the ‘King’ and ‘Queen’.

  The ‘Woman’ must now be sealed in a vessel and allowed to lie for five months. This offered no respite for the alchemist, he had to lavish great care and attention on the gestating substance: ‘Close up your matrix and nourish the seed, With continual and temperate heat if you will speed’ advised Ripley.

  The winter snows had melted and the worms had had their fill of Trithemius: 1517 must have been well advanced by the time Faustus reached conjunction, if he did. With the Ottoman Turks triumphant in Egypt, Pope Leo X was planning a new crusade. The future Emperor meanwhile was in Spain to collect his latest titles as King of Aragon, Majorca and Valencia, and Count of Barcelona from his deceased grandfather and the crown of Castile and Leon from his mother Joanna ‘The Ma
d’, to become Charles I of Spain. Ulrich von Hutten was made poet laureate by Maximilian I, although he surely did not write the latest book of magic then supposed to be on the market, the Grimorium Verum – the work was more likely a product of the eighteenth century. It was also at this time that the greatest change of the age was wrought: on the door of the castle chapel in Wittenberg Luther supposedly nailed his theses for all to read. Sequestered in his laboratory and diligent at his furnace, Faustus would have been unaware of any changes taking place outside of his ‘matrix’.

  5. The work continues with putrefaction. Faustus must inspect the ‘glass tomb’ and apply a ‘moist’, temperate heat for ninety nights until he sees the substance begin to turn black. Faustus must now turn up the heat and in this ‘purgatory’ his substance will become ‘like liquid Pitch’ that will ‘swell and burble, settle and Putrefy’. Faustus will see the ‘Woman’ turn all the colours of the rainbow – the so-called Peacock’s Tail – before finally turning white.

  6. Faustus must now transform this liquid substance into a solid state through congelation, which is ‘of soft things Induration of Colour White, and confixation of Spirits which fleeing are.’ This is probably what Geber called coagulation, which he defined as ‘the Reduction of a Thing Liquid to a Solid Substance, by Privation of the Humidity.’ The substance should become thick and of form, according to Rulandus, ‘like ice on water’. However, Ripley was nonchalant: ‘you need not much to care, For Elements will knit together soon.’26

  7. Faustus now has to start adding material back to his solid substance. Hortulanus in his Hunting of the Green Lion compared fermentation to a process of nourishing the alchemical child with drink, which is called cibation, or ‘feeding the matter’, but Ripley made this a separate and prior stage. Ripley also defines this process as ‘feeding of our dry matter’, adding ‘With milk and meat, which moderately you do’. Alternately feeding it and letting it want, Faustus will observe dark ‘leprosies’ grow and diminish on his substance until it returns to a white waxy form that is ‘Most like in figure to leaves of the hawthorn tree’, and called ‘Magnesia’ and ‘our White Sulphur without combustibility’ by Ripley.