The 1587 Faust Book: the birth of a literary legend

In 1587 the printer Johann Spies published in Frankfurt am Main a small book destined for enormous success: the «Historia von D. Johann Fausten», the story of Doctor Faust, «famous magician and necromancer». The author is anonymous and the text is far from sophisticated, but it fixed for ever the figure of the learned man who sells his soul to the devil in exchange for knowledge and power. Behind the character stood a real man and, in the background, the same magical culture that had produced Cornelius Agrippa.

The historical Faust

A flesh-and-blood Faust lived in Germany in the first half of the sixteenth century. One of the earliest testimonies is a letter of 1507 by the abbot Johannes Trithemius, who speaks scornfully of a certain «Georgius Sabellicus Faustus junior», a wandering charlatan who boasted of magical arts. The detail is striking: Trithemius was also the teacher and correspondent of Agrippa, who dedicated to him the first draft of De occulta philosophia in 1510.

Other scattered reports, in chronicles and in letters by physicians and humanists, present Faust as an astrologer, palm reader and fortune-teller. According to tradition he died around 1540, perhaps at Staufen, in circumstances that legend soon turned into a dreadful end. The certain facts are few, and even before the middle of the century the man was dissolving into the character.

Spies's book

The Faust Book tells of a twenty-four-year pact, signed in blood, with the spirit Mephostophiles. Faust obtains flights through the air, visions of hell and of the heavens, pranks at princely courts, even the apparition of Helen of Troy. When the term expires, the devils carry him off, leaving the room spattered with blood. The tone is that of a Lutheran warning: curiosity that seeks to pass the limits set by God leads to damnation.

Success was immediate. Within a few years came reprints, editions expanded with new episodes and even a sequel devoted to Faust's servant, Christoph Wagner, published in 1593. Abroad there appeared an English translation signed with the initials P. F., whose earliest surviving edition dates from 1592, several Dutch versions and a French translation by Pierre-Victor Palma Cayet, published in 1598. The German magician thus became a European character.

The learned magician in the imagination

The Faust of 1587 does not cite De occulta philosophia, but it embodies the suspicion that surrounded the learned magicians of the Renaissance. Agrippa, dead for about half a century, was already the subject of similar tales: he was said to be accompanied by a demonic dog, and his books were thought dangerous to open. Popular readers did not distinguish between occult philosophy and a diabolical pact, and Faust became the name that summed up both.

From this unpretentious little book came Marlowe, Goethe and an entire European tradition of plays, puppet shows, poems, operas and novels. To understand how later centuries remembered Renaissance magic, it is worth starting precisely here: with a moral tale in which secret knowledge is at once desire and guilt, and in which the figure of the learned magician, the one Agrippa had tried to ennoble, is handed over to the judgement of the public.