Walter Alison Phillips

“ To Faust himself, somnambulist and medium, Mephistopheles had—according to Kiesewetter—a real existence: he was “the objectivation of the transcendental subject of Faust,” an experience familiar in dreams and, more especially, in the visions of mediums and clairvoyants. He was thus a “familiar spirit,” akin to the “daemon” of Socrates; and if he was also half the devil of theology, half the kobold of old German myth, this was only because such “objectivations” are apt to clothe themselves in forms borrowed from the common stock of ideas current at the time when the seer lives ”

“ He is, however, also the devil, as the age of the Reformation conceived him: a fallen angel who has not forgotten the splendour of his first estate, and who pictures to Faust the glories of heaven, in order to accentuate the horrors of the hell to which he triumphantly drags him. Goethe’s Mephistopheles is altogether another conception. ”

“ Some of the traditional qualities are indeed preserved: the practical joke, for instance, in the scene in Auerbach’s Keller shows that he has not altogether shed his character as kobold; and, like the planet-spirits of the old magic he appears alternately in animal and human shape. He is also identified with the devil ”