| | Buchel is a fictional toponym, which TM took from the Malleus Maleficarum, a treatise on witchcraft published in 1486 by the theologian and inquisitor Henricus Institoris (ca. 1420–1505). Weissenfels is a real town in modern Saxony-Anhalt, about fifteen miles southwest of Leipzig. |
| | TM regarded linden trees, the subject of a famous song by Franz Schubert (1797–1828), as a quintessential symbol of Germanic inwardness. The Schubert song already features in his earlier novel The Magic Mountain (1924). |
| | An early example of the theme of mythic repetition and the Nietzschean “eternal recurrence of the same.” |
| ash-blond hair in need of a comb | Jonathan L.’s features were inspired by the portrait of Philip Melanchthon painted by Albrecht Dürer (1471–1528) (Fig. 1). |
| | Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) is supposed to have suffered from this condition, but migraines are also one of the symptoms of syphilis and associated with the early modern topos of melancholia. |
| | The L. bible is modeled on that of the Mann family, an early example of TM harnessing autobiographical experience for the composition of DF. |
| | A phrase from the Faust Chapbook. |
| | “Papilio” is the Latin for “butterfly”; “morpho” is the name of a genus of butterflies found mostly in South and Central America. |
| | Butterfly from the Nymphalidae family, indigenous to the Amazon. (Greek: Hetaera = “prostitute”, Spanish/Portuguese: Esmeralda = “emerald”). TM copied this and the other descriptions of butterflies from the 1935 book Falterschönheit by Adolf Portmann, though he made minor changes such as adding the reference to “transparent nakedness”—presumably to strengthen the association with prostitution, which will become relevant later in DF. |
| | The German term Zweckmäßigkeit (often translated as “purposiveness”) alludes to Kantian aesthetics, and thus introduces the question whether aesthetic production presupposes the existence of culture or can take place in its absence as well. |
| | L.’s uncanny laughter is another important motif in DF. Critics have linked it to, among other things, the early modern topos of melancholia, to Nietzsche’s Zarathustra (1883–1885), to the character of Kundry in Parsifal (1882) by Richard Wagner (1813–1883), and to the medieval folk belief that Christ never laughed. |
| | In Platonic and Gnostic teaching, a subsidiary divinity responsible for the shaping and maintenance of the physical universe. The demiurge of Gnostic thought is frequently portrayed as antagonistic to the will of the Supreme Being, thus related to the devil. |
| | The German word Charaktere is rare in this sense but used in the Chapbook to denote magical symbols. |
| | The “father of acoustics,” Ernst Chladni (1756–1827), who first described these visual correlatives of sound waves. The close relationship between music and mathematics will be another important theme of DF. Wittenberg was not only the home of Martin Luther, but also the city in which Faust lived in the Chapbook and many subsequent versions of the myth. |
| | References to the physical principle of osmosis recur in DF and will become associated with the devil’s pact and with L.’s syphilitic infection, in which the bacterial “flagellates” penetrate the brain membrane, the dura mater. |