I. THE HISTORICAL FIGURE
Various documents of the first decades of the six-
teenth century mention a contemporary necromancer
calling himself Faust. In 1507 the abbot J. Tritheim
wrote in reply to an inquiry:
Georg Sabellicus... is a worthless fellow... who should
be castigated to stop his proclaiming of abominable and
sacrilegious doctrines.... He has chosen to call himself
Magister Georgius Sabellicus, Faustus junior, fons necro-
manticorum, astrologus, magus secundus, chiromanticus,
aëromanticus, pyromanticus, in hydra arte secundus
([Episto-
lae] ad diversos, Hagen [1536], p. 312; see A. Tille, Faust-
splitter, Berlin [1900], no. 1).
“Sabellicus” and “Faustus” may be humanist latiniza-
tions of a German place name and a German family
name (or of two family names), but both “the Sabine”—
for ancient Rome the Sabine Hills were the country
of witchcraft—and “the Fortunate” are traditional
epithets of magicians.
Tritheim reports having been in Gelnhausen the year
before at the same time as Faust and hearing from
clerics there Faust's boast that, “if all the works of
Plato and Aristotle... had been lost, he through his
genius would, like a second Esra, restore them entire
and better than before.” In Würzburg, Tritheim con-
tinues, Faust even claimed that he could perform all
the miracles of Christ; subsequently he was appointed
schoolmaster at Kreuznach because of his vaunted
alchemical learning, but had to flee when his debauch-
ery of his pupils was discovered.
In 1509 a Johann Faust from Simmern (a principality
incorporated into Württemberg in 1504) received the
A.B. at Heidelberg; if he was Tritheim's Faust, later
tradition was right in claiming that the astrologer was
born at Knittlingen (the chief town of Simmern) in the
early 1480's. In 1513 Conrad Mudt (Mutianus Rufus,
supporter of Reuchlin and friend of Melanchthon) saw
and heard Georg Faust at Erfurt; he wrote to a fellow
humanist that this “immoderate and Foolish braggart,”
calling himself the “demigod from Heidelberg,” before
astonished listeners “talked nonsense at the inn.” The
accounts of the bishopric of Bamberg record a payment
in 1520 to “Doctor Faustus” for casting the Prince-
Bishop's horoscope; in 1528 the town council of Ingol-
stadt forbade the soothsayer Jörg (i.e., Georg) Faust
to remain in their city; and in 1532 the junior burgo-
master of Nuremberg recorded denial of entry to “Dr.
Faust, the great sodomite and necromancer.” From
1532 to 1536 the same “philosophus” practiced medi-
cal alchemy and soothsaying in the Rhineland and
Lower Franconia with some success; he is reported to
have died in 1540 or 1541 at a village in Württemberg.
