Faustus: The Life and Times of a Renaissance Magician

by Leo Ruickbie

  Flying over the market, the cloak-riders would have been drawn by the blazing torches and sounds of merriment coming from the Neuveste, built in 1385 on the site of today’s Residenz. We might suppose that Ernst put aside the affairs of the Church to attend the ceremony and the pushy Ludwig was surely not one to be left out as Wilhelm and Marie were wed. When they arrived, Faustus and his company were given a warm, if somewhat perplexed welcome on account of their silence.

  Of course, it could not have been the ‘good old Duke’ who greeted them, as P.F. had it, but the twenty-nine year-old Wilhelm.14 A group portrait of Wilhelm and his family from 1534 shows a man in his early forties. A broad black hat sits rakishly on a cushion of neatly trimmed hair. He stares purposefully at nothing in particular somewhere over the viewer’s right shoulder. His wife looks pale and somewhat full in the face. Dull eyes stare out above thin, pursed lips. In contrast to her bland expression, her clothes gleam with gold thread. There is sumptuousness in this portrait, but the display of wealth is balanced by a tone of seriousness and restraint.

  Faustus, with a wary eye out for possible trouble, advised his companions: ‘if anything happen otherwise then well, when I say, sit up, then fall you all on the cloak.’ His earlier warning proved in vain and the jaunt was cut short by the politeness of one of the young noblemen who, being given a bowl of water to wash his hands, asked his friend to wash first. Faustus cried ‘sit up’ and the noblemen leapt onto the cloak, but as it took to the air, the one who had spoken fell off and ‘was taken and laid in Prison’.15

  The prisoner was interrogated. Who was he? Who were the others who had vanished so mysteriously? But he kept his mouth shut and the Duke ordered that the recalcitrant guest be racked the next day. Facing the slow and excruciatingly painful dislocation of his limbs, the prisoner reasoned that ‘I shall be constrained by force to tell more than willingly I would do.’16 Faustus had not abandoned him and before daybreak he reappeared, throwing the guards into a heavy sleep and springing the locks with his magic, perhaps with a charm like the ‘Key of Pluto’ from Codex 849.

  It was not foolish young students, however high-born, who needed his help, but his old patron von Sickingen. In August 1522 he had led around 8,000 men against Richard Greiffenklau von Vollrads (1467–1531), Archbishop of Trier, but finding himself deprived of the reinforcements he expected was compelled to retreat on the Ebernburg, assaulting some of the Archbishop’s possessions on the way. Alarmed by his boldness, the Reichsregiment placed von Sickingen under the Imperial ban. Pamphlets appeared decrying that he was in league with the Devil – one even included a supposed letter from von Sickingen to Satan. Von Sickingen sent the Elector Palatine a letter of feud and conducted a series of raids against Otterbach, Lützelstein and Kaiserslautern. It was a knight’s way of giving the Reichsregiment two fingers.

  With the edges of the Christian world falling before the Ottomans, the mighty of the Holy Roman Empire were at each others’ throats. The rulers of Trier, Hesse and the Palatinate mobilised against von Sickingen. Having secured help from the Swabian League, they cornered him at Burg Nanstein in Landstuhl with a combined army of 3,000 men. Shortly after the siege began, von Sickingen was mortally wounded by falling masonry during a bombardment and was forced to capitulate. He died the next day on 7 May 1523. Faustus had lost another powerful patron, perhaps also a friend.

  12

  The Planets Collide (1523–1525)

  Contrary to usual opinion, the astrologers proclaimed that the solar eclipse of 23 August 1523 would be beneficial. The benevolent Jupiter would dominate the maleficent Saturn and all would be well. It was only to be the calm before the storm.

  In 1523 a new Pope was in Rome: on 18 November Giulio di Giuliano de’ Medici (1478–1534), a Knight of Rhodes and Grand Prior of Capua, took the name Clement VII and became the second of the Medici popes. In one of his most characteristic portraits by Sebastiano del Piombo we see a fleshy face, the heavy lidded eyes of a libertine, a hint of a sneer playing upon his lips and a sidelong glance that conveys the deviousness for which he would long be remembered.

  Inspired by the mass torture and execution of alleged witches conducted by the Inquisitor of Bologna, Pico della Mirandola gave his full support to the Christian atrocities. In his book Strix he recounted endless details of the horrors witches supposedly indulged in, especially revelling in reciting details of sexual intercourse with incubi and succubi. At the same time, Bartolommeo de Spina, similarly inspired by some recent witch-burning in Ferrara, wrote his Quaestio de Strigibus refuting those who contended that the witches’ sabbat was an illusion. De Spina argued that the high number of people burned for witchcraft in the diocese of Como alone was proof that witchcraft existed.

  Grimoire

  In 1523 a little book of magic making great claims for itself was supposedly published in Rome. Like many others this book was attributed to the Supreme Pontiff himself. The Enchiridion of Pope Leo III was not a book of ceremonial magic in the grand tradition, but rather a catalogue of charms and an extended magical devotion called ‘The Seven Mysterious Orisons’. The Enchiridion was said to have been presented by Pope Leo III to Charlemagne after his coronation in Rome – an unlikely event. Although it has attracted the reputation of black magic and been condemned as such, the Enchiridion is relatively innocent.

  There was, however, a more sulphurous book on the market. Attributed to Faustus, the Doctor Johannis Fausti Manual-Höllenzwang was reputed to have been printed in Wittenberg in 1524. A black bird adorns the cover and, like the Black Raven purported to have come out of Lyon in 1469, the Manual-Höllenzwang begins with a stern warning:

  Without a circle read me not out loud,

  For then I spell great danger.1

  Butler believed the book to be the original Harrowing of Hell – thus actually coming before the Black Raven with its unfeasibly early date of publication. However, the date of 1524 is not to be trusted either. It would appear to have been produced after the name of Faustus was irrevocably connected to the idea of the pact in the last half of the century, and yet the naming of Faustus’s familiar as Aziel instead of Mephistopheles and that the book actually leaves out Mephistopheles altogether, points to the sixteenth century and especially before Mephistopheles exclusively filled the role of familiar. It is, however, the use of the name ‘Johannis’ instead of Georgius that suggests most strongly that this is not an original work. As with all these texts, we can never trust the place and date of publication given to them.

  In the Sign of Pisces

  Whether Faustus really was working on his Manual-Höllenzwang or not, we can be sure that one event had not escaped his notice. The conjunction of seven planets in Pisces predicted for February 1524 was the source of almost universal alarm and an astrologer of Faustus’s fame could not have avoided the subject. Terrible things were expected. It was believed that the conjunction of Saturn and Jupiter in Scorpio in 1484 had led to the dreadful scourge of syphilis. That such a great conjunction was taking place in the sign of the fish, Pisces, was the cause for many to predict widespread flooding of biblical proportions.

  As early as 1499, Johannes Stöffler and Jacob Pflaum had foretold terrible catastrophes for 1524 in their Almanach nova, warning of:

  Certain changes and transformations for the whole world … changes such as we have hardly heard of for centuries before our time, either from historians, or from our elders.2

  Stöffler and Pflaum’s prediction went through successive editions, but it was couched in general terms and largely restricted to academic circles. It was instead the famous Italian astrologer Luca Gaurico (1476–1558) who really put the cat among the pigeons with a publication sent to the Reichstag at Trier in 1512. Gaurico drew a much more vivid picture of looming disaster, being the first to talk explicitly of a flood caused by the conjunction in his Prognosticon ab incarnationis. Alarmed, Ludwig V commanded Stöffler and Virdung to investigate, whilst Leonardo da Vinci was inspired to paint psychedelic swirls of
watery chaos.

  Faustus may have discussed the subject with Virdung back in Heidelberg all those years ago – certainly Virdung had written about the matter in 1520 whilst discussing the signs over Vienna. He returned more fully to the subject in his Practica of 1521. Virdung believed that the effects of the conjunction would be felt as early as 1523 with an intemperate amount of water destroying the fruits of the earth and ships at sea in 1524. He was not of the Noah camp, however, and settled for a partial deluge with long-lasting effects. Virdung deduced that the repercussions of the conjunction would last for forty years with a timed series of after-effects being felt at precisely calculated intervals until 1563.

  One of the more influential books at the time was the Mirabilis Liber sometimes ascribed to Johannes Lichtenberger (1440–1503), astrologer to the Emperor Friedrich III, but it was a later work incorporating much of Lichtenberger’s earlier Prognosticatio of 1488, as well as extracts from Savonarola’s Compendium revelationum of 1495. Lichtenberger’s Prognosticatio was a major success: thirty-two editions and some 10,000 copies appeared in the years to 1530. First published in 1522, the Mirabilis Liber was swiftly reprinted by Jehan Besson of Lyon in 1523 (although it bears the date 1524) and many more editions followed. Disaster was a common theme. A chapter described as ‘Another Prophecy from Jean de Vatiguerro’, who flourished in the fourteenth century, predicted that ‘Many towns and strong military posts on the Po, the Tiber, the Rhône, the Rhine and the Loire shall be razed by extraordinary floods and earthquakes.’

  On the cover of Leonhard Reynmann’s astrological Practica called On the Great and Manifold Conjunction of the Planets (1523) an illustration shows the planets gathered in the giant figure of a fish to denote Pisces as a great stream of water descends upon the earth where houses, a church and dead bodies bob upon the waves. Even those of a more sober temperament predicted unusual quantities of rain and snow. Only a few stood against the general opinion. As early as 1519 Pico della Mirandola’s nephew Agostino Nifo had written On the False Prognostication of a Deluge, arguing that the eclipse of 1523 would have a palliative effect on the coming conjunction. Nifo hoped that his counter-prediction would break the stranglehold of terror. He hoped in vain. Was Faustus a doom-monger or a moderate? Whatever prognostications he made, they have gone unremembered.

  The prophets had had twenty-five years to spread their message of doom and the people just as long to worry about it. The invention of printing made it possible to carry this message of impending catastrophe from one end of Europe to the other with unprecedented speed. As many as sixty different authors produced 160 pamphlets during the peak publishing years from 1519 to 1523, putting an estimated 160,000 copies into circulation.3

  According to that famous nineteenth-century chronicler of ‘popular delusions’ Charles Mackay, London in the sixteenth century ‘swarmed … with fortune-tellers and astrologers, who were consulted daily by people of every class in society on the secrets of futurity.’4 As early as June 1523 a consensus had been reached amongst these diviners that 1 February 1524 would see the muddy and pestilential River Thames gradually overflow its banks and drown the entire city, washing away 10,000 houses in the process. If that was the case, then they were using foreign literature to make their point: no English astrological writing was produced on this subject.5 Nonetheless, the prediction caused widespread panic, growing as the appointed time drew nearer, and the trickle of families who packed up their belongings and retreated to Kent and Essex swelled into a steady torrent. By the beginning of 1524 the exodus was reaching biblical proportions.

  By mid-month as many as 20,000 people had fled London – in 1500 the city only had a population of around 40,000. Those with money relocated to the high ground of Highgate, Hampstead and Blackheath. Tented villages appeared from Waltham Abbey in the north to Croydon to the south of the river. At Harrow-on-the-Hill, the Prior of St Bartholomew’s in Smithfield, a man called Bolton whose wealth equalled his great credulity, built himself a fortress and provisioned it with enough for two months. He laid in a fleet of boats and a team of expert rowers on standby in case the rising waters threatened him in his lair. A week before the day of reckoning Bolton retreated into his fastness.

  The sun rose on 1 February to find curious crowds gathered along the banks of the Thames. As the prediction had specified a gradual rise in the waters, the bolder sort thought it safe to watch the beginnings of the disaster and still have time to make good an escape. They must have stood there for some time, watching the Thames flow by in its accustomed manner; slowly, as the sun climbed higher in the sky and the Thames stared back at them unperturbed, a sense of foolishness began to set in. Even as the sun set over the placid waters, people were still too afraid to go to sleep in case the deluge should catch them unawares and many stayed at their vigil until dawn. The next day they went back to their everyday lives. As panic gave way to embarrassment, then relief, rage followed. The whole caste of astrologers came close to a ducking in the Thames, but some quick thinking kept them dry. It was claimed that there had been an error in their calculations: the flood was due in 1624.

  Similar scenes must have been played out across Europe. The Mirabilis Liber had singled out Paris for ‘despoliation and devastation’. In certain parts of Italy deforestation had already caused severe flooding in past years and the promise of more to come was a very real threat. The message was carried throughout the land by apocalyptic preachers, wandering astrologers and cantastorie (street-singers), and panic was born in every heart. Penitential processions and civic rituals took place to ward off the coming catastrophe. The rich fled to the high ground just as they had tried to escape the plague in Giovanni Boccaccio’s day, whilst others started building arks. The rich were no different in Germany and also fled to the mountains. Johannes Carion had considered the problem as early as 1521 and advised his employer Prince-Elector Joachim I von Brandenburg to seek the high-ground of the Kreuzberg before the waters inundated them. People began selling off their possessions and the fields went untilled. Even Luther was talking about it, managing to turn a sermon on circumcision into a discussion about astrology and omens.

  Here, too, the weather stayed fine. The forewarned disaster had not struck, but at the end of the year the astrologers were able to weigh their predictions against their observations. The meteorological record kept daily by an astrologer in Bologna indicated that 1524 had indeed been a rainy year, but fell short of the tsunami that had been prophesied. Cardano later wrote smugly of his own opposition to the flood theory espoused by Stöffler, commenting that ‘the weather was perfectly calm’ and congratulating himself that, aged only twenty, he had predicted rightly.6

  As the year turned the corner, it was relief that flooded the populace. In Italy, the carnival-goers of 1525 delighted in making the flood the object of obscene humour. In Venice in particular, the public storytellers were causing the maidens to blush and the men to slap their thighs with their ribald tales. In retrospect it has been concluded that such antics had ‘an enormous negative effect on the figure of the astrologer’.7 The more accurate predictions of Nifo and Cardano did little to assuage the general ire directed against anyone bearing the name of ‘astrologer’, but astrology was far from over. They may have failed to predict a flood, but ‘certain changes and transformations’ were still to come and couched in such general terms could not fail to pass.

  A Land Full of Murder and Bloodshed

  There was more on the cover of Reynmann’s Practica than deluge. On a hill two men sound the muster on fife and drum. Below them a group of peasants armed with scythes, flails and pitchforks confront representatives of the Roman Church. Along with a depiction of heavy rainstorms, Johannes Carion’s pamphlet of 1521 showed a knight and a peasant putting a group of clergymen to the sword. Carion’s 1522 edition showed women and children meeting the same fate. On the front of Johann Copp’s 1523 Practica Teutsch siege cannon bombard a city. Still more of de Vatiguerro’s prophecies published in the Mirabi
lis Liber predicted that ‘stars shall collide with each other, and this shall be the sign for the destruction and massacre of nearly all mankind.’

  Pisces was a shark and the heavens would rain blood. Terrorised by the prophecies of doom, driven to desperation by two years of poor harvests, aggrieved anew by the old complaints of high taxes and social injustice, inspired by revolutionary religious teachings, and seizing the chance to settle old scores, the common people raised their banner of war, the Bundschuh.

  The Bundschuh was the rough rawhide footwear of the German lower classes and because of the striking contrast of this humble shoe to the noble spurred boot, it came to symbolise the popular rebellions that history has come to know as the Peasants’ War. It was also a play on words. The Bundschuh, common to all working men, implied their common bond, their Bund.

  ‘Nobleman, may a cow shit on you’ ran one of their slogans, but there was more to this than class conflict.8 It has been called the Peasants’ War, but it was an uprising of more than just peasants. Crippling taxes and political disenfranchisement were the common complaints of both poor artisans and peasants. Rising prices, the curse of the age, hurt everyone and even some of the middle classes and lower nobility joined the conspirators. Unemployed or disillusioned Landsknechte, many of whom came from peasant or working-class backgrounds, swelled their ranks. It was revolution.

  The sixteenth century is so often divided between Renaissance and Reformation, between the arts and religion, when at the heart of the Empire it was rebellion and divisiveness between the people that defined the age. This was an age when politics and religion were edges of the same sword, but it was not Luther who was leading this popular revolt, it was people like Hans the Piper. In 1476 crowds of up to 40,000 had turned out to listen to this young shepherd and musician tell them how the Madonna of Niklashausen had spoken to him. The message was one of revolutionary communism inspired by a religious vision and deeply moved those who heard it. It moved the priests deeply enough to denounce Hans’s visions as sent by the Devil. Hans called a huge army to his side, but he was arrested and his army outmanoeuvred by trickery. Luther came after, a late entry to a long-standing struggle, and one who preached against the peasants in favour of feudal obedience. He was not a revolutionary.