Christian Tradition and Non-Christian Tradition are Two...

Many have heard of Faust in one way or another. A â€Å"Faustian Bargain† is one where an agent trades away the future for a boon in power during the present. I will be exploring at least two magical traditions in Marlowe’s Faust: the Christian tradition and the non-Christian tradition. Not many stories captivate readers like Marlowe’s Faust can captivate. It’s the classic story of a man who risks hellfire by dealing with the devil for a brief, yet magnificent, period of otherworldly knowledge and power. This story has been rewritten and reformulated time and time again. I aim to show that the story of Faust is inspired by the story of Adam and Eve. What accounts for this story’s persistence? I think it is because readers are gripped by the fantasy of humans possessing divine powers, engaging in adventures and magical exploits, and trafficking with the greatest of evils. Many view the Faust tradition from the perspective of magus literature. Their searches for Faust’s beginnings often turn up magicians. The historical Johann Faustus, a sixteenth-century charlatan who wandered across Germany, who exercised a minimum of pharmaceutical knowledge†¦with a maximum amount of malice,† was himself a magician. E. M. Butler, in The Myth of the Magus, links Faust with a broad number of magicians extending back to Moses and others. Other scholars, seeing the Faust legend as a Christian story, seek Fausts roots in a more limited way. Here the consensus identifies Simon Magus as the