Posts Tagged ‘Faust’

Faust and links

BY: Mark

Following a previous about the Praxis Magica Faustiana and the subsequent realization that I knew very little about Faust, both historically and in literature, I’ve been working on getting educated. It’s a humbling process that dovetails with some of my long-standing embarrassment about the focus of this site. I have wanted DARKLINE to be about esoterica and the strange occult world we live in, but I’m constantly faced with the fact that I know very little of these things. I suppose one should consider oneself a life-long student, but the depth of my ignorance is, well, exceedingly deep. The default solution has been to hunker down and do nothing, which serves no one, especially myself. It is time to shake off that fear, and get on with the enlightenment. The point isn’t to build a platform to display my erudition (which this clearly isn’t), but to provide a forum for discussion and learning. I just get to be the guy providing the general direction of the rubric.

To that end, here’s the current state of my Faust education.

If one is to believe Wikipedia, Goethe’s Faust has, as one of its inspirations, Jacob Bidermann’s play Cenodoxus, though without digging into the text, it is hard to say where the inspiration lies, as Cenodoxus appears to dance around the question of the price of secret knowledge rather than addressing it directly. Goethe’s Faust, even, does not appear to be as dark and as much as a morality tale as the myth that is burned in my brain–the random bits of literary mythology one picks up in course of an classical education. Faust, the man–notably one Dr. Johann Georg Faust–appears to have been a 16th charlatan of the classic sort: a racounteur, a traveling alchemist, a magician, and a scoundrel. Exactly the sort of man that would be a perfect source for the hubristic hero of the tragic plays.

Christopher Marlowe wrote a play about him within fifty or so years after he supposedly died, and I find it almost most interesting than the play itself that Marlowe wrote a play about a man’s pact with the Devil–a suspiciously Christian theme, and I’m hard pressed to think of a Shakespeare play which has a similar theme. Old Bill relied on much more pagan sources for his fantastical elements. Odd, don’t you think? Or was it simply a matter of Shakespeare knowing who his real audiences were and playing more readily to them?

Anyway, Faust the charlatan was purported to be sort of man who would have dabbled in the Black Arts, which makes the historical provenance of Praxis Magica Faustiana certainly easier to swallow. And given the subject material of the text, it follows that this could be source of that type of grimoire known as ‘Faustian.’

Dan Harms has posted a link to a digitized version of a 18th century German grimoire, which falls under the category of Faustian magic. Of course, the comments are insightful and filled with smart people talking all manner of things that will send you spiraling off into other corners of the occult world. Including Dan’s original commentary on the idea of the liber spirituum, the type of book that this MS. purports to be.

According to the commenters, the Herzogin Anna Amalia Bibliothek is a hothouse of Faustian magical documents. Who knew there were enough of these that a library could specialize in them? The digitization of the Liber Spirituum Potentissimorum is of exceptional quality, and it makes my fingers tingle as I look at it.

I suppose any magician who seeks knowledge from spirits is engaging in Faustian Magick, though I wonder about the veracity of that statement. Dee, Crowley, and so on sought to communicate with otherworldly creatures in order to gain knowledge. Was Faust, in the 16th century, the first one to do this? Or was his story simply the most readily available and comprehensible to the masses? There certainly had to be other seekers before Faust . . .

Praxis Magica Faustiana

BY: Mark

Published in a limited & numbered edition by the Society of Esoteric Endeavour (out of a secret back room at Caduceus Books, I believe), the Praxis Magica Faustiana is an anonymous grimoire attributed to Dr. Johann Faust himself.*

It’s a wee thing, the Praxis Magica Faustiana, and is just a collection of eleven lithographs (text and illustrations) that offer techniques for binding Lucifer and Mephistophiles (who appear as respective components of light and darkness) in order to gain access to the generative forces of the universe. The last lithograph is a picture of two lions embracing a plant, which the Caduceus edition’s commentary points out is probably a mandrake root.

The Praxis Magica Faustina crops up in Arthur Edward Waite’s Book of Ceremonial Magic in the chapter on Black Magic (filed away under the section of Miscellaneous Texts Which Are Probably Quackery, But Let’s Be Thorough And List Them), and he cites its history as being contained in a manuscript added to the Municipal Library of Weimar in 1571. Which, if true, suggests that municipal libraries were much different than they are now. Waite bases his notes on an unprinted translation by Major Irwin, which he owned, and which is now held by the Cleveland Public Library in the United States.

Some public libraries are still havens for esoteric texts, I guess.

Anyway, Waite points out that (a) there was no Municipal Library in Goethe’s birthplace, and (b) the collection as it existed in his era does not contain this MS. Either way, this little grimoire has been published in a fine edition by Caduceus so that we may lay our eyes on its particularly odd incantations and make our own assessment.

The interesting historical tidbit this grimoire provides is a reference point for where Goethe might have sourced the name ‘Mephistopheles,’ as the Praxis Magica Faustiana may be the first historical record of the name. Believed to be of Greek origin, it translates (roughly) to “not light lover,” thereby setting him up as the opposing force with Lucifer, who was still enjoying the “light-bearer” sobriquet.

The pictures and incantations themselves are not very complex, and most of them are exhortations to various named demonic and angelic figures to abide by the commands of the magician. The seventh page, in fact, shows a picture of a cock (the creature who summons the morning light and who is a symbolic stand-in for Lucifer) above the text “Lucifer amicus meus dilectus et Servus”–”Lucifer friend, my love and my servant.” These Infernal Conjurations and Oaths as practiced by the good Doctor certainly appear to be of the kindler and gentler variety.

The Irwin text contains an additional page which contains an interesting depiction of a small creature–perhaps a homunculus–that may be related to the mandrake root drawing of the MS. The Caduceus commentary goes into some interesting discussion about the figure, which I’ll save for another post.

* Somewhat foolishly, I was thinking that Faust was an entirely literary creation, making the real-world existence of an actual grimoire penned by the good Doctor not unlike the Necronomicon as written by Abdul Alhazred, but in the process of educating myself about the history of this text (read getting called on my assumption by a sharp-eyed reader), it turns out out that Faust really existed. Praxis Magica Faustiana is noted as being written in 1527, well within the range of Faust’s lifespan, though it was added to the Municipal Library of Weimar in 1571, after his death. It’s still very likely that the grimoire was used by Goethe as part of his inspiration for his play, though Christopher Marlowe’s play (written in 1604) also used Mephistopheles.