CARTOGRAPHER’S SELECTS: FAUST IN GERMANY

The story of Faust is the ultimate cautionary tale. An ambitious man desires more than is humanly possible (a common affliction), succeeds in getting an appointment with an infernal advocate (not so common), and finally receives what he wants, losing his soul in the process. The moralistic tale has its precedent in the tale of Theophilus of Adana, but much more attention has been given to a figure named Dr Johann Faust, a Renaissance scholar, scientist, and magician. The reprobate actions of this mysterious doctor were famously fictionalised in the popular works of Christopher Marlowe and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, but the ‘historical’ Faust was well-known to his sixteenth-century contemporaries; many of whom also dabbled in the occult.

Early appraisals of the mage’s integrity were almost universally negative. In a 1507 letter to his friend Johann Virdung, Johann Trithemius, the abbot of Wurzburg accuses “Magister Georgius Sabellicus, Faustus Junior” of being a prince of the “necromancers” and a charlatan. Ironically, Trithemius also had a reputation as a black magician. In one of the abbot’s private letters, he outlines his own system of divinatory magic and spirit communication.

Though the students of reformers Martin Luther and Philip Melanchthon described how their masters spoke about Faust’s arrogance, the only person who claimed to have actually met Faust was Conrad Rufus, a friend of Johannes Reuchlin, the professor of Greek and Hebrew at the University of Tübingen. Rufus, who ran into the evil doctor at an inn, declared Faust to be a braggart and a soothsayer. In 1587, many of the legends surrounding Faust came together in the Historia von D. Johann Fausten, a chapbook edited by Johann Spies. This collection, which served as a primary source for Christopher Marlowe, became a major repository of Faustian tropes.

In literature, Faust eventually emerged as an intellectual with Luciferian whims, ultimately destroyed by his own greed and unquenchable thirst for knowledge. His personality linked him to other German magi such as Paracelsus and Heinrich Agrippa, who were both sometimes regarded as egotists.

Today, Faustian archetypes can be found in plot devices everywhere (remember this scene?). Nevertheless, if one looks hard enough, one can still follow the trail of the legendary sorcerer in Germany. Goethe’s Faust hailed from Brocken, but there are traces of the ‘real’ Faust in the Hessian town of Gelnhausen, where Faust apparently fled from an inn in fear of the abbot Trithemius. One could also spend a day at the Faust Museum in Knittlingen, his supposed birthplace. Diehard fans however, will want to visit the Gasthaus zum-Lowen in Staufen. Legend has it that Faust perished on the hotel’s premises under mysterious circumstances.

Share this: Twitter

Facebook

