THE HISTORICAL MAGICIAN

Of our four myths, that of Faust is unique in one respect: It undoubtedly began with a real historical person. Unfortunately, although there are many contemporaneous records of his activities, they are defective in many ways, and we do not really know what kind of person the original Faust was.

There was a widely known wandering magician in Germany during the first four decades of the sixteenth century who went under the name of George (in German Jörg, in Latin Georgius) Faust or Faustus; sometimes he was known merely as Doctor Faust. He was born, possibly about 1480, in the small town of Knittlingen in northern Württemberg; and he probably died in about 1540, possibly at Staufen, another small Württemberg town, not far south of Freiburg.

There are some thirteen contemporaneous references to this George Faust. They can be roughly divided into five groups: letters of scholarly opponents; sundry public records; tributes from satisfied customers; other, more noncommittal memoirs; and reactions of Protestant clerical enemies.

The fullest and earliest account of Faust is given in a letter by a scholarly opponent dated 1507. It was written in Latin, as most of the documents of the time were, and was addressed to Johannes Virdung, a mathematician or astrologer who was a professor at the University of Heidelberg. The writer, Johannes Tritheim, a well-known Benedictine scholar, was at that time the abbot of a monastery at Würzburg.