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Deals with the devil aren't what they used to be

Tales of Faust’s bargain teased and consoled an earlier culture with the lure of freedom, the promise of a wider world. But Hell is everywhere now.

Keith Thomas tells the story of an English boy who, for five or six years, “went to sleep with his hands clasped in a praying position, so that if the devils came for him they would find him prepared.” This is the world brilliantly evoked in Daniel Kehlmann’s novel “ Tyll ” (2017), set in early-seventeenth-century Germany, in which Claus, a village miller who has been dabbling in magic and necromancy, is quickly forced to confess by Jesuit inquisitors and sentenced to hang. In these two early stories lie most of the subsequent Faustian motifs: the temptations of knowledge and power; the bargaining away of more distant spiritual gains for nearer material ones; the almost symmetrical rivalry of good and evil forces; the taint of the commercial or contractual bond; the picaresque flights through time and space; even the odd obsession with exciting women called Helen. Myths about the dangers of knowledge (Pandora, Genesis) may be as old as humanity, but the Faustian tale as such really gets going only in the early modern period, when magic, necromancy, and sorcery became intellectual options for educated humanists while remaining potentially heretical choices as far as the established church was concerned.

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