The corpus of German grimoires attributed to the semi-mythic patronage of the infamous early modern sorcerer Faust were composed and re-articulated in popular circulation from the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries. They instruct on the ritual protocols for calling, pacting, and trafficking with a range of devilish and elemental spirits and shades; from circle casting and tool consecration to the spoken acts of conjuration, deployments of seals and sigil, and other such intricacies of these cunning nigromantic arts.

In this class, we will survey the family of shorter focused Faustian manuals of devilish conjuration collected as the Compendium of Unnatural Black Magic, comparing and contrasting both their shared methodologies and distinguishing details to examine the operable components of these grimoires of Germanic goetic magic.