Faustus: The Life and Times of a Renaissance Magician

by Leo Ruickbie

  At Basel I had dinner with him in the great college and to the cook he gave various kinds of birds to roast. I am ignorant as to how they were obtained, or who gave them away, at this time there were none for sale. Furthermore, I had never seen them in our region. He led a dog and a horse, I believe them to have been demons, that were ready to follow him to the end. The dog sometimes assumed the likeness of a servant and carried the food, so I was told.8

  The action has moved further south into new territory, but there are familiar elements, like the magical banquet and the demon horse that remind us of Erfurt and Prague. The addition of the dog finds echo in stories circulating about Agrippa and later we find its role solidified in the fictions of Marlowe and Goethe. Melanchthon also told the story and linked it with the name of Agrippa, possibly for the first time: Faustus had a dog who was the Devil, just as Agrippa had a dog who was the Devil.

  Gast reveals a close association with the necromancer. He did not meet him in an inn like Mutianus, but actually dined with him in ‘the great college’ (collegio magno). The University of Basel had been founded in 1460 with a charter granted by Pope Pius II. The model was a familiar one: a faculty of arts leading to the faculties of law, medicine and theology. Paracelsus had been through these doors, stirring up trouble, so the university was used to controversial visitors.

  Then a city of around 10,000 inhabitants, bustling round the twin spires of the cathedral, Basel had become a centre for printing, pharmacy, Humanism and reform. Once a part of the Upper Rhenish Imperial Circle (Reichskreis), Basel had since allied itself with the Swiss Confederacy and broken away from Rome. Johannes Froben (1460-–1527) had set up his press here and had published the works of his sometime lodger Erasmus. When Paracelsus arrived in the 1520s he cured Froben of a troublesome leg complaint. Basel had embraced Zwinglism and Gast himself was a Protestant clergyman in the city. His reputation, however, rested principally on the popularity of his Sermones Convivales, a collection of anecdotes and tall tales.

  In the Faustbook, Faustus made a visit here as part of his whirlwind world tour, pausing just long enough to learn of an interesting legend. As usual, he took the time to visit ‘many rich Monuments’ and admired the brick wall and ‘great trench’ that surrounded it.9 However, the name struck him as unusual and he enquired of Mephistopheles its origins:

  His Spirit made answer and said, that before this City was founded, there used to be a Basiliscus, a kind of Serpent, this Serpent killed as many men, women, and children, as it took a sight of.10

  Of course there was a gallant knight on hand to do battle with the perilous beast. The knight surpassed his courage with cunning, having a suit of crystal fashioned for him that covered him entirely. Over this he wore a black mantle and set out to find the monster. Scenting another easy victim, the basilisk crept out of its lair to meet him. With the creature rearing up before him, the knight pulled off the mantle. The basilisk had not even time to utter a cry at its undoing and shattered into a thousand pieces.11

  Fabulous tales were no anomaly in Basel. Towards the end of the 1530s Basel society was treated to the pagan revelations of a curious work by the Swiss scholar Gilg (or Aegidius) Tschudi (1505–1572). His Die uralt warhafftig Alpisch Rhetia published in Basel in 1538 detailed what he described as pagan fertility customs still being performed in the Swiss Alps. Tschudi told of yearly rituals in which groups of masked men called Stopfer (‘Piercers’) journeyed from village to village, carrying huge clubs and leaping dramatically into the air to collide violently with one another. The Reformer Durich Chiampel later added his own recollections of similar rites held to ensure the fertility of the harvest. What Tschudi and Chiampel dismissed as pagan superstition and the worst sort of nonsense was then still a living tradition in the remote mountains. Faustus and the Stopfer were worlds apart – high magic and folk custom were never comfortable bed-fellows – but the extermination of these folk practices by Protestant and Catholic priests echoes the transfiguration of Faustus from magus to diabolist. History was being rewritten and not by sympathetic hands. As they sat together in the refectory of ‘the great college’ perhaps Gast and Faustus discussed Tschudi’s work or the recent witch trials.

  Some years earlier in Pfeffingen, a township within the demesne of the Bishopric of Basel, three women had been tried for witchcraft. The trial records state that ‘without being subjected to duress or to torture’ Agnes Callate, Ita Lichtermutt and Dilge Glaserin had all confessed to having been seduced by demonic ravens who granted them whatever they wished to eat and became their lovers.12 The abundance of produce – cherries, birds and wine – delivered by the ravens is uncannily similar in effect to the fertility of the land ensured by the leaping Stopfer. At a distance, twice removed, we think of Faustus’s own magical banquets and out of season produce, faint echoes perhaps of similar fertility rites.

  Such an interpretation would not be against Renaissance thinking. In 1561 Conrad Gesner (1516–1565), the Swiss teacher, physician and scholar, wrote to his friend, Emperor Ferdinand I’s ‘Physician in Ordinary’, Johannes Crato von Kraftheim, about a celebrated wandering scholar called Faustus. Gesner had some interesting ideas on the origins of the ‘prohibited arts’ that people like Paracelsus and Faustus practised. ‘I suspect indeed’ he said ‘that they derive from the Druids who among the ancient Celts were for some years taught by demons in underground places. This has been practiced at Salamanca in Spain down to our day.’13 Known as the ‘Swiss Pliny’, Gesner’s scholarly output was enormous, covering the fields of zoology, botany, philology, medicine and the Classics. His most popular work was a treatise on the ‘secret remedies’ of alchemists and empirics, and he had been in Basel in 1537 about the time Faustus may have been there.

  At that time Basel was the home of another Renaissance man, the unparalleled Erasmus. Now past his prime, aged and in poor health, Erasmus was glad to accept the offer of Mary of the Netherlands of a living in Brabant. As he packed his bags and made ready for the journey his good fortune was interrupted by a severe case of dysentery. He did not recover and died soon after. Against the usual custom he did not receive the last sacraments. He was buried with great ceremony in Basel cathedral in 1536. Anyone in the town or with connections to it could not have been unaware of the passing of this giant of the Renaissance.

  Erasmus had kept Agrippa at arm’s length, despite Agrippa’s overtures towards him, and it is unlikely that he would have received Faustus. But Basel was a small town and local gossip was the continuous news broadcasting of the day. Gast’s circle probably included the likes of Sebastian Münster (1488–1552), Hebraist and geographer, Ottomarus Luscinius (Otmar Nachtgall, c.1478–1537), Humanist, musician and theologian, and the priest and dramatist Valentin Boltz (d.1560). Whilst Boltz did not arrive in Basel until after Faustus’s time in 1546, Faustus may well have met the others. These were convivial times and it is unlikely that Gast dined alone with Faustus in the university. However much he may have enjoyed Faustus’s stories, Gast ended his account on a familiar and less than sympathetic note: ‘God preserve us lest we become slaves of the Devil.’14

  Slaves of the Devil (1536)

  In 1536 Joachim Camerarius was in Tübingen, having been called there to reform the university, but his mind was much preoccupied with other matters. As we saw, he had been determined to make a positive prediction for the outcome of Philipp von Hutten’s expedition to the New World. Part of the reason for that could have been competition from a rival. He wrote defensively to Daniel Stibar warning him about other astrologers and trying desperately to bias him against them:

  Do not think that one should accept any divinations of astrologers or haruspices with greater faith than those of men who have discovered the essence of prophecy, not steeped in some kind of superstition, but endowed with a certain instinct and divine power.15

  In another letter to Stibar, written three months later, he revealed the target of his attack.

  When the moon stood in Pisces in oppo
sition to Mars, on the 4th of August, I endured a very difficult night. I owe to your friend Faustus the pleasure of discussing these affairs with you. I wish he had taught you something of this sort rather than puffed you up with the wind of silly superstition or held you in suspense with I know not what prestidigitator’s tricks. But what does he tell us, pray? For I know that you have questioned him diligently about all things. Is the Emperor victorious? That is the way you should go about it.16

  So, Camerarius had heard of Faustus. Philipp’s letter to Moritz von Hutten shows that he had consulted Faustus on the subject of his expedition and Camerarius was clearly unhappy about the intrusion of a competitor. Much has been made of ‘your friend’ (tuus) with some suggesting that a particularly close relationship existed between Faustus and Stibar. The reference to juggler’s or conjuror’s tricks was a common form of abuse. Prince-Bishop Franz von Waldeck used the same words when writing about the Anabaptists to the town-council of Warendorf in 1534.17

  Dismissing Faustus’s work as ‘silly superstition’, Camerarius sought to defend and exalt himself by reference to his own higher abilities, what he called ‘a certain instinct and divine power’. Camerarius supplemented his astrology with the ancient arts of the sortes Homericae and sortes Virgilinae, a method of bibliomancy involving the works of Homer and Virgil. The diviner would open a suitable text such as the Iliad at random and interpret the passage he alighted on as having special bearing upon the question at hand. To answer his own question posed to Stibar, ‘Is the Emperor victorious?’, Camerarius reported that the sortes drawn from Homer were favourable: ‘His honour is from Zeus, and Zeus Allwise cares for him.’18 He reminded Stibar of the sortes he had cast for Charles V years before when he was still a boy. This time he had opened Virgil’s Aeneid and read: ‘Because of his arrival even now the Caspian kingdoms and the Scythian land dread the divine oracles, and the mouths of the sevenfold Nile are alarmed.’19

  Camerarius’s concern about the exploits of the Emperor must have been widely shared. Old enemies had unfurled their banners of war and the Empire again found itself ringed with naked steel. In the autumn of 1534 Charles V laid out his plans for a campaign in North Africa, at the same time sending out emissaries to sue for peace with France. But François I was intent on causing mischief. His own emissary, de la Forêt, was with the corsair Barbarossa (c.1478–1546) in Algiers and then at the Ottoman Court, looking for cash and allies in the war against the Empire. Barbarossa had been successfully raiding the Italian coast and had captured Tunis from Mulay Hassan, an ally of the Spanish, proving himself an irksome thorn in Europe’s side. When another of Charles’s emissaries met François in the spring of 1535, he found the French king unresponsive, but uncovered a conspiracy involving several of the German princes. Venice meanwhile was entreating Suleiman to abandon his campaign in Mesopotamia and counter Charles in the Mediterranean.

  On 30 May 1535 Charles sailed out of Barcelona to be joined by the fleets of Andrea Doria (Genoa), the Knights of St John (Malta), Portugal, Sicily and the Italian States to lead a combined force of over 400 ships towards Tunis. By August he had conquered the city and whipped Barbarossa back to his Algiers lair, but news may not yet have reached Camerarius. After his victory Charles had taken his forces to Italy, over-wintering in Naples and spending Easter of 1536 in Rome.

  Italy at that time was in the grip of several witchcraft panics. As Reginald Scot told the story, events unfolded at Cassalis in Salassia (possibly modern Casali near Firenze). A gang of witches was believed to be behind a resurgence of plague in the district. Similar cases emerged at Genoa and Milan amidst devastating plague outbreaks that continued into the seventeenth century. In the fourteenth century in France and elsewhere, lepers had been accused of the same crime and exterminated en masse. The Jews were blamed for inciting them and behind the Jews the conspiracy theorists saw the Muslims. Little had changed. Acting on Luther’s advice, the Elector of Saxony, then Johann Friedrich I, expelled the Jews from his domain in 1536. Mixing misfortune, minorities and ignorance was like mixing saltpetre, charcoal and sulphur. Sociologically, such panics are often linked with wider social crises.

  In Rome, Charles V warned Pope Paul III that if François I continued to reject his peaceful overtures then it must come to a final battle that could only end in the Turk’s conquest of Europe. In February 1536 the treacherous François had allied himself with Suleiman. In March he invaded Savoy and by early April held Turin. Charles responded by challenging François to single combat. Being far from a model of chivalry, François declined. Abandoning plans to besiege Algiers (and ultimately Constantinople), Charles found himself leading an army of between 50,000 and 60,000 men into Provence, up to the very gates of Marseilles.

  Had Camerarius been right? To an extent Charles’s campaign was successful, particularly against the Ottoman’s North African allies, but having taken Aix-en-Provence, he found himself stalemated by Montmorency. The French commander had split his army between the heavily fortified towns of Avignon and Valence, and refused to come out, leaving to the invader a systematically devastated countryside. Charles hesitated before Marseilles to the south and Arles to the west, and on 13 September decided to turn back. The mouth of the Golfe du Lion might have been alarmed, but Camerarius was wrong. The Emperor was not victorious. By December he had sailed back to Barcelona – he had already considered abdicating.

  In his correspondence with Stibar, Camerarius was simply blowing his own trumpet and crying down Faustus at the same time. His towering conceit is reminiscent of Trithemius and Mutianus before him. However, his letter does reveal something of how the troubles of the period were discussed in intellectual circles.

  If Faustus really was a Commander of the Knights of St John, then he could hardly have avoided being swept up in the conflicts of this period, especially as Turkish raiders were probing frontier areas like Styria. Charles V’s settlement on the Knights at Tripoli and Malta (1530) had been intended to provide a bulwark against the corsairs, and their ships had joined the campaign against Tunis. The evidence, such as it is, suggests that Faustus was in southern Germany. The fighting days, if he had any, of the seventy year-old magician were over. He may have lost his commandery – preceptors were appointed for periods of five or ten years and could resign – or have been travelling abroad to seek support for the war against the enemies of the Empire. Even if he took off the distinctive cloak of the Knights, he was still the one-time astrologer to the Bishop of Bamberg and was doubtless looking for another wealthy client. The shifting power balance in Württemberg may have made his home region too dangerous for an itinerant magician and the principal towns of Bavaria had already shown him the door.

  The Faustbook of course made no mention of the politics of Faustus’s day. Instead we find the magician conjuring up a bevy of lovelies to entertain him in the autumn of his years. As the end of the pact approaches ‘he began to live a swinish and Epicurish life’, although according to the Faustbook he seems to have done that from the beginning. He commanded Mephistopheles to bring him seven of the fairest maidens he has seen in all his extensive travels. According to P.F. he was duly supplied with ‘two Netherlanders, one Hungarian, one English, two Wallons, one Francklander.’ In the Wolfenbüttel Manuscript the ladies from Walloon were originally from Swabia and we should note that the ‘Francklander’ hails from German Franconia, not France.20 With this extensive harem he lived as Jan van Leyden might have done: ‘and with these sweet personages he continued long, yea even to his last end.’21 The Faustbook gave the date of this as in the twentieth year of Faustus’s pact, which would give us 1534 using the dates in the Dutch edition, but of course this dating is hardly reliable.

  To lust, the Faustbook added avarice to Faustus’s list of deadly sins. With a rudimentary banking system that was available only to wealthy merchants and nobles, burying one’s money was still seen by many as the best way of safeguarding it against theft. Consequently many like those unfortunates at Jena and the
deluded Leipzig serving-boy John George E., dreamt of finding a hidden hoard, much as people today discount the fourteen million to one odds and squander their money on the lottery. The Faustus of the Faustbook was not immune to this obsession and turned to finding buried treasure in the twenty-second year of his pact, or 1536 by our rough reckoning of the dates in the Faustbook.

  The Faustbook had Faustus back in Wittenberg, skulking around the ruins of an old chapel less than a kilometre outside of town. The Devil pointed out the spot for him to dig and presently he uncovered the treasure trove ‘like a huge light burning’ and guarded by a ‘mighty huge serpent’. Faustus charmed the serpent and heaved up the treasure. He was unpleasantly surprised to find that he was digging up ‘nothing but coals of fire’ and ‘there also he heard and saw many that were tormented’. Not to be put off by this preview of damnation, Faustus persevered in recovering the coals and back in his den found that they were transformed into silver and gold. According to the Faustbook, Wagner found this hoard after Faustus’s death and estimated it to be worth in the region of a thousand gilders.22

  We see that the Faustus of the Faustbook was too busy with what the Wolfenbüttel Manuscript called his ‘devilish concubines’ and the pursuit of buried treasure to take much interest in the affairs of the day. However, the real Faustus could hardly have been ignorant of them. His presence in south-western Germany may have been a result of instability in Württemberg and the hardening of attitudes towards him in Bavaria, as we see from the official records of Ingolstadt, Nuremberg, and Saxony-Anhalt. The fallout from the suppression of the Anabaptists in the north may also have made this region too dangerous for someone regularly perceived as unconventional. Faustus may have used the waterways to travel much of the distance from Batenburg, lying on the River Meuse (Maas), to Lixheim, bypassing turbulent Württemberg altogether, and the Rhine would have taken him directly into Basel. Using these routes he could have travelled swiftly from the last dated reference to him in Münster in 1535 to the locations given by Gast for around the year 1535.