ABSTRACT
Georg Faust, self-styled ‘Demigod from Heidelberg’, ‘Philosopher of Philosophers’, ‘Magister Georgius Sabellicus, Faustus junior, wellspring of necromancers, astrologer, second magus, chiromancer, aeromancer, second in the art of hydromancy’ - Faust, for all his evident talent for self-advertisement, had a very bad press from his own age. 1 To Abbot Trithemius of Sponheim, he was a vagabond, a braggart and a rogue; to the learned monk Conrad Mutianus Rufus, nothing but a boaster and a fool; to the scholar Joachim Camerarius, a windbag of empty superstition. The city fathers of Nuremberg labelled him ‘the great sodomite and nigromancer’, the reformer Philipp Melanchthon execrated him as a ‘vile beast’ and ‘a stinking privy of the devil’, and the Heidelberg professor Augustin Lercheimer described him as a lewd and devilish scamp, a parasite, glutton and drunkard, who lived from quackery. Even if few of these graphic indictments are based on reliable first-hand experience, and even if the more direct and apparently authentic sources are themselves coloured by prejudice, rivalry, or antipathy - it is still extraordinary that this was the historical figure who would be transmuted into Marlowe’s doomed and anguished scholar, let alone into Goethe’s restlessly striving individual who proceeds through universal experience and error towards his ultimate salvation.
