Faust
Faust names 4 different subjects across the 6 encyclopedias on this shelf. Each is set out below.
Faust A magician of the sixteenth century
An Encyclopaedia of Occultism (1920)
A magician of the sixteenth century, famous in legend and literature. There is sound proof that such a person existed. Trithemius (q.v.) mentions him in a letter written in 1507, in which he speaks of him in terms of contempt, as a fool and a mountebank who pretended that he could restore the writings of the ancients were they wiped out of human memory, and blasphemed concerning the miracles of Christ. Mudt, a canon of the German Church also alludes to him in a letter as a charlatan. Johann Gast, a Protestant pastor of Basel, appears to have known Faust, and considers a horse and dog belonging to him to have been familiar spirits. Wier (q.v.), the great protector of witches, mentions Faust in a work of his, as a drunkard who had studied magic at Cracow. He also mentions that in the end Satan strangled him after his house had been shaken by a terrific din. From other evidence it is pretty clear that Faust was a wandering magician or necromancer. whose picturesque character won him wide publicity or notoriety. By the end of the century in which he flourished he had become the model of the mediæval magician, and his name was for ever linked with those of Virgil, Bacon, Pope Silvester and others. The origins of the Faust legend are of very great antiquity. The essentials underlying the story are the pact with Satan, and the supposed vicious character of purely human learning. The idea of the pact with Satan belongs to both Jewish and Christian magico-religious belief, but is probably more truly Kabalistic than anything else, and can scarcely be traced further back; unless it resides in the savage idea that a sacrificed person takes the place of the deity, to which he is immolated during the period of life remaining to him before his execution, and afterwards becomes one with the god. The wickedness of believing in the all-sufficiency of human knowledge is a favourite theme with the early Lutherans, whose beliefs strongly coloured the Faust legend; but vivid hues and wondrously carven outlines were also afforded its edifice by the thought of the age in which it finally took shape; and in the ancient Faust- books we find tortuous passages of thought and quaintnesses of conception which recall to our minds the artistry of the Renaissance. The Faust-book soon spread over Europe; but to England is due the honour of the first dramatic representation of the story by Christopher Marlowe, who in the Tragicall History of Dr. Faustus produced a wondrous, if unequal drama, the outstanding passages of which contained most of his best work. Lessing wrote a Faust play during the German revival of the eighteenth century, but it remained to Goethe to crown the legend with the creation of the Fetch greatest psychological drama the world has ever seen. The manner in which Goethe differed from his predecessors in his treatment of the story lies in the circumstance that he gives a different character to the pact between Faust and Mephistopheles, whose nature again is totally at variance with the devils of the old Faust-books. From Lessing Goethe received the idea of Faust's final salvation. It may be said that though in some respects Goethe adopted the letter of the old legend he did not adopt its spirit. Probably the story of Faust has given to thousands their only idea of mediæval magic, and this idea has lost nothing in the hands of Goethe, who has cast about the subject a much greater halo of mystery than it perhaps really contains. (See Goethe.)
Faust fowst, Doctor Johann (1480-1538)
Aiton's Encyclopedia (1910)
fowst, Doctor Johann (1480-1538), a German magician. He was a native of Wurtemberg. There is no doubt that such a man lived in Germany, and that he was credited with the possession of magic arts and of living in intimate association with evil spirits. In other words, he was considered a master of the black art. According to the legend of Dr. Faust, however, he was a youth of large fortune who flung away his money and gave himself over to a wild life. He then began to study magic and made a bargain with Satan, according to which he was to have wealth and pleasure for twenty-four years. At the end of this time his soul was to belong to the Evil One. Faust signed a contract in his own blood to the effect that: "(1) He shall renounce God and all celestial hosts; (2) He shall be an enemy of all mankind; (3) He shall not obey priests; (4) He shall not go to church, nor partake of the holy sacraments; (5) He shall hate and shun wedlock." Mephistopheles, a devil, "who liked to live among men," went with Faust and helped him to riot in every kind of gross pleasure for twenty-four years as agreed. At the end of that time, Satan appeared in a hideous form at midnight and bore Faust away to everlasting torment. The legend has been used as literary material by many writers in Germany and elsewhere. In all perhaps 200 or 300 volumes have the whole or a part of their space devoted to the Faust legend and his black arts. This Dr. Faust is the basis of Goethe's Faust, a production which is considered Goethe's greatest work. It is needless to add that it would be a bold writer who would undertake to improve Goethe's use of the legend. See Goethe
Faust or FAUSTUS, DR
Collier's New Encyclopedia (1921)
or FAUSTUS, DR. JOHANN, a famous magician, about whose name and existence so many obscure legends have grown, lived in the beginning of the 16th century, and was probably born at Knittlingen, in Suabia. After receiving his education at Wittenberg, he went to Ingolstadt, where he studied magic, and ocmedicine, astrology, and cupied himself in alchemical experiments. Faust was a man of great scientific acquirements; and, according to legendary tradition, he made use of his powers to inspire his countrymen with a firm belief that he had dealings with the devil. The story of Dr. Faustus furnished the subject of a remarkable dramatic poem by Christopher Marlowe, and has been immortalized by the genius of Goethe. Gounod's well-known opera is also founded on this character.
Faust or FUST, JOHANN
Collier's New Encyclopedia (1921)
or FUST, JOHANN, one of the three artists to whom the invention of printing has been ascribed, was the son of a goldsmith at Mentz, Germany. The other two were Gutenberg and Schöffer; to the former of whom the invention of printing with wooden blocks has been attributed; and to the latter, who married the daughter of Faust, is allowed the honor of having invented punches and matrices, by means of which this grand art was carried to perfection. It is believed that he died of the plague in 1466.
What Has Changed in the Last Century
The historical core of these accounts still stands: a wandering magician named Georg or Johann Faust really did move around German lands in the early 1500s, dismissed by Trithemius in 1507 as a mountebank, and the printed Historia von D. Johann Fausten of 1587 turned him into the model magician whom Marlowe and then Goethe took up. Modern scholars generally place his death around 1540-41 rather than the 1538 given by Aiton's in 1910, and they lean toward Helmstadt near Heidelberg over the Knittlingen that Collier's offered in 1921, though neither is settled. What the Occultism volume of 1920 could not foresee was how much further the legend would travel: Murnau filmed it in 1926, and Thomas Mann's Doktor Faustus (1947) recast the pact as a composer's bargain and an allegory of Germany under the Nazis, so that "Faustian bargain" is now a phrase used about nuclear weapons and artificial intelligence rather than about necromancy. On the legend's literary history and on Goethe's departures from the old Faust-books, these entries read as well today as they did then.
Written for this edition, 2026.