Doctor Faust’s Fourfold Harrowing of Hell

The Vierfacher Höllen-Zwang, or ‘fourfold compulsion of hell’, is one of a family of German grimoires that circulated under the name of Doctor Johann Faust, the sixteenth-century magician whose legend had become a byword for pacts with the devil. Faustian Höllenzwang texts, which promise power to compel infernal spirits, were copied in manuscript and printed with fictitious early dates throughout the eighteenth century. This version claims to have been printed at Rome in 1501 with a papal approbation from Alexander VI and reissued in 1680; such claims are fanciful, and the text most likely belongs to the eighteenth century. It was published by the Stuttgart antiquarian Johann Scheible in the fifth volume of his anthology Das Kloster (1847), and a shorter variant was included in the English Sixth and Seventh Books of Moses. The work gives rules for timing, faith and the consecration of the circle, a prayer based on Psalm 91, and lists of spirits classified by the four elements, together with the seven great princes, familiar spirits and pygmies. A second section addresses the operator directly, specifies equipment and gives a citation of Pluto, followed by tables of amulets for each season of the year with the spirits and benefits associated with them. Its importance lies less in originality than in what it shows about the commercial popular magic of the German Enlightenment and its afterlife in nineteenth-century collections.

What it contains

• Title page, epigraphs and a fictitious papal approbation
• Rules on timing, faith and consecrating the circle
• A prayer based on Psalm 91
• Spirits of air, earth, fire and water; seven great princes
• Familiar spirits, pygmies, general citation and dismissal
• Amulet tables for spring, summer, autumn and winter