Faustus: The Life and Times of a Renaissance Magician

by Leo Ruickbie

  What made Heidelberg exciting in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries was its championing of the studia humanitatis – what we have come to call Humanism. The Humanists wanted to get away from the Schoolmen, away from the commentators and their endless commentaries, and back to the sources themselves. Introduced to Heidelberg by Peter Luder (1415–1472), Humanism was the latest thing and the best minds of the age gravitated towards it.

  Greek and Hebrew studies were pioneered in Heidelberg in the late fifteenth century. Helmstetter’s student years were under the chancellorship of Johannes von Dahlberg who had arrived in 1480 fresh from a trip to Italy. Dahlberg’s library was noted by Johannes Reuchlin for its many volumes in Latin, Greek and Hebrew. It is thought that Dahlberg may have published De numerorum arcanis mysteriis on the mystical value of numbers. Rudolph Agricola arrived in 1484 and was famed for his lectures on Pliny the Younger. Helmstetter’s fellow students included the celebrated Conrad Celtis, who graduated Master of Arts on 20 October 1485. Trithemius even studied here, leaving in 1482, shortly before Helmstetter arrived. The Humanist school was much under the influence of the Neoplatonic and hermetic writings of Marsilio Ficino (1433–1499) and Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (1463–1494), which were brimming with spectacular ideas on natural magic. In Faustus’s day Heidelberg was getting a reputation for the magic endorsed and practised there.21

  Helmstetter mastered the philosophical complexities, literally. In 1487 he was awarded the degree of Master. However, there was again a problem. On 1 February 1487 it was recorded that ‘Georgio de Helmstadt’ had not met all of the requirements. He had only taken part in two out of three obligatory formal disputations and was required to fulfil this. He did so and with flying colours. On 1 March 1487 ‘Jeorius Helmstadt’ graduated second in his class of ten. Some days later, on 20 March, he took the oath that enabled him to use the Faculty of Arts library. Despite his good grades, it had taken him longer than normal to complete his Master’s course and this suggests that the delay was caused by failing to meet the minimum age of twenty or twenty-one, which gives us another reason to suppose that he must have been born around 1466.22

  After graduating, Helmstetter was required by the university statutes to teach for two years in the Faculty of Arts. This would likely detain him up until 1489. In June 1490 plague broke out in Heidelberg and the university granted its staff permission to flee the city.23 His duties fulfilled, it is unlikely that Helmstetter lingered and when Virdung arrived at the university in late 1492 he was still waiting to meet him by 1507, as we read in Trithemius’s letter, so he evidently did not return before then. Even at this early date we know that he had already taken his first tentative steps on a magical career.

  When Seuter wrote to his friend Ellenbog on 7 October 1534 he sent him a copy of the speech that Professor Pallas Spangel (d.1512) had delivered on the occasion of Emperor Maximilian’s visit, along with a horoscope drawn up for him by Magister Georgius Helmstetter using judicial astrology, physiognomy and chiromancy. Seuter had himself enrolled at Heidelberg on 28 March 1490, so it seems likely that he came into contact with Helmstetter around this time. Ellenbog enjoyed the speech, but he was critical of Helmstetter’s horoscope. Whilst he admitted ignorance in the art of chiromancy, Ellenbog pointed out that Helmstetter had neglected to mark the precise borders of the astrological houses and the planetary positions, and returned the horoscope to Seuter on 12 October. It was not a promising start.24

  4

  The Magus Arrives (1500–1506)

  As the fifteenth century came to a close, millennial fears produced reports of wondrous signs and portents. Prophets sprang up like mushrooms to preach of the Antichrist and the Second Coming, and Arquato (Antonio Torquato) prophesied the destruction of Europe. There were stories of monstrous births, downpours of milk and blood, and stains upon the heavens. A triple moon was seen in the skies over Germany. In 1500 coloured crosses miraculously appeared on people’s clothes in two villages near Sponheim and again in Liège the next year; a portent of plague, according to Trithemius. Legions of deformed children were born in Greece. Plague ravaged France. A corona of flaming swords illuminated Italian skies. It was said that a thunderbolt had struck the Vatican and toppled the Pope from his throne.1

  War touched all corners of Europe. The Ottomans had won two successive battles against the Venetians at Lepanto in 1499 and 1500. Louis XII of France and Ferdinand II of Aragon carved up the Kingdom of Naples between them in 1500. There had been insurrection in the Low Countries (1491, 1492), Alsace (1493) and Swabia (1492). Rebels were swarming across the Empire. Armed and mutinous peasants were demanding better rights and being slaughtered for such temerity. Their discontent would simmer for many more years before coming to a final, bloody reckoning.

  Death, pestilence, famine and war – the Horsemen of the Apocalypse – might well have been thought to be gathering. One who saw them more clearly than others was Albrecht Dürer (1471–1528). After a supposed rain of blood he had seen the crucifixion in a stain left on a servant girl’s smock. In 1498 he issued his broadsheets on the ‘Secret Revelation of St John’ amongst which is the famous ‘Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse’. Three of the Four Horsemen are depicted in the dress of the ruling classes. They ride rough-shod over the common people. Famine, the only rider not attired in the finery of the elite, tramples a sumptuously be-robed bishop. Above it all an angel hovers in the sky, appearing to bless the scene and mock poor humanity.

  Witchcraft and magic were always pressing concerns and millennial tension inevitably heightened the sense of unease surrounding them. The decade to 1500 had seen witches executed in their droves across the Empire. Over the same period numerous works on witches and magic appeared. In 1500 the Inquisitor Bernardo Rategno warned of the spread and increase of witches in his Tractatus de strigibus. Europe seemed to be swarming with the agents of the Devil. In time Faustus, too, would be reckoned amongst their unholy ranks.

  The Black Magic Pope

  Despite the hysterical prophecies and mysterious signs, the world did not end when the arbitrary numbering we give to time changed from one set of figures to another. Things continued largely as they had before and in some ways got better. Leonardo had painted his La Gioconda (it was not called the Mona Lisa until after his death). Dürer completed his famous self-portrait and began work on the Lamentation for Christ. The great Humanist scholar and controversial cabbalist Johannes Reuchlin (1455–1522), whose career would define the intellectual climate of his age, had published his Hebrew grammar – the first of its kind. Some things, of course, became worse.

  With the problems of ever increasing numbers of heretics and heathens weighing on his mind, Pope Alexander VI (1431–1503) tried to rally support for a crusade, unsuccessfully, while an estimated 30,000 pilgrims gathered in Rome for the Church’s Jubilee year died of plague. Fortunately, Copernicus, also on pilgrimage to Rome in 1500, survived the plague to observe the lunar eclipse of 6 November – an event that could only have looked to the untutored like the shadow of death passing across the moon. Alexander VI had reputedly spared no expense for the Jubilee celebrations, but Rome must have seemed like a city of the dead, heaped with reeking corpses.

  As the first printed music appeared in 1501 – mostly intended for use in private homes – Alexander VI issued a Papal Bull demanding that German printers submit their books to ecclesiastical authorities for licensing. Almost in response, a pamphlet against the papacy appeared accusing the Holy See of being a den of iniquity. Alexander himself was denounced as an ‘abyss of vice, a subverter of all justice, human or divine’.2

  While Alexander was celebrating the marriage of his daughter Lucrezia Borgia to Alfonso, son and heir of Duke Ercole of Ferrara, with a party unrivalled for its splendour and extravagance, Faustus, for his part, was supposed to have produced three Latin texts on magic that year graced by the name of His Holiness. It is no wonder that he wanted everything vetted before it got into print. Of the texts, two fall int
o the Höllenzwang category with prefaces allegedly written by the Pope himself: D. I. Fausti dreyfacher Hoellen-Zwang (D[octor] Fausti Threefold Harrowing of Hell) and D. Faustus vierfacher Höllen-Zwang (D[octor] Faustus’s Fourfold Harrowing of Hell). The latter is notable for the use of the name Faustus, and the initial I. (J.) could be a contraction of the later and incorrect Johannes or stand for Jörg, an historically recorded version of Georgius. The third text appeared under the title of Tabellae Rabellinae Geister-Commando, to be followed the next year by D. Fausts (Original) Geister Commando, again printed in Rome under the falsified imprimatur of Alexander VI.

  On the cover of the (Original) Geister Commando we see the smudged picture of a male head, bearded and wearing a cylindrical fez-like hat. Underneath is the inscription ‘The magus Dr Faustus of the city of Kundlingia wrote this’. It claims to be an original work of magic with the place of Rome given, the additional name of Alexander VI and the date of 1502. It further claims to have been through the hands of a certain ‘D. Habermanno (Mago)’ and privately printed, under penalty of excommunication, in 1510 in the reign of Pope Julius II. This Dr Johann Haberman (1516–1590) was a theologian and Hebraist who also had a reputation as the author of a number of magical texts. The dates of publication and Haberman’s own do not match and, given the catalogue of apparently pious Lutheran works in his name, his sideline in grimoire seems to have been someone’s idea of a joke.

  Alexander VI had the reputation of being a black magician, he was after all a Borgia, and it was said that he had sold his soul to the Devil for the papacy. He would become something of another ‘Faust’ in Barnabe Barnes’s 1607 play The Devil’s Charter. A connection between the two was thus clearly made at a later date.

  There were rumours of grisly black magic in the Castel Sant’Angelo, implicating Alexander VI’s son, the infamous Cesare Borgia (1475–1507), and suggesting the presence of an able necromancer. When one of Cesare’s enemies – the young Astorre Manfredi – disappeared inside the castle in 1501, never to return, the word was that he had been subjected to the most gruesome rituals.

  It has been suggested that Manfredi fell victim to the practice of extispicium (extispicy) or pedomancy, divination by the examination of human entrails. That Manfredi died in the Castel Sant’Angelo, the converted mausoleum of the Roman Emperor Hadrian – also alleged to have practiced extispicium – adds weight to the argument for some.3 Extispicium was not a skill one could easily pick up, even if Cesare proved he had the stomach for its nauseating techniques. Ambitious and adventurous men were attracted to Cesare, and Faustus was certainly both, but it is too much to say that he was there.

  Alas, as with most of the Faustian works of magic, it is most probable that the dates of publication of these grimoires were backdated by unscrupulous printers, with the Pope’s preface or imprint added as an extra selling point or opportunistic defamation. The (Original) Geister Commando text only has a traceable history to 1846 when it was acquired by the British Museum from a Berlin antiquarian bookseller, and on the basis of textual similarities and typography is thought to have been produced between 1765 and 1780. Likewise, the dreyfacher Hoellen-Zwang and Tabellae Rabellinae can only be dated to their publication in the nineteenth century.4 The use of ‘Faustus’ and the intitial I. (J.) leaves room for doubt in the vierfacher Höllen-Zwang, but the text is only traceable to 1680, the date of its supposed second printing. On textual grounds, it is the mention of the spirit Mephistopheles that, as I will argue later, almost certainly seals the fate of these texts as later forgeries.

  For all his unsavoury reputation, it is inconceivable that Alexander would have permitted his name to appear on such documents. Faustus could very well have been in Rome, or somewhere in Italy at least, attracted like so many others by the great reputations of that country’s venerable universities, but it would be some years later before the first verifiable reference to him would be made.

  The Prince of Necromancers

  It was 1506 and a weary 44 year-old monk who went by the name of Trithemius was returning from the court of the Prince-Elector, Margrave Joachim I von Brandenburg (1484–1535) in Berlin. He was not in a good mood. Earlier he had been forced to leave the Benedictine monastery of St Martin at Sponheim, near Bad Kreuznach, and his post of abbot and, he said, he feared for his life. He had been painfully laid up in Leipzig for six days with kidney stones before managing to struggle on to Gotha where he visited his friend Mutianus, Canon of St Mary’s Church. From there he made his way to Gelnhausen, arriving towards the end of May. Here he would make one of the most fateful encounters in history and provide us with the single most important written reference to Faustus.

  Gelnhausen was an old Freie Reichsstadt (Imperial Free City) founded by Emperor Friedrich I, Barbarossa, in 1170. It was a prosperous town guarded by its encircling wall, the castle of Barbarossaburg (or Königspfalz) lying on an island in the River Kinzig and the Fratzenstein (‘grotesque face stone’, later renamed the Hexenturm or ‘Witch’s Tower’), a reminder of the Hussite Wars in the early fifteenth century. The Knights of St John of Jerusalem had long established themselves here in a building that is now one of the oldest half-timbered houses in Hesse. The town’s importance derived from its situation on the old Via Regia trade route between Frankfurt and Leipzig.

  Beyond Frankfurt lay Sponheim. The exiled abbot’s thoughts might well have turned to his old monastery, to the vegetable gardens and orchards now in bud and spring flower, and to the circumstances of his hasty departure. If he kept on the Via Regia he could be back once more in the place where he had felt that God had once led him. But now, where would he go? What fresh trials did the future hold? It was then that the legend of Faustus was born.

  There are no records to examine, the devastations of war and fire have destroyed anything that might have been buried in the town archives, but there are local theories. According to these, Trithemius stayed in the Arnsburger Hof at 41 Langasse. Founded by Kloster Arnsburg, a Cistercian monastery near Lich in Hesse, in the thirteenth century, the current building was entirely reconstructed in the eighteenth century. Faustus, meanwhile, supposedly stayed across the way in Der Goldene Löwe, nowadays Zum Löwen, but still sporting a golden lion affixed to its half-timbered façade. Trithemius was safely lodged with the ecclesiastics, whilst Faustus shared the fleas with the commercial travellers.5

  It was a year later when Trithemius told his story. He had received a letter from Johannes Virdung von Haßfurt asking him for information about a certain Faustus. Virdung was eagerly awaiting his arrival and sought out the opinion of Trithemius. In doing so he had inadvertently tossed Faustus’s career to the four winds. Trithemius’s reply in 1507 was the first recorded reference to Faustus and it was not a flattering one.

  That man about whom you wrote to me, Georgius Sabellicus, who dares to call himself the prince of necromancers, is a wandering vagrant, a driveller and a cheat, who deserves to be punished with a whip that he may not lightly dare to publicly profess that which is abominable and against the holy church.6

  Trithemius lost no time in blackening Faustus’s name; barely had he mentioned him but he was heaping insult upon insult. For all his hard words, Trithemius’s description of Faustus gives us one of the best insights into his career, although we should not, like Trithemius, presume to judge his character on account of that career. Trithemius expanded on his subject, prejudice in every stroke of the quill.

  Indeed, what are the titles assumed by this man, if not the signs of a most foolish and insane mind, who reveals himself to be a fool and not a philosopher? Thus indeed has he formulated an appropriate title: Magister Georgius Sabellicus Faustus Junior, fount of necromancy, astrologer, second magus, cheiromancer, agromancer, pyromancer, second in the art of water. See the foolish rashness of the man, how much madness he displays, how he presumes to declare himself the fount of necromancy, when truly, ignorant of all good education, he should rather call himself a fool than a master.7

  These tit
les may well seem ludicrous now, but during the Renaissance it was not thought insane to practice the divinatory arts, although all of these practices had been condemned as unchristian at one time or another. Trithemius was also writing to an astrologer. It was not very politic of him to list the title of ‘astrologer’ as the product of a ‘most foolish and insane mind’. Trithemius was trying to influence Virdung’s opinion of Faustus, but he may well have also influenced Virdung’s opinion of himself. It is an even stranger remark, since Trithemius dabbled in divination by the stars himself. In 1508 he composed an astrological history of the world for Maximilian I. He also attributed a riding accident to the influence of Saturn. He believed that his form of astrology was entirely in keeping with Christian dogma, but lambasted the astrology of others, particularly judicial or divinatory astrology. It was a highly self-serving position to take. He believed that demons co-operated with its practitioners, and that the astrologer (and the diviner in general) was ‘an imitator and disciple of the Devil’.8

  The Germans had been noted for their use of divination – especially the casting of lots – since Tacitus reported it in his Germania as early as the first century CE. It was still widespread enough (or perhaps even more advanced) in the fifteenth century for the Bohemian poet Johannes von Tepl (c.1350–c.1415) to list eleven different varieties in Der Ackermann und der Tod (1401). Writing in 1456 the Bavarian physician, writer and diplomat, Johannes Hartlieb (c.1400–1468), reduced the number to seven ‘forbidden arts’, intended to reflect the seven Liberal Arts. Paracelsus was still using a taxonomy similar to Hartlieb’s in 1537–8. The infamous witch-hunters’ manual of Kramer and Sprenger, the Malleus Maleficarum (‘Hammer of the Witches’), listed fifteen types in 1486. Not to be outdone, Trithemius catalogued an astounding 44 varieties of divination in 1508 – a list he would later expand.