Introduction to the Symbolism of the Faust Myth

The Faust myth

Introduction

There is a story dating back to 6,000 BC called The Blacksmith and the Devil, which is similar to the theme of the Faust myth. It is about a blacksmith who sells his soul to the devil in order to obtain spiritual powers.

The Faust myth is like the myth of Prometheus; they reappear periodically in history. In 495 BC, Prometheus appeared in ancient Greece during the famous century of Pericles and his reforms in favour of democracy, science, philosophy and freedom.

Prometheus re-emerged in the Age of Enlightenment, as did Faust, a very archaic myth that reappeared in the 15th century and took five centuries to become a historical reality through Nazism. It is resurfacing today through transhumanism. Faust is deeply convinced that more knowledge will give him more power. This is the great theme of the transformation of man to create a superman.

History of the myth:

In the 1460s, a historical figure named Goerg Sabel, but who called himself Dr Faustus, had an infinite intellectual curiosity for the occult. As well as being a doctor and theologian, he was interested in astrology, alchemy and magic.

Alchemy transforms lead into gold, medicine transforms illness into healing, occultism is the magical power over things and beings, and astrology also represents psychic transformation through self-knowledge.

The luminous version is equivalent to the knowledge that enables us to remove the obstacles that prevent the evolution of living beings, Mercury and Pluto.

However, the myth shows us the traps we should not fall into.

As a reminder, Nazism consists of the creation of the Superman, in 1933 Hitler took power in the Reichstag and in 1932 Aurobindo wrote a little book entitled the Superman.

We have the luminous version with Aurobindo's work, i.e. how to transform human nature. Just as Narcissus will ask the question of who am I, just as Icarus will ask the question of truth and lies, so Faust will ask how to transform man. This is why the author has raised the question of the transhumanist, the materialist version of Faust.

Georg Sabel goes to Krakow to enrol in a magic school. He is gifted, brilliant and nicknamed the speculator because he has an answer for everything.

After his lessons, he went into the woods, made a circle around himself, placed himself in the middle of the circle and called upon his magical powers. The first time it doesn't work, the second time it doesn't work and, as in all good stories, the third time a character in a Dominican habit appears, calling himself Lucifer and telling him that he is at his service. So what do you want? Doctor Faustus replies: I want a spirit to be at my service and to answer all the questions I ask. Lucifer replies: "No problem, I'm at your service, I'll give you this spirit, but on one condition, that you make a pact with your blood, a contract that stipulates that after 24 years of good and loyal fservice on the part of my spirit, you will give me your soul". Faust, who believes in neither God nor the Devil, happily signs.

Then Lucifer sends him the spirit originally called Mephostophilus, which Goethe transformed into Mephistopheles.

The fact that Faust stands at the centre of the circle suggests that he identifies with the sun and invokes Lucifer, the bearer of light. In this way, Faust is the one who has the goodwill to bring the light of knowledge to humanity, but who is transformed into its opposite and ends his life dismembered, his brains smashed against the wall, in other words he becomes the victim of his own knowledge. Dismemberment here represents psychic dismemberment. However, we can see that this is a person of good will who will use the power conferred by his knowledge to do several things, to develop the system, but also to use and enjoy it.

Etymology :

Faust is an obsessive seeker of knowledge. He believes in neither God nor the Devil and explores the occult and hidden worlds. The secret services, the NSA, are Faustian. These people are hidden and seek to know the secrets of others. This is what was revealed by a Promethean hero, Edward Snowden, who has a Sun-Mars conjunction in his chart, a Black Moon in Aquarius and a valued Uranus. Prometheus is the liberator who reveals what has been hidden, and Mars-Sun corresponds to the myth of the hero.

Mephostophiles means those who don't like Faust; Faust's spirit, which has to answer all the questions, doesn't like Faust. In a way, Faust does not love himself. And Mephistopheles is the lying spirit.

This Faust character has a servant called Christopher Wagner, Christophoros, the bearer of light, and Wagner, whose historical eponym you know, who had a Faust myth and inspired Hitler, means wheelwright. The wheelwright is the one who repairs the chariot wheel, who symbolically repairs the wheel of the sun, in other words the wounded self, but he is also Charon (or Caron), the character who takes the dead across Acheron, the river of the underworld. So there is a link with death, and we find the ambivalence again with Christophe Wagner, the bearer of light, who repairs the wheel of the sun and at the same time takes the dead to the underworld. Faust is constantly on the move between the temptation of God and the temptation of death and destruction. This is also what we find in Nazism, with its attraction to the creation of the superman and destruction as we know it.

Faust's three journeys:

First, he asks his spirit to learn more about the underworld, the world of the Underworld. As a result, his spirit takes him on a tour of the underworld, where he sees souls freezing to death, being burnt on spits, covered in lava, and so on.

On his way down the chimney of a volcano, Faust almost falls and is caught by a great ape. The scene tells of the anguish of death, but this fear is recovered by the skill of the mind, the skill of thought. Faust is a character who protects himself from the fear of death by his intellectual curiosity.

After that, Faust says to his spirit: "I've seen enough, can you take me home?

The spirit takes him home in a chariot drawn by dragons.

Faust tells his spirit that he has enjoyed his first journey and would like to make another: "I would like to visit the world of the stars," he says.

The text is astonishing because it was written in the 15th century and describes the scene: in a chariot pulled by dragons, he sees the round earth and, approaching the stars, he says: "I've seen enough, I want to come down".

After this journey, he signed his letters with the name Dr Yoann Faust, the star contemptor. Contemptor means to despise. Faust will therefore despise any space of transcendence, he will despise any form of elevation.

His third trip was what we would now call a tourist trip. You know, when you visit a city, they give you leaflets telling you that in one place there are 350 fountains, that in another place there's a museum with 537 display cases, and so on. Here, we are in a purely descriptive dimension, with no one inside.

So Faust has made one journey into the depths, another into the heights and a third into banality. In response to his anxiety about death and his desire to commit suicide, the Faustian is generally someone who has made these three journeys, in order. Inspired by theology to know God, but at the same time renouncing this search because of his contemptuous pride. To bring the myth back to our time, he ends up travelling the world with a tourist agency.

One day, Faust is invited to a party where there is a pregnant countess who wants strawberries. Using his magical powers, Faust teleports to a place where it's springtime and brings her strawberries. Incidentally, here we see the prophetic side of our modern world: we have strawberries on our market stalls all year round. Since it's better to celebrate with good wine, Faust also steals some good wine from the bishop's cellar. In the myth of Faust, we have it all: we short-circuit the natural seasons to satisfy every desire, so that knowledge gives power, the power to satisfy every desire.

The end of Faust's life

After 22-23 years of the pact, while enjoying life, he begins to have doubts and says: "My God, what have I done? This is when Faust tries to break the pact he has made with the Devil. Of course, the Devil disagrees, but Faust insists and ends up negotiating. He is allowed to have mistresses, to spend fabulous nights with beautiful women, without being allowed to marry. At another point, he meets a priest and wants to convert him to evil, but the priest laughs at him, allowing the priest to free himself from Faust's grip.

So we have two important keys to getting out of the Faust myth, the love relationship, marriage, which is the metaphor for the love between soul and personality. In other words, opening up to the love of the Self, having that fire that leads to our essence, rather than remaining in the omnipotence and greed of knowledge. The other key is humour. The priest gets rid of Faust by making fun of him. What is humour? Quite simply, it is what enables us to change the field of coherence and free ourselves from our own identifications.

At the end of his life, Faust gathered together 12 students and said to them: I'm a bit tired, I'm going home, if you hear noises coming from the house, don't come! Indeed, that night, the students heard terrible screams and infernal noises, but as Faust had said, they didn't come to see him. The next morning, when the students knocked on Faust's door, no one answered. They opened the door and saw Faust's dismembered body with his brains splattered against the wall. This helps us to understand that Faust has been punished for his sins. On the one hand, he is dismembered, which means psychic destruction, and on the other, his brain has exploded, but in fact he has blown himself up because of his greed for knowledge.

The psychological clues to a Faustian myth are as follows:

An interest in all esoteric practices, astrology, alchemy, medicine, occultism and theology. The Faustian is interested in the nature of God. They have a fear of death, a desire for suicide, a greed for esoteric knowledge, a proud feeling of omnipotence linked to their knowledge and/or a feeling of intellectual superiority, and all three travel. These are, for example, the exploration of shamanism that retraces the descent into the underworld, the interest in theological questions that represents the journey to the stars, and finally the tourist journey.

The work is important because Faust began by descending into the underworld instead of ascending to the world of the stars; conversely, one must first turn on the light of the Self and then explore the shadows. Go up to go down, not down to go up.

Even miners go down into the mine with a small lamp on their foreheads so that they are old enough to receive the dark night of the mine. If we haven't lit up the third eye or the coronal centre, it's always dangerous to go down into the mine. If we descend into the depths, into the shadows, before we have experienced at least once in our lives a non-ordinary state of consciousness that brings us inner peace, light and joy, before we have found that place of refuge in our heart, which is in reality our true nature, it is dangerous to descend into the shadows of the unconscious.

One of the greatest difficulties for the Faustian is that he feels unloved, has no faith in grace and wants to save himself. In reality, man cannot be his own redeemer; he cannot do it alone. He must first open himself to the presence and grace of the Self in order to make the most of the Faust myth.

Since the discovery of Pluto in 1930, which represents a drive towards the superman, the idea of the Aryan superman has become a reality, asserting that the Aryan race can only triumph over sub-humans: on 14 July 1933, the German Reich introduced a "hereditary health policy". In Russia, there was also an attempt to create a new Communist man, which means that Pluto/Faust is insatiably seeking to transform human nature. Today, a third attempt is being made with advances in technology, AI, and is called transhumanism. These attempts to change human nature are very Faustian.

From the author's point of view, the only attempt that makes spiritual sense is the work of Aurobindo. Sri Aurobindo also lived in the 1930s. He said that by bringing down the supra-mind, which is beyond the mind, into the cells of the body, we will be able to transform human nature by changing its genetic code and evolving into a new species. So every Faustian attempt is an attempt to evolve into a new species.

As Satprem and Nietzsche said, today's man is merely a transitional being, between animal and true man. The Faustian is aware of this, he is aware that there is an impulse in man that pushes him to fulfil his human nature right down to his flesh. It's a difficult process, even today, because we have too many memories of Nazism to say that we can change man. Today, we don't say that we can change man, but that we are going to change social conditions, our representations of the world, put more money into the suburbs to build new houses, and so on. In reality, we need to change the nature of man, but because we remember the experiences of communism and Nazism, and we distrust them like the plague, transhumanism seizes on them with diabolical bait, because it brings man back to the robot and not to heaven, as Aurobindo proposed.

We lived through a Promethean period until the 1960s. Since the 1930s, we have entered a Promethean-Faustian period.

If you were born in a Faustian era and have a Faustian myth in your chart, it will be easier to live the Faustian myth because the social context will allow it. Conversely, if you have an Orpheus myth, for example, it will be very difficult for you to live in a world that does not understand the ontological values of poetry and beauty, which have become commercialised, and the context will not help you to live this Orpheus myth.

We can consider any myth as a model of civilisation. The Orphic civilisation would be the poetry civilisation of the Middle Ages or of Iran before the Shah of Iran came to power in 1979. That is, with the incredible poetry of Rûmî or Khalil Gibran. All that beauty that was there and was destroyed by the coup d'état. We can imagine a world of Narcissus, where there would be spaces for meditation, with fountains, lakes and gardens, where everyone could look at themselves in the real mirror. Today, we live in a world of technological Eden, which has become Faustian because it is based on power, the only thing that interests people today is power. We can also imagine, for example, how a society living under the myth of Proteus would have evolved if Buddhism had taken over. It's true that there are models of civilisation based on myths. Today, we are living in the myth of Daedalus, who created technology, but technology has been put at the service of power and control, in other words of Faust. We have left behind the myth of invention, which is the myth of progress that reigned in the Western world from the 16th to the 20th century.

Question from a participant: if we have several types of myth in our theme, can we change the types?

Answer by Luc Bigé : No, you can't change the type, just as you can't change the size of your shoe. If you're a size 39 and you want to buy a size 36 shoe, it won't work, so you can't change the type. But you can buy a more flexible shoe.

Question: How do I do this?

Answer: By working on them, you can work on playing with the myths and living them at different levels of consciousness, from the most overwhelming to the most subtle. You can't change who you are, you can only move towards who you are, from the heaviest to the lightest, and the lightest means the most supple, the freest, the most ethereal, the most joyful, the most loving and the most drunk with humour.

Until the day we leave our astrological chart behind, because who we really are is beyond the astrological chart.

Translated and adapted from Luc Bigé's https://reenchanterlemonde.com/mythologie/#faust by @SatyamAstro/Nicolas Roessli and supported by DeepL.com

To access the sites, click on the underlined links:

To go further, an article has been written by Luc Bigé and translated by SatyamAstro/Nicolas Roessli on Transhumanism and Posthumanism | lucbige-astromythology.simplesite.com