 In this presentation I'm going to talk about Mephistopheles, his appearance in myths and legends, especially those of Faust and in old grimoires and books of magic. I will also take a look at his role in modern times and discuss the interpretation of the Faust myth in psychology and magic, showing how we can work with Mephisto in the modern context. Let's start with the origins of the myth. Mephistopheles for the first time appears in occult literature at the close of the Middle Ages. His name is probably derived from the Hebrew words meaning destroyer and slanderer. Another theory is that the name is derived from Latin or Greek and translates to not loving light or lover of the sulfurous fumes of hell. Ian Butler in her ritual magic proposes a theory that the Mephistopheles is derived from the word Lutzifugum and was coined due to a wrong translation. This gives a new perspective on the nature of Mephisto, possibly equating him with a spirit known from the Grand Grimoire as Lucifer Trafocal. According to medieval accounts Mephistopheles was a cruel devil, mischievous and cunning. He fed on people's suffering, ridiculed virtues and spread lies. On the other hand he was easy to call and he had the power to give the magic much, much more. The first known literary account of the spirit appears in the story of a mysterious scholar, Johann Faust, written by an anonymous German author and published in 1587. Translated into English in 1592, it quickly spread to other European countries. This and similar published accounts of Faust were known across Europe as Faust-Char books. On the basis of these books the popular English playwright, Christopher Marlow, wrote a play which later became the source of numerous legends about the scholar who sold his soul to the devil in exchange for knowledge and magical power. The play was entitled The Tragical History of the Life and Death of Dr. Faustus. Following this release the story of Faust was retold by a number of authors and it is believed that there were at least 50 different versions of the legend. Faust as a character is believed to be an authentic person but the legend that arouse around him derives from life stories of famous magicians that preceded the appearance of the Faust myth. Among these famous characters we can mention both historical and mythical figures such as the Witch of Endor, Simon Magus, Merlin, Virgil, Albertus Magmus, Roger Bacon, Agrippa and Paracelsus to only mention a few. The ability to summon spirits that descend to the underworld, the Black Dog familiar, alchemical experiments, creation of a homunculus, walking on water and flying in the air. All this is found in the stories of the above mentioned characters and all of it is found within the Faustian tradition. In the Faustian tradition, which includes a number of grimoires describing how to obtain the assistance of demonic forces to perform magical arts, the belief that the magician can command spirits is derived from legends of King Solomon, the greatest of magicians. According to those legends, he was granted the power of demons by God, thus being able to bind them and use their service in any task you wished. Following this conviction, grimoires such as the Grand Grimoire, Grimoireum Verum or Lemmageddon belong to the white concept of Salamonic magic and their authorship is ascribed to King Solomon himself. While Dr. Faustus is believed to have authored texts such as, for example, the Black Raven, which feature a similar theme, only instead of Lucifer's Raphocrawl we have Mephistopheles. The large part of the Faustian tradition is dedicated to making tactile spirits, Mephistopheles and Lucifer in particular. The Black Raven, the most famous grimoire of the Faustian tradition, describes ways to summon the so-called Grand Dukes. These are seven spirits with a high position in an infernal hierarchy. In the grimoire they are presented together with their attributes, powers and sigils. In this paradigm, Mephistopheles is the grand master of many arts and of luck in general. In the Faustian tradition, the Grand Dukes are also called electors and correspond to the seven planets used in Salamonic magic, the Sun, the Moon, Venus, Mercury, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn. Another theme occupying a large part of the Faust myth is the spirit's role as the initiator of the Astral Sabat. In Gethys Faust, Mephistopheles takes the scholar to the Brokkam, where they both participate in the Valpurgis Night Sabat. There's an open project by the Temple of Ascending Flame that explores this idea, presenting a ritual to summon Mephisto and to travel to a place where you can meet the horned one, the Dark Man of the Witches Sabats. It is based on the folklore of the Valpurgis Night described in the Faust legends, the concept of a journey to a liminal place or state of consciousness and the legend of the meeting with the Old One that rules in the forest and the wilderness. In modern times, the story of Faust and Mephistopheles is found in many famous works of literature. Among them we can mention Gethys Faust, Mihayub Buhakov's The Mars Laren Margarita, Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus and many more. It has also been an inspiration for movies, music or even video games. However, while in medieval and Renaissance magic he was one of the most popular spirits, in modern occultism his role was diminished and much less attention is now paid to this legendary character. For this reason I've decided to dedicate this video to him and present his role both in the old times and in the modern world. You will also find other information about him in the Book of Mephisto. When I started working with him many years ago, I was deeply fascinated with the idea of Mephisto as an embodiment of personal shadow and I was exploring all kinds of grimoires that mentioned him in their catalogue of spirits. Apart from that I was also searching for his appearances in literature and popular culture and discovered that even though he no longer appears under his medieval and Renaissance disguise, he has accompanied us throughout all the following centuries and is still present in the modern world, tempting us with forbidden knowledge and igniting our desire of transcendence. It is especially true in regard to the Luciferian ethos, the search of power through self-knowledge and self-sacrifice. The story of Faust is the tale of initiation in which Mephistopheles is the initiator acting on behalf of Lucifer. He ignites in Faust's heart the desire of knowledge and power and shows him the path that can make him greater than any common man. It is the initiation of the left-hand path, the desire of man to be a god. Mephistopheles performs to Faust the role of the serpent in the Garden of Eden. He initiates him into the path of liberation, offers the fruits from the Tree of Knowledge and reveals secrets of creation and destruction. The theme underlying the whole legend is longing, desire, thirst that drives the main character to leave his entire life behind and to open up to the unknown. Faust understands that in order to gain the knowledge he wants, he has to enter a territory that is forbidden, dark and transgressive. He doesn't hesitate to renounce God, his religion, and all that he has learned so far. It is a similar approach as in certain aspects of Gnosticism, which claimed that man cannot be redeemed from a sin that has not been committed and whose followers indulged in all that was forbidden because they believed that this was the only true way to salvation. In Faust's case, this is turning to magic instead of philosophy and rituals instead of mere study. In the Bible, the adversary initiated Adam and Eve into mysteries of knowledge and revealed to them the path of self-deification. In the Faustian tradition, it is Mephistopheles who acts as the manifestation of the adversary. He is the spirit of contradiction. He questions, reverses values, destroys old viewpoints, and plans the seeds of doubt and hesitation. These seeds planted in human consciousness may lead either to transcendence or sanity. Depending on whether or not we are able to handle the transforming force of the adversary. It is the devil, the adversary that invents challenges and trials to test the determination of the initiate. And without this ordeal, initiation would not be possible. In this interpretation, Mephistopheles is the spirit that denies the Faustian equivalent of the original force of misrule, disorder and contradiction that appears in all accounts of creation, in many forms and under many disguises. It is the same principle of misrule that was personified by the serpent in the Garden of Eden identified usually with Lucifer or Samae, but generally associated with the adversary of the left hand path. He is the spirit of eternal progress and movement, acting against cosmic order and inspiring the desire of transcendence in the heart of man. Geta portrayed Mephistopheles as highly intelligent but also immoral and inhuman, with the ability to perceive all weakness and hypocrisy of humanity. In Jungian psychology, he corresponds to the alchemical spirit Mercurius, which is morally neutral, neither good nor evil. At the same time, he is a spirit of chaos related to the devil. This ambivalent nature allows him to act as the adversary, question everything he encounters on the way and point out alternative solutions. Another modern interpretation of the legend is related to a translation of the name Mephistopheles as he who shans the light. In this sense, his essence is that of absolute darkness. He is a personification of darkness not permitted by any single ray of light. Rudolf Steiner identified him with Ariman, the black dragon of Persian lore. In Steiner's Anthroposophy, Ariman is the spirit of matter and shadow. The dark counterpart of Lucifer, who is the spirit of light, intellect and all progress. As an embodiment of darkness, Mephistopheles can be inscribed to the Samuel Clever on the Kabbalistic Tree of Night, which is the sphere of darkness, shadow and the total withdrawal of light. As a personification of the shadow, Mephistopheles is the principle of contraction, the force that contracts and withdraws the light so that the energies of the shadow can enter. The shadow is the term encountered in psychology. Carl Gustav Jung speaks of the shadow as the total of the dark and unknown aspects of personality, everything that has been repressed through consciousness and has never been expressed in the dark side of the human nature. The reservoir of repressed and unwanted aspects of the self, feared and avoided to such an extent that it is generally viewed as evil and personified as the devil. In magic, however, the shadow has a broader meaning than in psychology. It embraces physical, cultural, cosmological and personal elements of what is referred to as darkness and evil. All that is encountered in the external world is translated into an inner experience. Therefore, the shadow operates on the personal level of our own negative, unpleasant and traumatic experiences, but it also manifests through the archetypal level of what Jung called the collective unconscious. According to this theory, all external impulses are filtered by the psychic sensor. What is repulsive is pushed down into the depths of the unconscious. There it lives its own life, slowly evolving as an independent force that is integral with the self and eventually comes up to the surface as a manifestation of the shadow. On the conscious level, the shadow may cause a number of disorders in regard to both the physical and emotional health, as well as our spiritual life, making us unable to find happiness, balance and fulfillment in anything we do. In Jungian psychology, the work with the shadow is of great importance because it helps to integrate these repressed aspects in a conscious way, thus regaining control over our life, be it mundane or spiritual. For the same reason, it is important to work with the shadow as spiritual paths and those paths that deny this necessity seldom lead to any genuine transcendence or development. These and many other modern interpretations of the Faust legend can be explored when we start working with Memphis Tophelys. If you are interested in this work, I encourage you to check out our open project, Mephisto Sabatic Initiator. If you'd like to know more about the temple, check out our website, anthologies and other videos available here.