Faust's Höllenzwang: The Grimoires Faust Never Wrote

What this article gives you: what a Höllenzwang actually is, who the historical Faust was, why the dates printed on the title pages cannot be true, what these texts really contain, and how a nineteenth-century antiquarian bookseller in Stuttgart shaped almost everything we know about them. What it does not give you: instructions. The conjurations are described here as cultural history, not reproduced.

What a Höllenzwang actually is

The word does not name a single book. It names a whole genre. Höllenzwang texts are conjuration manuals that promise the user he can do more than call spirits: he can force them to appear and force them to obey. That is exactly what sets them apart from most other magic books of the German-speaking world.

A charm book like the Romanusbüchlein works with blessings, prayer formulas and Christian protection. It asks. The Höllenzwang does not ask. Its entire rhetorical frame is a legal act: the conjurer steps forward as someone with a rightful claim, and the spirit is treated like a debtor who has been summoned to court and must show up.

That also explains why these books had such a bad name. Blessing was allowed. Compelling was presumption, toward the spirits and toward God. In the moral world of early modern Germany, a book that claimed to put a leash on hell was not just magic. It was arrogance in print.

If you are used to the English-language grimoire tradition, the closest relatives are the Solomonic books such as the Ars Goetia, with their lists of spirits, seals and binding formulas. The Faust books borrow heavily from that stock. What makes them different is the name on the cover and the story that came with it.

The historical Faust and the Faust of the books

He really existed. Johann Georg Faust is documented several times in the early sixteenth century: in town records, in expulsion orders, and in letters by contemporaries who describe him partly as a scholar and mostly as a braggart. In 1507 the learned abbot Johannes Trithemius wrote a scathing letter about a wandering "Georgius Sabellicus, Faustus junior" who boasted of magical powers. In 1528 the city of Ingolstadt ordered a fortune-teller named Faust out of town, and in 1532 Nuremberg refused safe conduct to "Doctor Faustus, the great sodomite and necromancer." He traveled through southern and central Germany as a soothsayer, horoscope caster and miracle healer. He most likely died around 1541; tradition places his death in Staufen im Breisgau.

What he was not: an author. Not a single piece of writing survives that can be reliably attributed to him. The books came later, and they came in two waves.

The first wave is literary. The anonymous Historia von D. Johann Fausten, printed in 1587 by Johann Spies in Frankfurt am Main and known in English as the "Faust Book," turns the traveling showman into a cautionary figure who sells his soul to the devil. An English translation, the so-called English Faust Book, followed within a few years, and it is the text Christopher Marlowe drew on for Doctor Faustus. Goethe's Faust, two centuries later, drew on the same legend.

The second wave is magical. At some point in the seventeenth century, manuscripts began to circulate that did not tell stories about Faust but claimed to be written by him. Those are the Höllenzwang texts. The legend had grown big enough to need its own books, so it got them.

Wittenberg 1524: why the title pages lie

Take the title pages at face value and you run into a problem. They carry imprints such as "Johannis Fausti Manual Höllenzwang, Wittenberg 1524" or a Faust "Miracle, Art and Wonder Book" dated Wittenberg 1540.

Neither can be right. No print from Wittenberg, Luther's town, where every piece of printed matter was watched closely, could have appeared in 1524 under such a title without leaving traces. There are none. No surviving copies from that date, no entries in the book-fair catalogs, no contemporary mentions.

False imprints like these were standard practice. A magic text gained value when it looked old, and printers and dealers were safer when the place and year were wrong. Wittenberg was no accident either: in the 1587 Faust Book, Faust studies there. The title pages take a literary invention and use it as a historical address.

American readers know the same trick from a later era. Mail-order occult publishers in the early twentieth century routinely advertised "ancient" and "secret" texts whose actual history went back a few decades at most. The mechanism is identical: age sells, and a famous name sells even better.

Johann Scheible and "Das Kloster"

That we can read these texts at all is thanks to a bookseller. Johann Scheible, an antiquarian dealer in Stuttgart, published a twelve-volume series between 1845 and 1849 called Das Kloster (roughly, "The Monastery: Secular and Spiritual"). It collects chapbooks, legends, comic tales and several Höllenzwang versions in full.

Scheible was no magician. He was a collector and a businessman with a nose for what would sell. His contribution is still considerable: without him, many of these manuscripts would be lost. His problem is just as real. He printed what he was given, ordered it by effect rather than by the state of the sources, and in doing so helped build the legend himself.

In 1849 he also published Doktor Johannes Fausts Magia naturalis et innaturalis, based on a lavishly illustrated manuscript dated to Passau around 1612. That is probably the oldest tangible layer of the whole tradition, and it sits roughly seventy years after Faust's death.

Scheible's volumes had a second life in the English-speaking world. The German editions of the Sixth and Seventh Books of Moses that he helped popularize were translated and printed in New York in the late nineteenth century and went on to a long career in American folk magic. The Faust texts never became as famous in the United States, but they came out of the same workshop and the same market.

The key texts at a glance

The genre is hard to map, because versions overlap, titles wander and copies are copied from other copies. These five are the ones you are most likely to run into:

Text	Claimed age	Actually traceable	Contents
Magia naturalis et innaturalis	Faust himself	Manuscript Passau c. 1612; printed 1849	Seals, spirit hierarchies, color plates
Threefold Höllenzwang	Wittenberg, 16th century	18th/19th century	Three graded rounds of conjuration
Fourfold Höllenzwang	Wittenberg, 16th century	18th/19th century	Expanded version, more seals
Miracle, Art and Wonder Book	Wittenberg 1540	Scheible, 1840s	Treasure hunting, tricks, recipes
Key to the Höllenzwang	Faust's companion volume	Scheible, 1840s	Interpretation of seals and names

Look at the third column. Not one of these texts can be traced back before the seventeenth century, and most of them not before the eighteenth. That does not prove nothing existed earlier. It is, however, the reason scholars reject the attribution to Faust across the board.

What is actually in these books

Most people who open a Höllenzwang for the first time are disappointed. The structure is similar across all the versions:

• Prefaces that warn the reader and tempt him at the same time, often with the claim that the book was recovered from a monastery, a grave or a hollow in a wall.
• Lists of spirit names, with rank, domain and the form in which each one appears. Much of this is copied from older Latin traditions and mangled along the way.
• Seals and characters: graphic signs meant to bind a particular spirit. They are the most striking part visually, and the reason the manuscripts still find collectors today.
• Formulas that mix Latin prayer language, Hebrew names of God and German legal phrasing. The Latin is often faulty, which gives away the chain of copies behind it.
• Appendices: treasure hunting, invisibility, weather blessings, occasionally household remedies. Here the text slides from demonology into ordinary folk magic.

Anyone expecting a coherent doctrine will not find one. What you are reading is a compilation that grew over generations, closer to a card file than to a system. That links the Höllenzwang to the Sixth and Seventh Books of Moses, which traveled the same route through printers and peddlers, and to the wider family of books described in our piece on the grimoire versus the Book of Shadows.

It also sets the Faust books apart from the learned magic of the Renaissance. Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa's Three Books of Occult Philosophy (1533) tried to build a philosophical framework for magic. The Höllenzwang tradition shows no interest in theory at all. It wants results, and it wants them now.

The book you cannot get rid of

Few objects have gathered as many ownership legends. The core is the same across the German-speaking lands: a Höllenzwang cannot be burned, because the fire will not take it. It cannot be given away. Throwing it out or burying it does not help; the book finds its way back. Only two routes count as possible: selling it, and below its value, or passing it on by inheritance.

For folklorists this is easy to read. The legend describes not a property of the paper but a social situation. Whoever owned such a book was under suspicion. You could not shake off the reputation, even if you gave the book away. The story turns a reputation problem into a magical one.

It also explains the market. An object that can only be sold keeps moving, and every sale is at once proof that the legend is true. Collectors of cursed objects in the United States will recognize the pattern from haunted-doll and cursed-painting stories: the object's story does the selling.

Self-check: how do you read a book like this?

The German original of this article includes a short interactive quiz. Here is the same idea as a quick self-check. Count how many of the left-hand answers fit you.

Question	Historical reader	Effect-seeker
What draws you to these texts?	The history, the seals and images	Whether it works
How do you treat dates and sources?	I check the dates	I barely notice them
What would you do with an old copy?	Read it, place it in context, display it	Try it out
Which sentence fits you better?	I'm fascinated by what people believed	I'm fascinated by what's actually true

Three or four on the left: you read historically, which is the best way in. These texts were made to be sources, and a good illustrated history of the occult gives you more than any reprint. One or two: you are somewhere between curiosity and caution; context is the sensible next step. None: you mainly want to know whether it works. For this genre the plain answer is that there is no evidence it does. What remains is a fascinating piece of cultural history, and that is where to start.

Practical: how to approach these texts

• Check the title page first. If it names a place of printing with a year before 1600, the imprint is very likely fake. That is no flaw in the text itself, but it tells you which century you are really reading.
• Keep Scheible in mind. Almost everything in circulation today goes back to his editions of 1845 to 1849. Anyone quoting "an old source" is usually quoting him.
• Choose a facsimile over an "original." Antiquarian offers with a dramatic backstory are almost always expensive later reprints. Scholarly facsimiles and library digitizations cost nothing and show you more.
• Read the seals as an image source. They are the most interesting part culturally: a sign language that grew and shifted over centuries of copying.
• Do not reenact. These texts contain instructions involving fasting, solitary night walks and the use of blood. They are historical documents, not something to act out.
• Read comparatively. Set them next to the Book of Abramelin and you quickly see how differently two traditions handle the same basic idea.

Voices from practice

Subjective impressions from people who study these texts, not evidence:

• "For years I believed it was a medieval book. When I saw that the oldest traceable manuscript is from 1612, it didn't get less exciting for me, just different."
• "What really holds me are the seals. You can see from the lines where someone copied without understanding what they were drawing."
• "In my family there was a story that a book like this had been in the house and could only be sold. Nobody knows if it's true. People were still telling it in the seventies."

What we do not promise

• There is no evidence that the conjurations described have any effect whatsoever.
• The attribution to Johann Georg Faust does not hold up historically; he wrote none of these texts.
• This article does not reproduce formulas, seal constructions or instructions, and it is not an invitation to try.
• The ownership legends (unburnable, impossible to give away) are folklore, not observation.
• What remains is one of the most revealing sources on German folk magic, and on how a legend creates its own books.

Frequently asked questions about the Höllenzwang

What is a Höllenzwang?

A genre of German-language conjuration books that claim to do more than call spirits: they claim to force them to appear and obey. The name means roughly "hell's compulsion." The books are attributed to Doctor Faust.

Did Faust really write the Höllenzwang?

No. Johann Georg Faust died around 1541, and no writing of his survives. The oldest traceable Höllenzwang manuscripts date from the seventeenth century, and most versions from the eighteenth and nineteenth.

Why does the title page say Wittenberg 1524?

Because fake imprints were common in magic books. They gave the text age and authority and protected printers and dealers. Wittenberg comes from the 1587 Faust Book, in which Faust studies there.

Who was Johann Scheible?

An antiquarian bookseller in Stuttgart who published the twelve-volume collection Das Kloster between 1845 and 1849 and printed several Höllenzwang texts in full. Almost all modern editions go back to him.

What is in the Magia naturalis et innaturalis?

Seals, spirit hierarchies and conjuration formulas in a richly colored manuscript. It is dated to Passau around 1612 and was printed by Scheible in 1849, so it was made roughly seventy years after Faust's death.

Is it true you can never get rid of a Höllenzwang?

That is a widespread legend: the book supposedly cannot be burned or given away, only sold or inherited. Folklorists read it as a description of the reputation that came with owning one, not of the book itself.

Is Marlowe's Doctor Faustus based on the Höllenzwang?

No. Marlowe drew on the English translation of the 1587 Faust Book, a narrative about Faust. The Höllenzwang manuscripts, which claim to be by Faust, only appear later, in the seventeenth century.

Sources and further reading

• Johann Scheible (ed.), Das Kloster, 12 vols., Stuttgart 1845–1849, a collected edition containing several Höllenzwang versions.
• Johann Scheible (ed.), Doktor Johannes Fausts Magia naturalis et innaturalis, Stuttgart 1849, after a manuscript dated to Passau around 1612.
• Historia von D. Johann Fausten, Frankfurt am Main 1587 (printed by Johann Spies), the chapbook behind the literary Faust figure; English translation as The Historie of the Damnable Life and Deserved Death of Doctor John Faustus (1592).
• Frank Baron, Doctor Faustus: From History to Legend, Munich 1978, on the documentary evidence for the historical Faust.
• Book-historical studies of false imprints in early modern magical prints.
• Further reading on Desire Diaries: The Sixth and Seventh Books of Moses · The Romanusbüchlein · The Book of Abramelin · The Greek Magical Papyri

This article describes historical sources of European folk magic. It contains no instructions and makes no healing or success claims.

Some books grew more powerful than anything that was ever written in them.