Faustus: The Life and Times of a Renaissance Magician

by Leo Ruickbie

  Conceptions of social power flowing from gender and professional status contrived to make Faustus and those in a similar position less likely to be tried for witchcraft. Where witches were generally held to be ignorant women by a structurally misogynistic society, the magicians made great store of their learning. The magicians themselves constructed a protective discourse in which they clearly demarcated themselves from the witches.13 Someone like Trithemius could invoke that considerable learning in his defence, showing how the possession of magical books did not taint him and demonstrating that his was a natural magic entirely compatible with Humanistic Christianity. Unlike the village gossips who used the accusation of witchcraft, the Humanists and Humanist-magicians such as Trithemius employed a rhetoric of folly and sexual misdemeanour to attack their opponents. It is only later in the discourse of the Reformation that the situation changes, notably when the Devilobsessed Luther broaches the subject and by then Faustus was nearing the end of his natural life, if not actually dead.

  The case is not cut and dried and things might have gone differently for Faustus. In 1594 the Cologne newspaper Warhafftige newe Zeitung reported a recent case of witch-craft, describing a ‘leader’ or ‘king’ of the witches, a learnéd doctor who practised ‘diabolical magic’, and directly compared him to Faustus.14 In 1589 Dr Dietrich Flade (1534–1589) had been tried and convicted of witchcraft. Could Faustus have ended up like Flade?

  Flade was a doctor, but a doctor of law, not medicine or philosophy. He was professor of law at the University of Trier and later dean of the faculty and rector. He was head of the civil courts in Trier – one of the highest judicial positions in Germany – and advisor to the Archbishops of Trier. Flade not only held high office, but was also one of the wealthiest men in town; his annual income was greater than that of the whole city. Neither professional immunity – granted that Flade was not a medical man – nor social rank were sufficient to save him. Not even his own legal acumen served. His sophisticated defence crumbled under repeated torture and corroborative evidence was tortured out of others until there could be no doubting the guilty verdict. However, there are several key factors to consider: there were political motivations behind this case and the trial itself occurred late in the sixteenth century, well after Faustus’s own lifetime. The times had changed. Flade only resembled the legend put forth in the Faustbooks, not Faustus himself.

  In the early sixteenth century, Europe experienced an overall lull in witch-hunting. The years from about 1490 to 1560 were relatively quiet and certainly after 1517 the Reformation movement pushed witchcraft into the background as it struggled to assert itself. Luther himself noted the change in 1535, saying:

  When I was a child there were many witches and sorcerers around … But now that the Gospel is here you do not hear so much about it.15

  He ended by making a polemical thrust against the Roman Church as ‘spiritual sorcery’ with its worship of saints and sale of indulgences, and everything else he railed against – most of it not actually what we would consider to be witchcraft at all. However, there really was an underground movement that sought to overthrow the established social and religious order, and that practised the Black Mass, that is, a deliberate parody of the Christian Mass (at least once). It was called Anabaptism. It has often been overlooked that the years 1520 to 1565 saw large numbers executed for heresy. Of some 3,000 executions for heresy in this period, about two-thirds of them were Anabaptists. The Anabaptists were both themselves accused and accused others of crimes familiar in witchcraft trials, especially Satanic conspiracy. Despite this discursive overlapping between religious heresy and witchcraft accusations, the two forms remained relatively discrete. The Anabaptists may have been accused of being in league with Satan, like the witches, but they were executed because they were Anabaptists, not witches. Nor should we overlook the upheaval of the Peasants’ War, the motivation behind much of which was religiously inspired, or, at the very least, couched in religious language. All those who died fighting for a peasants’ Christianity of primitive communism and self-determination had also strayed from the straight line of orthodoxy.

  The reasons for these patterns are complicated, but there is a sense in which we can see the increase in witch-hunting towards the end of the century as a sublimated response to the division of Christendom into Protestantism and Catholicism. Following a comparatively mild period of Catholic censure of the Reform movement under Charles V, circumscribed as it was by the political necessity of retaining the support of the Lutheran lords, Protestantism had moved beyond academic theology to new levels of popularism where reasoned debate gave way to the arguments of the mob. Witch-hunting was a displacement of aggression towards the ‘witchmongers’, the Catholics, as Reginald Scot called them, or the ‘heretic’ Protestants, as well as an exaggerated and violent means of establishing group identity for both parties. By the mid-1560s the Anabaptist ‘threat’ had been neutralised through mass murder in the same way that the millenarian peasant movements had been crushed by force of arms, leaving the path to the courtroom free for all those petty complaints and wild accusations that are the bane of close-knit communities. The courts were also now equipped with a procedure and the experience of trying heresy that fitted well with the theorisation of heretical witchcraft that had begun a hundred or so years earlier, exemplified by the Malleus Maleficarum.

  We also have to take into account the criminal legislation on witchcraft. Article 109 of the Carolina promulgated in 1532, prescribed the death sentence only for those crimes of witchcraft that resulted in the harm of another. Although Article 44 stated that association with anything that implied witchcraft was sufficient justification for the use of torture, Article 21 expressly removed divination from this list. While Faustus could have been accused of practising witchcraft – he was a self-confessed necromancer – we have no evidence that he harmed anyone. Poor Dr Dorstenius, shaven too close for comfort, and the pesky poltergeist of Lixheim are neither historically verified nor verifiable. It was only later in the century that witchcraft per se became the crime, regardless of whether anyone caused harm by it or not. If we look at the Criminal Constitutions of Electoral Saxony for 1572 we find that a pact or any sort of truck with the Devil becomes the crime, not the misuse of magic. The Palatinate revised its criminal code along similar lines in 1582. In the earlier part of the sixteenth century the limited criminalisation of witchcraft no doubt explained, in part, the relatively few witch trials leading to execution during this period.

  Within his lifetime Faustus was accused of being a fraud, not a diabolist. He was branded a sodomite – a capital offence – but not a witch. He was denounced as a necromancer, but not a heretic (although Trithemius came close). The combination of several factors ensured that he did not end up like the unfortunate Flade. He lived in a time of relatively low witch-hunting and leniency towards magic; he enjoyed the privileged status of a scholar and lived outside the social conditions that commonly produced accusations of witchcraft. The wandering life alone was not safeguard against accusations of witchcraft as the numerous cases brought against beggars attest, but in combination with the scholarly life brought the individual the dual benefits of professional immunity and social distance. Such records as we do have show that his clients (the Bishop of Bamberg and von Hutten) sought his astrological services. Despite Trithemius’s accusations, others took Faustus seriously, reinforcing the protective effect of his professional status.

  That Faustus was not tried for witchcraft is one of the principal questions raised by his life. Writing in 1563, Wierus expressed his exasperation that Faustus and other ‘infamous magicians’ went unpunished, while hundreds of deluded old women were sent to their deaths. Even in the later legend material that sought to revise this apparent escape from punishment, Faustus was made to answer, not to the judge, but to the Devil.

  The Devil’s Due

  No one knows exactly when or where Faustus died, or how. The generally accepted date to be found in d
ictionaries and encyclopaedias is 1540, but that is only an approximation, rounded to the nearest convenient decade. The death of Paracelsus on 24 September 1541 has perhaps confused the actual death of Faustus. According to Battus’s Faustbook of 1592, Faustus’s end comes on 23 October 1538. For once the Faustbook may not be entirely wrong. In 1539 he was mentioned, unflatteringly, in the Index Sanitatis of Philipp Begardi in such a way as to suggest that he was already dead.

  Begardi probably wrote his Index in 1538 – the dedication is dated 8 January 1539, although it was published 20 August 1539 – and so the crucial passage ‘several years ago’ may indicate that Faustus died in the mid to late 1530s. Begardi’s information may not have been accurate. People were often reported to have died when they had not and news of a death could take some time to circulate. Begardi’s references to Faustus’s wide travels and the divinatory arts rings true, and Begardi appears to have known people who had met Faustus. The real problem is that Begardi did not explicitly state that Faustus was dead.

  Wierus provided a similar dating to Begardi’s, although writing in 1568, when he said ‘a few years prior to 1540 he [Faustus] practised [i.e., magic]’.16 When Conrad Gesner wrote to his friend Johannes Crato in 1561 he only vaguely referred to ‘a certain Faustus, who died not long ago’.17 The Zimmerische Chronik said that Faustus had died ‘around this time’, which from the context is interpreted as 1541 from reference to the Regensburg Reichstag of that year.18 The range of dates spans the three years from 1538 to 1541, but none of the sources is specific and all point to a date earlier than that given or inferred. Faustus probably died sometime between the last dated reference to him as being alive in 1535 and the earliest reference to his demise in 1538.

  Everyone who has written about Faustus has been more concerned with the question of how he died. In 1548 Gast gave details of the manner of his end – or as Gast imagined it:

  Nevertheless, he was alloted a miserable, lamentable end, for he was suffocated by Satan, whose dead body on its bier continually turned its face to the ground, notwithstanding that it was five times turned back.19

  Gast was the first to write of the death of Faustus, but assuredly not the last. In 1563 Manlius published the words of his master, Melanchthon, delivered sometime between 1554 and 1557, notably getting Faustus’s name wrong:

  A few years previously this Johannes Faustus, on his last day, sat wholly dejected in a certain village in the Duchy of Württemberg. The host asked him why he was so gloomy, which was against his character and habits (he was otherwise a disgraceful good-for-nothing who led a corrupt life and was again and again nearly killed because of his libidiousness). Thereupon he said to the host in the village: ‘Do not be terrified this night.’ In the middle of the night the house was shaken. When Faustus did not get up in the morning and by now being nearly midday, the host summoned others and entered his chamber to find him lying near the bed with his face turned round. In this way the Devil murdered him.20

  There is no reason to suppose that Gast and Melanchthon (or Manlius) were known to one another, but their stories share a common element: the strange condition of Faustus’s body. Manlius’s version became the better known tale. Wierus, writing in 1568, gave almost exactly the same account of Faustus’s death:

  Here, at last, in a village in the Duchy of Württemberg, he was found dead close by his bed, his face turned about, and in the middle of the night before the house was shaken, that is how it was reported.21

  It is clear whence Wierus derived his information, but his retelling was adding authority to the story. Philipp Camerarius (1537–1624), the son of Joachim Camerarius, repeated these details some years later, citing Wierus as his source.22

  We can see that these separate accounts of Faustus’s death somewhere in Württemberg are in fact all derived from Melanchthon. Melanchthon’s account, in both Manlius’s book and Andreas Hondorff’s excerpts, was published frequently and widely in the late sixteenth century, giving his version greater force through repetition. The popularity of Spies’s Historia of 1587 would imprint this violent death on people’s perceptions of Faustus’s final days.

  A Magician and his Penance

  In 1555 Melanchthon delivered another of his popular Sunday lectures, this time choosing as his subject ‘a magician and his penance’. The story concerned an unnamed nobleman of Regensburg and is a piece of barefaced propaganda for Melanchthon’s religious views. The story contains many points of similarity with his account of the death of Faustus and no doubt contributed to a certain confusion between the two accounts, leading to rumours that it was Faustus himself who died in Regensburg. We find the same dissolute life, the practice of magic, a pact with the Devil and a twisted corpse.

  The nobleman ‘led an extremely wicked life’ practising magic, but when the Reformed faith reached Regensburg he started going to church and became remorseful. He transformed himself into a model of piety and lived to an old age. On his deathbed he called his friends round him and confessed that he had made a pact with the Devil. He was confident that his new found piety would deliver his soul out of the Devil’s clutches, but consequently warned his friends that the Devil would ‘rage against my body and deform it’. As he breathed his last ‘there was rumbling and such disturbance that the house appeared to collapse’. Terrified, his friends ran off, returning later to find that the Devil had ‘twisted the dead man’s face against his back’.23

  It is of course a comfort to the Christian, and especially the Protestant in this case, to think that magicians and sorcerers would eventually tremble before God and repent of their former ways. Even today the sentiment is held as a vouchsafe of the righteousness of the Faith and the Christian fold is duly full of those who claim to have been saved from a life of wickedness in the practice of magic.

  What we see here is that the reports of Faustus’s death in fact conform to a type. They should not be seen as in any way accurate, but simply versions of the same desire to vindicate the writers’ belief and punish, with a rod of words, those who infringe their arbitrary morals. As we read in Psalms (146:9): ‘the way of the wicked he turneth upside down.’

  Even though Melanchthon (through Manlius) had padded out the spare scene described by Gast, his vague mention of a village in Württemberg leaves us scratching our heads. It is left to the relatively late Zimmerische Chronik of around 1565 to give us the name of Faustus’s final destination: ‘finally, in the manor of Staufen in Breisgau, at a great age, he was slain by an evil spirit.’ While many have taken the town of Staufen itself as the place intended, the Zimmerische Chronik was less certain: ‘Faustus died in or not far from Staufen, a town in Breisgau.’24

  Today Staufen is part of Baden-Württemberg, but in historical maps of the mid-1500 s Breisgau is shown as a separate region. Breisgau was a Habsburg possession and part of the Austrian Circle that included Styria. Melanchthon’s testimony may or may not be taken as supporting evidence for the Zimmerische Chronik’s identification of Staufen (or near Staufen) as the location of Faustus’s death.

  The essential problem with the Zimmerische Chronik is that it is already party to the legend formation around Faustus. There are also textual similarities to other stories about both Faustus and other magicians that are often seen to discredit it. The Chronik cannot be dismissed on these grounds alone. Almost all of the sources we have are part of the legend formation and provide a less than objective view of Faustus. That there are similarities with other stories told about Faustus and other magicians may indicate, not derivation, but that the Chronik is drawing on the same magical tradition as revealed in the grimoire. There are also reasons to suppose that the author of the Chronik knew what he was talking about. He was something of a black magician himself.

  The Zimmerische Chronik was written by Count Froben Christoph von Zimmern with assistance from his secretary Hans Müller (d.1600). He had acquired part of Archbishop Herman von Wied’s book collection, including his copy of Agrippa’s Occult Philosophy, and as hin
ted earlier, there is a possibility that the Archbishop had been personally acquainted with Faustus. Christoph’s father Johann Werner II (1488–1548), a contemporary of Faustus, was also interested in the Dark Arts. Before his death he had burnt his magical books and warned his sons Johann Christoph (1516–c.1553), Froben Christoph and Gottfried Christoph (c.1524–c.1566) against following the left hand path. Both Johann and Gottfried evidently took heed and entered the church, becoming canons in Strassburg and later Cologne, while Froben became intrigued. Froben, like his father, would eventually abandon the occult, and some of that late fear of the forbidden arts entered into his Chronik. It is unlikely that Froben and Faustus crossed paths. In the 1530s the young student was to be found in Tübingen (1533), Strassburg and Bourges (1533–1534), Cologne (1536–1537), Louvain (1537–1539) and Paris (1539–1540), where he is believed to have attempted some alchemical experiments.25

  Lercheimer repeated the location given by Gast and Wierus, although he was forced to try and refute an idea that was in circulation and would acquire dominance through Spies in 1587:

  He was strangled by the Devil in a village in Württemberg, not at Kimlich near Wittenberg, because there is nowhere a village of that name. For after he ran away to avoid capture, he was never allowed to return to Wittenberg.26