Faustus: The Life and Times of a Renaissance Magician

by Leo Ruickbie

  All of the Faustbooks are generally agreed that Faustus was in the vicinity of Wittenberg and was carried off by the Devil in fulfilment of his pact. The Wolfenbüttel Manuscript, Spies and P.F. all gave Rimlich, not Kimlich as Lercheimer thought, but in any case Lercheimer was right: there is nowhere called either Kimlich or Rimlich. The English traveller Fynes Moryson had heard the story, too, when he visited Wittenberg in 1591, but despite exploring the surrounding villages could find no one to verify it.

  Alexander Tille listed fifty references to the death of Faustus in his colossal Faustsplitter. Although many were literary references, it is not surprising to find that there are other traditions that give other final locations for Faustus. Amongst these we find Prague, as we saw earlier, Cologne, Regensburg, Königsberg (Kaliningrad), Cappel on the Baltic coast, and the castle of Waerdenberg (Wardenburg) in Holland even has the ‘evidence’ of an indelible bloodstain to support its claim. Other Wittenberg traditions maintain that the place in question was a small village called Pratau, some three kilometres away. Here in a tavern called ‘Freischütz’ Faustus met his end. Even Knittlingen and Maulbronn are mentioned.27

  Like all of the suggestions we have examined so far, none of these other alternatives is entirely credible. However, there is a geographical similarity between the report of Melanchthon and the Chronik that is suggestive. Given what biased, unreliable and incomplete reports we have, I am more persuaded by Melanchthon and especially the Chronik, than the Faustbook or any of the other legends.

  On a steep knoll the imposing ruins of a castle perch dramatically like a ragged old eagle. Vineyards crawl down the slopes, adding to the romantic charm, to find the town of Staufen nestling at their foot. The castle had been raised in the thirteenth century by the Lords of Staufen, Bailiffs of St Trudpert’s monastery. In its shelter a settlement had prospered and in the fourteenth century was granted the right of calling itself a town. A defensive wall and ditch once enclosed it with two gates – the Bürgerturm in the north and the Malefizturm in the south – controlling access. Staufen today still has a prosperous air, but gone are the days when silver mining made it rich. Documented as early as the eleventh century, the silver mines in the surrounding Münstertal were the prized possession of the von Staufens. In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries the family was extracting approximately 230 grams of silver per ton annually, a fifth of all the precious metal yield of the Black Forest. But by about 1535 the once rich seams were petering out.

  Witchcraft trials are documented from 1523 to 1632, raising once more the phantom of a judicial end to Faustus’s life. However, the belief is that Faustus was invited to the town by the local lord Antonius von Staufen (1523–1567) and a connection has been made between the declining family fortunes and Faustus’s reputation as an alchemist.28

  According to the late sixteenth-century Schwäbische Chronick of Martin Crusius (1526–1607), Antonius von Staufen was well-educated and intelligent. The account is eulogistic and should be taken with a pinch of salt; nevertheless, we find someone who had attended university and taken definite steps to broaden his mind.

  At university he shared the lecture hall with Nicolai von der Stroß from Basel. In 1537 Nicolai purchased a book printed in Basel by Heinrich Peter (or Petri, 1508– 1579). It was Sebastian Münster’s treatise on designing sundials bound together with a 1532 edition of the Quadrans Apiani, a scientific work on astronomical instruments printed by Peter Apian (1495–1552). On the leaf facing the title page of the Quadrans is a mysterious inscription written in a hand other than Nicolai’s: ‘Zwanzig, Zwanzig nahest wan’. The writing trails off as if something devilish had overcome the writer. It was found many years later in the attic of a house on Staufen’s Spitalstraße. The reference to the number twenty (zwanzig) has been related to Faustus’s supposed twenty-four year pact and it has been suggested that it was Faustus himself who wrote it in 1537 with just four years left to run.29

  As attractive as that is, the supposition is based on two things that are less than true: that Faustus signed a pact, and that he died in 1541. In addition, the script requires considerable powers of imagination to be decipherable at all and there appears to be more written than can be easily transcribed. Still, a connection with a scholar who had come from Basel is not out of the question given Faustus’s probable visit to the city in the mid to late 1530s.

  Nicolai did not study at Basel as far as we can tell, but at the University of Freiburg. His name appeared in the same list as Erasmus – a professor of theology there in 1533 – and ‘Wernherus Wÿga de Zÿmern’, identified as a presbyter in the diocese of Konstanz. Antonius von Staufen, through his father’s marriage to his second wife Agnes, was related to the von Zimmerns. Both Antonius (matriculated 1534) and Nicolai (matriculated 1533) had studied together with another of Froben’s relatives, Gottfried von Zimmern (matriculated 1535), in Freiburg. Wilhelm Werner von Zimmern had held the post of rector. Thus we can trace ties of kinship and friendship that bring the families of von Staufen and von Zimmern together, suggesting the possibility that Froben got the information he needed for his Chronik either from Antonius or through one of his relatives.

  Antonius was in his teens when he apparently issued his invitation to Faustus, but after the death of his father in 1523 he and his brother Hans (1523–1545) were the sole heirs to the estate and responsibility was thrust early upon them. For whatever reason, Faustus was not invited to stay with Antonius in the castle. The inn where he supposedly stayed dates from 1407 and more or less took its present shape in 1536, so it is clearly old enough to have received its infamous guest. Things did not go according to plan. According to local folklore Faustus died in an explosion shortly after arriving and the so-called Devil’s footprint in the town hall is all that remains. Whether he was successful in producing gold or not – and it seems not – Antonius was forced to pawn his possessions in 1549 for a large loan to meet his mounting debts.30

  Certainly the people of Staufen firmly believe that Faustus died there. In a corner of the market square, under the sign of a leaping lion, is the inn Zum Löwen where almost 500 years earlier, as local folklore has it, a certain Dr Faustus died under mysterious circumstances. According to tradition, Faustus stayed in room no. 5 and died downstairs in the Fauststube, the room reputed to have been Faustus’s laboratory. It is a cosy room, three-quarter panelled in a mock medieval, Gothic revival style of the early twentieth century. Six painted scenes are set above the wainscoting depicting the life and death of Faustus with captions. On the outside of the lobster-pink inn is a large mural. Above a towering mass of black letter Gothic recounting his terrible end, it shows a man falling to his hands and knees. A Devil the colour of putrid flesh with extended bat wings reaches up to grasp the man whilst another figure stands above him, hands fastened to his neck.31

  The Devil’s Polemic

  But he is not quite dead yet. In the Faustbook the final moments are drawn out with relish. Faustus laid on another banquet and filled his guests up with wine before announcing that ‘he had many wonderful matters to tell them’. He delivered a lengthy and impassioned speech in which he revealed that he had promised ‘body and soul’ to the Devil for all that he had achieved in his life and that now ‘this dismal day those twenty-four years are fully expired, for night beginning my hour-glass is at an end.’32

  It was just the sort of confession an inquisitor could have wrung from him on the rack. Faustus’s purpose in inviting his friends to his end, according to the Faustbook, was to bid them a final adieu and warn them against following a similar path. He delivered a gushing sermon about having God always before one’s eyes and visiting church a lot. He ended with the familiar advice about paying no heed to any strange noises in the night and requested that his friends give him a Christian burial: ‘and so I wish you a quiet night, which unto me notwithstanding will be horrible and fearful.’33 It was a fine speech, surely stirring to Christian hearts, but utterly false. There are clear echoes of Gast’s accou
nt and Melanchthon’s Regensburg nobleman.

  His shocked guests called upon him to repent, but Faustus countered their efforts by saying that, like Cain, his sins were too great for God to forgive. Furthermore, there were the contracts themselves, sealed with his own blood. His guests prayed for him and left the room weeping.

  Faustus lingered, reflecting on his life. His friends lay in their beds, wide-awake in expectation of the end. The clock relentlessly ticked on, their terror mounting, until between midnight and one o’clock ‘there blew a mighty storm of wind.’ The students rose and comforted one another, but as yet did not dare to venture forth, while ‘the Host of the house ran out of doors, thinking the house would fall.’ With the storm raging around them they next perceived ‘a mighty noise and hissing, as if the hall had been full of Snakes and Adders.’ The door to Faustus’s room burst open with some unseen force and they heard his plaintive cries of ‘Murder! Murder!’ The voice sounded strangely hollow and after a while was heard no more.34

  In the morning the students summoned enough courage to venture into the hall where they had left Faustus the previous evening. P.F.’s description is wonderfully gory. The hall is spattered with blood, globs of brain are stuck to the walls, in one corner lie his eyes, in another his teeth. His body, ‘most monstrously torn, and fearful to behold’, is found outside on a pile of horse dung.35

  There are few today who would so readily believe that the Devil had beaten him to death, so it is not idle to speculate on other possible causes. In 1930 Harold Meek tried to fathom the mystery, considering the various guises the Grim Reaper might have assumed, from the natural – epidemic, arteriosclerosis, kidney failure and syphilis – to the unnatural – murder, accidental explosion and suicide by strychnine poisoning. He concluded that after suffering from syphilis for years – the cause of his bombastic outbursts and decline of his career – he had taken his own life with a lethal dose of strychnine. Meek’s diagnosis is colourful. The effects of syphilis might explain some of his reported behaviour (and the source whence he contracted it) and the administration of strychnine could account for the contorted state of the dead body. A verdict of suicide could also explain why there is no known grave. More recently, but less convincingly, Thomas Weber suggested that Faustus was strangled and robbed by a beggar, for which there is not the slightest evidence. While these theories are at least plausible, there is a simpler and more convincing explanation.

  We cannot trust the reports of Faustus’s behaviour or of the condition of his body after death, so neither of these factors give any substance to Meek’s theory. In reality, there was no pact and the Devil did not come for him; nor did he have need of the strychnine bottle. Old age was cause enough. In the Zimmerische Chronik he is described as having died at a ‘great age’.36 Faustus was at this time aged about seventy and living without the ministrations of modern medicine. The reputation he subsequently acquired is sufficient to explain the absence of a grave marker.

  The world has been blinded by the more dramatic fictions that surround the life and death of this magician. When such an obviously devout man as Trithemius could so easily and quickly acquire a sulphurous reputation, how much more likely that someone like Faustus, operating outside the Church, would be seen as an agent of the Devil? In death Faustus had completed his transformation from Renaissance magus to Reformation bogeyman.

  In the writings of the times, the Devil became a pawn in a game of religious retribution, the so-called Teufelspolemik. Just as Melanchthon could gloat on the details of Faustus’s death at the hands of the Devil, so the forces of Counter-Reformation meted out the same fate to the Reformers. For example, Guazzo reported that ‘It was noted as a fact that when Martin Luther died at Eisleben, the demons flew to his funeral from those who were possessed.’37 More pointedly, Guazzo wrote that ‘in 1566, through the mouth of a demoniac woman at Laon, a demon in the hearing of all mocked at the Calvinists, crying out that he had nothing to fear from them since they were his friends and allies.’38 In an age when both Catholics and Protestants portrayed each other, and others such as the Anabaptists, as the Devil’s disciples, someone like Faustus operating on the verges of heresy and outside the protective circle of organised religion was a safe and obvious target for the same accusations. When we further consider how like religions both alchemy and especially astrology were at this time, we find another cause for Faustus’s denouncement. He was clearly seen to belong to a group, Wierus’s ‘infamous magicians’, that professed their own enchanted worldview and in doing so contested that of all the others.

  For all the obvious propaganda that embellishes the story of Faustus, it really is as if the Devil had carried him off to hell. No tomb shelters his mortal remains, no epitaph is inscribed to his memory, no grave marks his end. His final moments have been subverted by his enemies. We do not know for certain where and when he died, or under what circumstances. 500 years on he still lives in legend as the greatest, most notorious magician of the Renaissance. Perhaps now we can remember him for different reasons, for reasons more truthful than the stories that have chased his memory like furies down all those long years.

  Epilogue: A Damnable Life?

  During his lifetime Faustus had acquired a black reputation, but it was nothing to the one he would acquire after death. In life he was the Prince of Necromancers, the Second Magus, an equal of Jesus, a philosopher ranked amongst Plato and Aristotle, who could foretell the future better than any other astrologer of his age – as he apparently told his audiences. In death he became the blackest of black magicians.

  The diabolical Faustus was born in the Tischreden of Luther and his circle, raised in the Erfurt Chronicle (Reichmann-Wambach, c.1570–1580), augmented by Christoff Roshirt (c.1570–1575), expanded in the Wolfenbüttel Manuscript (c.1580), revisited by Lercheimer (1585), codified in Spies (1587), ‘Englished’ by P.F. (1592) and engorged by Widmann (1599). When Marlowe added his genius to the story its essential elements were carved in stone. It was a sixteenth-century blockbuster combining the energy and restless curiosity of Renaissance man, the religious fear and fervour of Reformation and the expansionism of the Elizabethan age. But for all the popular appeal and literary fireworks, it was still a witch-hunt against a dead man.

  It has been a long overdue task to try and uncover the man behind the myth. Many have fallen into the endless rut of literary criticism, arguing over how many Fausts can dance on the nib of Goethe’s pen, leaving the sixteenth century sources dusty and unread. The few other writers who have turned their attention to the historical Faustus have often, disappointingly and uncritically, been only too willing to acquiesce in the character assassination begun by Trithemius.

  On the basis of all we have discovered here we can say that, in all probability, Faustus was born in Helmstadt or Heidelberg on 23 April 1466, that he studied at Heidelberg University from 1483 to 1487, completed his obligatory two years of teaching and afterwards sought his fortune as a wandering scholar engaged in the great projects of his day – astrology, alchemy and magic – and that he died in the vicinity of Staufen in 1538, at the latest, his name already blackened by the libellous, ignominious ink of his foes.

  He was not called Johannes Faust or Faustus. His real name was variously recorded by the university authorities of Heidelberg as Georgius Helmstetter, Jorio de Helmstat, Jeorius de Helmstat, Georio de Helmstadt and Jeorius Halmstadt. Some years later he adopted the nom de plume of Georgius Sabellicus Faustus Junior. This was a Renaissance code linking him with two popular Humanists of the period: Marcus Antonius Sabellicus and Publius Faustus Andrelinus. In time this became shortened to just Doctor Faustus.

  He lived on his wits and enjoyed certain successes as well as defeats, but only briefly benefited from the security of an official position. What we know of Faustus shows that during his lifetime he travelled widely throughout Germany with a possible foray here and there into other countries, that he had some illustrious clients and that theologians and their ilk reviled
him. It is unlikely that he ever tried to conjure a spirit called Mephistopheles and almost certain that he did not sign a pact, or believed that he had signed a pact, with the Devil or any of his agents. He undoubtedly had a greater reputation than the scattering of historical references suggest. Influential men such as Trithemius – who had the Emperor’s ear – and Luther and his disciple Melanchthon – all had at one time or another the name of Faustus on their lips. By all accounts he was boastful, but no more so than the people who levelled that accusation at him. In an age that excelled at defamatory polemics, we can hardly take any of the accusations made against him seriously.

  History, as always, has much to teach us and the sixteenth century in particular. We see how war always leads to war until the opponents run out of resources, immaterial as well as material. We see how belief begets strife when it is unmitigated by compassion. We see how magic and science are always part of the same project to explain and predict the vagaries of fate, and ultimately master the universe. We also see the centrality of magic, both theoretically and socially, in Faustus’s age. In looking for Faustus we have searched that much neglected twilight side of the Renaissance and learnt something of its secrets.

  The parallels with our own times and those of Faustus are not with Nazi Germany, American foreign policy, or environmental disaster, but with the tension between religious fundamentalism and liberal pluralism. There is a striking similarity between the eclectic esotericism of the sixteenth century – that dizzying amalgam of Hermeticism, astrology, alchemy and magic – and the sprawling spirituality of the New Age today. If we can believe that sub-atomic particles can spontaneously appear and disappear, and be in two different places at once, how much closer are we to the beliefs of the sixteenth century than we realise?