The Devil, fighting with God for the souls of all mankind, was supposed to have a special passion for catching souls. Being the prince of the world, he could easily grant even the most extravagant wishes, and was sometimes willing to pay a high price when a man promised to be his for time and eternity. Thus originated the idea of making compacts with the Devil; and it is worthy of note that in these compacts the Devil is very careful to establish his title to the soul of man by a faultless legal document. He has, as we shall learn, sufficient reason to distrust all promises made him by men and saints.
Following the authority of the old legends, we find that even the good Lord frequently lends his assistance to cheating the Devil out of his own. He is always duped and the vilest tricks are resorted to cheat him. While thus the Devil, having profited by experience, always insists upon having his rights insured by an unequivocal instrument (which in later centuries is signed with blood); he, in his turn, is fearlessly trusted to keep his promise, and this is a fact which must be mentioned to his honor, for although he is said to be a liar from the beginning, not one case is known, in all devil-lore in which the Devil attempts to cheat his stipulators. Thus he appears as the most unfairly maligned person, and as a martyr of simple-minded honesty.
The oldest story of a devil-contract is the legend of Theophilus, first told by Eutychian, who declares he had witnessed the whole affair with his own eyes. The most famous, most significant, and the most profound story among the legends of devil-contracts is the saga of Dr. Johannes Faustus. Whether the hero of the Faust legend derives his name from the Latin faustus, i. e., the favored one, or from the well-known Mayence goldsmith Fust, the companion of Gensfleisch vom Gutenberg, the inventor of printing, or whether he was no historical personality at all, is an open question. Certain it is that all the stories of the great naturalists and thinkers whom the people at the time regarded as wizards were by and by attributed to him, and the figure of Dr. Faustus became the center of an extensive circle of traditions. The tales about Albertus Magnus, Johannes Teutonicus (Deutsch), Trithemius, Abbot of Sponheim, Agrippa of Nettesheim, Theophrastus, and Paracelsus, were retold of Faust, and Faust became a poetical personification of the great revolutionary aspirations in the time immediately preceding and following the Reformation.
The original form of the Faust-legend represents the Roman Catholic standpoint. Faust allies himself with the Devil, works his miracles by the black art, and pays for its practice with his soul. He begins, his career in Wittenberg, the university at which Luther taught, and is the embodiment of natural science, of historical investigation, of the Renaissance, and of modern discoveries and inventions. As such he subdues nature, restores to life the heroes of ancient Greece, gathers knowledge about distant lands, and revives Helen, the ideal of classic beauty.
As the fall of the Devil is, according to Biblical authority, attributed to pride and ambition, so progress and the spirit of investigation were denounced as Satan's work, and all inquiry into the mysteries of nature was regarded as magic. Think only of Roger Bacon, that studious, noble monk, and a greater scientist than his more famous namesake, Lord Bacon. In the thirties of the 13th century, at the University of Paris, when Roger Bacon, making some experiments with light, made the rainbow-colors appear on a screen, the audience ran away from him terrified, and his life was endangered because he was suspected of practising the dark arts.
Gallery[]
A collection of all Faustian Deals Zahn has made.
Trivia[]
The name of the deals comes from the legendary magician Johannes Faustus (simply known as Faust), who allegedly made a deal with Mephistopheles (another name for the Devil) in exchange for knowledge and power.
