Faustus: The Life and Times of a Renaissance Magician

by Leo Ruickbie

  8. Another forty days of temperate heat are required for sublimation. Again colour changes are to be expected, this time of black and brown. With care and attention Faustus will see that ‘the soul begins to come out, From his own veins, for all that is subtle, Will with the spirit ascend without doubt’ and ‘in the air our child must thus be born’. Faustus should then bring this soul back into its body and repeat seven times until his substance turns ‘whiter than snow’.

  9. Ripley warned that ‘True Fermentation few workers understand’. Faustus must putrefy his substance, utterly destroying its former qualities, before fermenting proper. Ripley is vague on how this should be done, perhaps suggesting that more sulphur and mercury should be added to again produce a waxy substance. The mass should be ‘fermented’ according to this procedure three times with the added provision that ‘you must ferment your gold with gold’. Faustus will observe the colours green, red and white again until he produces a fragrant smelling oil: ‘Which heals all diseases in man’.

  10. Faustus must now proceed to another form of sublimation called exaltation, which Ripley explains as if Jesus were speaking: ‘If I exalted be, then shall I draw all things unto me’. The Woman and Man are now buried and afterwards ‘revived by the Spirits of Life’ and ‘up to Heaven they must Exalted be, there to be in Body and Soul glorified’. They ascend in ‘clouds of clearness uniting together with Angels’. They then ‘draw as thou shalt see, all other Bodies to there [sic] own dignity’. It seems that vaporisation and condensation are meant, although Ripley talks of ‘loosening’ and more ‘putrefying’, ‘subliming’ and ‘calcining’. Faustus’s strange substance is now more precious than gold, according to Ripley.

  11. The next stage is multiplication where, by repeated fermentation, cibation and the addition of more mercury, Faustus must increase his substance ‘in Colour, in Odour, in Virtue, and also in Quantity’. In his glass vessel Faustus, if successful, will see the fabled Tree of Hermes begin to grow. Faustus’s fire must never go out and by continual feeding with mercury he shall have ‘more than you need to spend’. Ripley adds a moral lesson, calling upon the alchemist to ‘dispose you virtuously, helping the poor at need’, which suggests that at this stage in the process the transformation into gold has already been achieved, but Faustus is not finished yet.

  12. Finally, Faustus is ready for projection, the transmutation of base metals by use of the substance he has produced. He is instructed to take his ‘medicine’ and ‘cast’ it on metals that have been cleansed to prevent the result from fading and becoming ‘brittle, blue and black’. Faustus will now find out if all of his long labours have paid off: ‘In Projection it shall be proved if our practice be profitable.’

  We can picture Entenfuß rushing across the little garden at the back of the Herrenhaus or climbing the stairs within the monastery to enquire ‘is it ready yet?’, whilst Faustus in his tower or secret chamber, sweating from the heat of the athanor, calls back ‘not yet’ or ‘more charcoal’, until the fateful day of projection arrives, if it ever does.

  Today the opinion is that it could never have worked and the testimonies of those who swore that it did are dismissed as the ramblings of fools or cheats. If we take this view, then it seems incredible that alchemy was practiced so determinedly for so many hundreds of years. Many people firmly believed that the promises of alchemy were attainable, but if it was a question of faith alone, then we would be more advised to think of alchemy as a religion rather than a proto-science. What of Ripley and all the others? Are we to dismiss them as deluded believers in a false faith? Was Faustus entirely without hope of success?

  The Transmutation

  The answer is that alchemy worked. It worked in a way that would not stand up to today’s higher standards of assaying and greater chemical knowledge, but, to all sixteenth-century intents and purposes, it worked.

  Perhaps as early as the age of the Pharaohs – the word ‘alchemy’ is sometimes thought to derive from the Arabic for Egypt – the ancient Egyptians had discovered a technique for doubling gold called diplosis, although the best evidence only survives in Leyden Papyrus X, a Graeco-Egyptian recipe of the third or fourth century CE. To ‘double’ gold one is instructed to heat a mixture of two parts gold to one part silver and one part copper, and, indeed, a gold alloy is produced that appears to be double the amount of gold one had before. The Egyptians believed that the gold used in the operation acted as a seed that once sown in the silver and copper, grew, consuming them as it did so. Using copper alone gives the result a reddish tint; silver a light greyish one; combined the result was hardly discernable. This process makes sense of Ripley’s instructions to ‘ferment your gold with gold’ and ‘mingle gold with gold’.

  The result, if it looked like gold, was generally thought to be gold. The problem for alchemy and society generally was that it was unclear what gold actually was. The tests for gold purity were rudimentary at best. In cases where an alloy had been produced it was thus difficult to establish that it was what we would consider an alloy and not pure gold itself. The principal test used was the hard, black stone called a touchstone. Scraping a piece of gold across it left a streak of metal and, depending on the brightness of the streak, an experienced eye could estimate how much gold was in the sample, usually by comparing it to samples of established quality. Pure gold left a bright yellow streak, whilst iron pyrites, so-called ‘Fool’s Gold’, left a green-black streak. However, the touchstone was not a precise test and could not determine whether the gold was only a coating on a metal of lesser value.

  The Mesopotamians had discovered a method for purifying gold as early as 1500 BCE. Called ‘cuppellation’, this involved melting impure gold in a ceramic cup, the ‘cuppel’. Impurities were absorbed by the ceramic, leaving a button of pure gold. A misunderstanding of this process led later alchemists to believe that they had produced gold. If one takes a piece of lead and melts it in a cuppel a small amount of gold does appear to be produced. As we know now, most lead ore contains traces of gold or silver and so melting enough of it in the cuppel would eventually leave a residue of precious metal.

  Dyeing or tinting is hinted at by Ripley’s reference to ‘your tincture’, a tincture being a colouring or staining liquid thought to possess the power to transmute instantly. In the Middle Ages a process of making ‘golden tin’ was known that involved applying a yellow lacquer made from saffron called doratura to ordinary tin. Paracelsus was aware of such techniques and claimed to have used them.

  A story told about Paracelsus relates how he changed a woman’s kitchen fork into ‘solid gold’ by smearing a ‘yellow ointment’ on it. This miraculous transformation was obviously a tinting, but it is recounted as if gold was really produced. Change in colour alone could be seen as an actual transformation, although most alchemists, such as Paracelsus and before him Albertus Magnus, did distinguish a difference in quality between ‘chemical gold’ or ‘our gold’ and its natural cousin ‘vulgar gold’, but all of them still considered the result to be gold and goldsmiths were prepared to pay a high price for the manufactured metal.27

  The probability is that by using diplosis, cuppellation or dyeing Faustus could have produced something that looked like gold and, to the sixteenth-century eye, was gold. He would have needed it. By the end of the process, Faustus would have spent almost two years on the operation and a good deal of Entenfuß’s (or Ulrich’s) money. The athanor and still would not have been cheap and a store of crucibles and glass vessels, easily broken, was required. A good deal of expensive sulphur and mercury, sometimes antimony as recommended by Basilius Valentinus, even gold, were required.

  We have not even begun to think of the cost of keeping the athanor burning all that time. Writing in 1557, Thomas Charnock noted that he spent over £3 a week on keeping his fire going and that in the nine months of his experiment this cost him over £100. Working on the basis of a sixteen-to-one depreciation,28 £100 in 1557 would be equal to about £7,000 today. Using the s
ame calculations we would expect Faustus to have needed almost £20,000 to keep his athanor burning for up to 24 months. For most of its working life the monastery at Maulbronn only had one heated room, the calefactory – for all the sweat of his brow, Faustus would have been envied his athanor in the cold months.

  Then there were the assistants’ wages, after all the alchemist must sleep and someone would be needed to tend the athanor. The Bristol alchemist Thomas Norton wrote in his The Ordinall of Alchimy of 1477 that eight assistants were desirable, but at a pinch one could make do with four. The number was necessary, as he explains, because ‘one halfe of them must werke/ While the other Sleepeth or goeth to Kerke.’29 Add to this his board and lodging (and probably that of any assistants, although he might have made use of the free labour of the monks), and we begin to see that having one’s own alchemist was a pastime for the wealthy. Yet many monasteries produced a surplus and what was another shovel full of charcoal to a self-sufficient and no doubt profitable concern like Maulbronn?

  It was too much. Whether it was the cost alone or the nature of the operation, or something else entirely – we can never exclude that – by 1518 the course of events was about to take a drastic swerve. Entenfuß was dismissed from his post. We have yet to find a satisfactory reason why this was so. A register of past abbots drawn up in the eighteenth century has the words ‘sancta simplicitas’ (‘holy fool’) against Entenfuß’s name, opening up a wide vista of error, but Entenfuß’s modern successor at Maulbronn was inclined to believe that financial profligacy was the chief cause. Entenfuß was not the only one to leave. In 1440 130 monks and lay brothers were counted in the monastery, but by 1530 they had dwindled to only 24. The work on the Herrenhaus, completed in 1517, was the last ecclesiastical building project in the monastery. It looks as though Entenfuß might just have bankrupted Maulbronn, but more for his lavish apartments than for the strange company he kept.

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  The Court Magician (1519–1522)

  After Maulbronn the trail runs cold. A smattering of legends and historically datable incidents put Faustus in the company of nobles, high-ranking clergy and even the Emperor himself in the role of something like a court magician. He appears in Heilbronn, in Boxberg, in Frankfurt, in Bamberg and in Innsbruck, wandering the roads of the Empire again in search of fame and fortune. The sightings are often mere hearsay. Rumours were rife and out of such fertilizer legends grow easily.

  The Violet Garden

  A story passed by word of mouth tells of Faustus in Heilbronn and nearby Boxberg castle. There is no date for this story, but Heilbronn is relatively close to Maulbronn, indeed could even be a misinterpretation of the latter, which leads us to place this story next to the events of Maulbronn.

  Boxberg lies some sixty kilometres to the north of Heilbronn by modern roads and roughly double that distance away from Maulbronn. A castle was raised sometime in the twelfth century and by the thirteenth it is likely that the surrounding settlement already had town and market rights. Towards the end of the thirteenth century the town and castle came under the control of the Knights of St John from Wölchingen and held the status of a commandery. After a century the Knights sold it to the noble von Rosenberg family. Due to a cavalier regard for the law, the von Rosenbergs became something of a problem to their neighbours during the fifteenth century. In 1470 the Electoral Palatinate (Kurpfalz), Electoral Mainz (Kurmainz) and the High Chapter (Hochstift) of Würzburg allied themselves against the predatory family and destroyed their castles, including Boxberg. The von Rosenbergs eventually got Boxberg back and repaired it, but the family was set upon its career. In 1523 the Swabian League marched against the outlawed Melchior von Rosenberg and destroyed Boxberg castle for a second time and the Electoral Palatinate took possession of it. It was not until after Faustus’s death that Albrecht von Rosenberg brought Boxberg back into his family’s hands in 1548. It was finally sold to the Electoral Palatinate in 1561, which retained possession until the early nineteenth century. A seventeenth-century map shows a fairly imposing castle sitting on a hill above a walled town.1

  If Faustus ever did visit Boxberg castle, then before 1523 he would have been the guest of the family von Rosenberg, perhaps of Melchior himself. After that date he may well have been enjoying the hospitality of the Elector Palatine, perhaps arranged through Virdung. Writing in 1940, Karl Hofmann dated the events of his poem ‘Dr. Faust auf Burg Boxberg’ to 1523. Unfortunately he gave no reason, but the destruction of the castle provides good grounds to suppose that Faustus must have visited before 1523.

  The story, first published by Franz Joseph Mone in 1838, presents Faustus as a frequent visitor to the castle. On one occasion, whilst walking with the lords and ladies of the manor on a cold winter’s day, he chivalrously leapt to the ladies’ defence when they complained of the frost and conjured up a summer’s day complete with fruiting trees and blossoming flowers. The ladies delighted in stepping through the masses of violets, but Faustus could not resist a practical joke. He caused ripe grapes to appear on the vine and invited his companions to reach out and put their knives to the purple bunches, ready to cut them on his command. When all were holding sharp blades to grapes he revealed that they were in fact holding their knives to each others’ noses, a story we encountered earlier in Erfurt. The part of the garden where this took place has ever since been called ‘the violet garden’.

  That was not the end of his adventures in Boxberg. Another story recorded in 1838 told of Faustus and his ‘Ghost Carriage’. In a rush to get from Boxberg castle to a banquet in Heilbronn before the clock struck midnight, Faustus hitched his carriage to four black horses and drove like the wind. Even so, he was not going to cover the sixty kilometres in the fifteen minutes he had left without some magical intervention. It is said that a man working in a field saw him speeding past with horned spirits furiously paving the way before him, whilst others lifted the slabs after him.

  The demonic road-builders are an ingenious explanation to account for such a fast journey over heavily-rutted, slow-going roads. Magical journeys covering great distances in an impossibly short duration of time are, like the magical deceptions, another mainstay of the Faustian legends. A variation of the legend adds that some of the stones remained behind after the journey as an eternal reminder that evil spirits had been at work there. The story is a familiar type of folk explanation for unusual features in the landscape.

  A final legend about Faustus and Boxberg adds another reason to place this location before Frankfurt and legends connected with Faustus’s supposed visit there. According to this legend recorded by Hofmann in 1940, Faustus was travelling with a party of merchants en route to the Frankfurt Fair. Faustus’s connection with the castle is forgotten (or not yet established) and it is through one of the merchants being a cousin to the castellan that the party was invited to enter Boxberg. They sat down to a feast and became so engrossed in the meal that they scarcely took any notice of the heavy rain that had started falling. When the time of their departure arrived – no doubt realising that the roads would now be all but impassable – Faustus leant out of the window, telling his companions that he intended to pull a rainbow towards them. Standing at the window with his hands apparently full of prismatic light, Faustus offered the rainbow as a form of transport to the others, magnanimously waiving any fee. Unsurprisingly, no one was keen to put their faith in the insubstantial beams to carry them the 146 kilometres to Frankfurt. Faustus let go of the rainbow and it returned to its former place in the heavens, explaining that he did not want to travel alone. And so the party set out on foot for faraway Frankfurt.

  Trouble in Frankfurt (1519)

  As plague ravaged France, Erasmus wrote enthusiastically of an impending Golden Age. There were few signs of it: war, witchcraft and disease were riding high. In 1518 von Sickingen was on the warpath, conquering the town of Gernsheim and besieging Darmstadt, and forcing the inexperienced Philipp I (1504–1567), Landgrave of Hesse, to pay heavy compensation. A new
book out of Antwerp told the story of Mary of Nijmegen, or Nemmegen, concerning what is often seen now as a type of female Faustus. She makes a pact with the Devil but is saved by confessing her sins to the Pope. It was a conventional tale of wrong-doing and repentance. Closer to home there were executions for witchcraft in Waldsee, west of Heidelberg. Hope, if there was any, lay in the election of a new emperor.

  When Maximilian I died in 1519, his failure to force through the appointment of Charles V as his successor left the field wide open. The office of Emperor was an elected one and Charles was not the only contender. Henry VIII, King of England, François I, King of France, Ludwig II, King of Hungary and Bohemia, and two or three of the Electors themselves were also in the running. It was known that Pope Leo X did not favour Charles and, despite all his titles, Charles could project no military force into Germany. The Electors looked divided in their sympathies, after all, three of them were archbishops whose ultimate interests lay with the Holy See. There was everything to play for.

  The day of reckoning would take place in Frankfurt on 28 June 1519. A convocation of electors and their extensive retinues would mean an influx of wealthy nobles and courtiers – rich pickings that would have drawn many from far and wide. Faustus would have found his services in demand: divinations were wanted, miracles sought.