MEPHISTOPHELES, in the Faust legend, the name of the evil spirit in return for whose assistance Faust signs away his soul. The origin of the conception and name has been much debated. In Dr. Faust's Hollenzwang "Mephistophiel" is one of the seven great princes of hell; "he stands under the planet Jupiter, his regent is named Zadkiel, an enthroned angel of the holy Je hovah." The origin of the idea of Mephistopheles in Faust's mind is thus clear. He was one of the evil demons of the seven planets, the Maskim of the ancient Akkadian religion, a conception trans mitted through the Chaldeans, the Babylonians and the Jewish Kabbala to mediaeval and modern astrologers and magicians. This suggests a plausible theory of the origin of the name. In the ancient Mesopotamian religion the Intelligence of the planet Jupiter was Marduk, "the lord of light," whose antithesis was conceived as the lord of darkness. According to C. Kiesewetter (Faust in der Geschichte and Tradition, p. 163), then, Mephis topheles (or rather Mephostopheles) is "he who loves not light" (Gr. ,LtiNSC.n ciwyely). Schroer, however, prefers the derivation from Hebr. Mephiz, destroyer, and tophel, liar (Faust, ed. 1886, i. 25), which is supported by the fact that nearly all the names of devils in the 16th century magic books are derived from the Hebrew.
Kiesewetter, applying to the Faust legend the principles of modern psychical research, held that Mephistopheles had a real existence for Faust, the medium and somnambulist, as the ob jectification of his own "transcendental substance," appearing in various guises—as a bear, as a little bald man, as a monk, etc.— but always recognizable as the same "familiar." However this may have been, the Mephistopheles of the Faust-books, who com bined the qualities of the devil of theology with those of the kobold of German myth, was certainly an objectification of the ideas of the age, which believed in kobolds and went in constant terror of the devil.
The Mephostophiles of the Faust-books and the puppet plays passed with little or no modification into literature as the Mephis tophilis of Marlowe's Faustus. Mephistophilis has the kobold qualities ; he not only waits upon Faustus and provides him with sumptuous fare, he indulges in horse-play and practical joking of a homely kind. 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 his traditional qualities are indeed preserved; 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; thus, in accordance with old German tradition, he is dressed as a noble man (ein edler Junker), all in red, with a little cape of stiff silk, a cock's feather in his hat, and a long pointed sword ; at the witches' Sabbath on the Brocken he is hailed as "the knight with the horse's hoof," and Sybel in Auerbach's Keller is not too drunk to notice that he limps. But his limp is the only indication that he is Lucifer fallen from Heaven. He could not, like Mar lowe's Mephistophilis or Milton's Satan, regretfully paint the glories of the height from which he has been hurled ; for he denies the distinction between high and low, since "everything that comes into being deserves to be destroyed." He is, in short, not the devil of Christian orthodoxy, a spirit conscious of the good against which he is in revolt, but akin to the evil principle of the older dualistic systems, with their conception of the eternal an tagonism between good and evil, light and darkness, creation and destruction. (See F AusT .) (W. A. P.)