Mystical systems
Faust
Direct answer
Faust is the scholar of German legend who trades his soul to the devil for knowledge and power, a figure based on a wandering astrologer who died about 1540.
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At a glance
- Found in
- Mystical Systems
- Related
- Pact with the Devil, Mephistopheles, Hubris, Necromancy
Faust is the scholar of German legend who trades his soul to the devil for knowledge and power, a figure based on a wandering astrologer who died about 1540.
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Was Faust a real person?
The legend tells of a learned man, weary of the limits of ordinary study, who calls up a spirit and signs away his soul in blood for a set term of years. In return the spirit serves him, answers his questions about heaven and hell, and carries him across the world. When the term ends the debt is collected.
Behind the legend stands a real person. A Georg or Johann Faust appears in German records between about 1507 and 1540 as a travelling astrologer, alchemist and showman, denounced by scholars as a boaster and expelled from more than one town. Stories gathered round him after his death. The tale's ending changed with the centuries: in the first printed version he is torn apart and damned as a warning to the curious, while in Goethe's play, finished in 1831, the striving that led him astray is also what allows him to be saved.
On the tree of the hidden arts: Forbidden knowledge.
What sets Faust apart
Faust is the rare legend whose growth can be watched in dated print. Within fifty years a disreputable fortune teller became the hero of a bestseller, within sixty a tragic figure on the London stage, and for two centuries after that a puppet show for fairs, which is how the young Goethe first met him. Each age made him want what it most distrusted wanting: forbidden theology in the age of Luther, dominion in the age of Marlowe, boundless experience in the age of Goethe.
- Historical Faust: astrologer and magician, recorded about 1507 to 1540
- First book: Historia von D. Johann Fausten, Frankfurt, 1587
- Length of the pact: twenty-four years in the 1587 chapbook
- Marlowe: Doctor Faustus, staged in the early 1590s, printed 1604
- Goethe: Faust, Part One 1808; Part Two 1832
Often mistaken for something else: Mephistopheles is the spirit who serves and tempts; Faust is the human who signs, and the story is told as his choice and his reckoning.
The story behind Faust
The abbot Johannes Trithemius described Faust unflatteringly in a letter of 1507. The Historia von D. Johann Fausten, printed by Johann Spies at Frankfurt in 1587, gave the legend its shape and its pact of twenty-four years. Christopher Marlowe turned an English translation into The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus, staged in the early 1590s and printed in 1604. Goethe published the first part of Faust in 1808 and completed the second shortly before his death in 1832. Thomas Mann's novel Doctor Faustus followed in 1947.
Why Faust matters
Faust is the modern West's chief story about the price of knowledge, and the word Faustian has passed into ordinary speech from it.
How to read Faust
Critics apply the name to the legend and its many versions; in everyday talk a Faustian choice is a gain bought at a moral cost.
Faust in practice: an example
A researcher who accepts tainted funding to finish a life's project might hear a colleague call the arrangement Faustian.
Where readings of Faust go wrong
The versions disagree about his guilt and his fate, so a claim about what Faust means should say which Faust is meant.
Sources and editorial method
This entry summarizes the tradition in the Almanac's own words; where no source is listed, it is an editorial summary rather than a primary text, and symbolic readings are named as the tradition's, not as fact.
- Source
- The Great Almanac Dictionary
- Category
- Mystical Systems
- Aliases
- faust legend, faust meaning, doctor faustus, who was faust, johann faust
- Last updated
- 2026-09-26
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Common questions
Was Faust a real person?
Yes, in outline. A man called Georg or Johann Faust worked as an astrologer and magician in Germany in the early sixteenth century and died around 1540. Almost everything else told of him is legend added later.
What did Faust sell his soul for?
In the chapbook of 1587, for twenty-four years in which the spirit Mephostophiles would serve him and answer all his questions. Later versions stress different prizes: power and pleasure in Marlowe, the fullness of experience in Goethe.
Is Faust saved or damned?
It depends on the version. He is dragged to hell in the chapbook and in Marlowe's play. In Goethe's Faust angels carry his soul away from Mephistopheles at the end, on the ground that he never ceased to strive.
