Goethe's Faust: the wager with Mephistopheles and the thirst for knowledge

From the historical Faust of the sixteenth century to Goethe's drama: alchemy, the Homunculus and the symbolic meaning of the wager with Mephistopheles.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe worked on Faust for almost his entire life. The earliest scenes, known as the Urfaust, date from the 1770s; Part One appeared in 1808, while Part Two was completed shortly before the author's death and published posthumously in 1832. Over this long span the old folk tale of the magician who sold himself to the devil became a meditation on the human desire to know everything, even what lies beyond the limits of reason.

From historical magician to chapbook

Behind the character stands a real but elusive figure: one Johann Georg Faust, active in Germany in the first half of the sixteenth century and remembered by the sources as an astrologer, palm reader and charlatan. After his death, around 1540, rumours about him multiplied. In 1587 the publisher Johann Spies printed in Frankfurt the Historia von D. Johann Fausten, an edifying book that told of the pact with the demon and the final damnation as a warning to readers.

Goethe knew the story mainly through puppet theatre, which had carried it to German fairs for generations. As a young man, during a long convalescence in Frankfurt, he had also turned to alchemical and Paracelsian writings thanks to his Pietist friend Susanna von Klettenberg, as he himself recounts in Poetry and Truth. Those readings, among them Georg von Welling's Opus mago-cabbalisticum, left clear traces in the opening scenes of the drama.

The sign of the macrocosm and the Earth Spirit

Goethe's Faust opens in a Gothic study full of books and alembics. The doctor, disappointed by philosophy, law, medicine and theology, turns to magic. Opening a book attributed to Nostradamus, he contemplates the sign of the macrocosm, an image of a universe in which all forces are interwoven, then summons the Earth Spirit, which rejects him with contempt. It is the first, burning lesson: man can sense the harmony of the cosmos, but cannot possess it.

Shortly afterwards Faust confesses his inner division in a line that has become proverbial: «Two souls, alas, dwell within my breast». One clings to the world of the senses, the other aspires to the regions of the spirit. This double tension, more than any taste for the supernatural, is the true engine of the drama, and every later episode puts a different side of it to the test.

A wager, not a simple pact

Unlike the chapbooks, Goethe does not build the story on a contract with a deadline. The Prologue in Heaven shows the Lord allowing Mephistopheles to tempt Faust, as happens to Job in the Bible. On earth, Faust then strikes a true wager with the devil: he will lose his soul only if, satisfied, he says to the passing moment «Stay, you are so fair». Mephistopheles describes himself as part of that power which always wills evil and always works good.

In Part Two the Hermetic symbolism grows even denser. Wagner, Faust's former assistant, creates in a phial the Homunculus, the small artificial being mentioned in the texts attributed to Paracelsus. Then come the Classical Walpurgis Night, the meeting with Helen of Troy and the mysterious journey to the Mothers, primordial powers from which, according to the drama, all forms are born.

The ending and the Eternal Feminine

When Faust, now old and blind, finally speaks the fatal words, he does so while imagining a free people on land wrested from the sea. Mephistopheles believes he has won, but the angels snatch the soul and carry it upwards. The final chorus declares that «the Eternal Feminine draws us on high»: salvation does not come from magic, but from an impulse of love that surpasses it.

This is why Faust has remained a point of reference for anyone studying esotericism in literature. Goethe used alchemy, Kabbalah and demonology not as doctrines to be taught, but as a symbolic language for describing the restlessness of modern man, always poised between knowledge and desire, between the temptation of power and the need for a higher meaning.