Introduction Appointment at Deptford Listen to me: You''ll never go wrong If you pile it on, pile it on, and still pile it on. Bewilder, confound them with all your variety, The public''s the public, they''re a hard lot to satisfy. --Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust I (1808) The book which you are currently reading, Devil''s Contract: The History of the Faustian Bargain , is your autobiography - mine too. That''s because in our willingness to occasionally betray our principles for personal gain the story of the man who sold his soul to the Devil for power and knowledge is our own story. No matter how saintly we may be, all of us lapse, all of us are imperfect creatures who are content to sometimes sign on the dotted line of a diabolical compact. There are resonances with that ancient story whenever we are bedeviled by particularly alluring delusions, whenever our endless appetite for justifying our delusions is indulged. That legend of the Devil''s contract is the most alluring, the most provocative, the most insightful, the most important story ever told. It concerns a humanity strung between Heaven and Hell, the saintly and the satanic; how a man could trade his soul for powers omnipotent, signing a covenant with the Devil so that he could briefly live as a god before being pulled down to Hell.

Frequently associated with Christopher Marlowe''s Doctor Faustus, that Elizabethan play wasn''t the origin of that myth, but his is certainly a sterling example of that eternal script. Yet long before that Renaissance play and long afterwards, we can find the inky traces of Faust''s damned signature in a multitude of works both high and low, canonical and popular. More disturbing than that is the way that the Devil''s hoof-prints can be found across the wide swatch of history, in our willingness to embrace power and engage in exploitation, to summon self-interestedness and to conjure cruelty. Examine some of those Mephistophelian hoof-prints as discovered at a Southwark, London construction site in 1989. The Rose Theatre, where Marlowe''s play premiered in the late sixteenth-century, was torn down in 1606 where it would be subsumed beneath layers Jacobean, Interregnum, and Restoration, then Hanoverian, Regency, and Victorian, until Thatcher-era contractors building a soulless corporate office tower uncovered the bottom level of this strata of London history. Workers sifting through dirt found the tell-tale signs of a theater, from the preserved remains of charred hazelnut shells once sold as snacks to the broken clay pots used to collect tickets. The ruins of the theater once again had sunlight upon them. Now the remains of the Rose are within the basement of said soulless office tower looming above the Thames, the rare active archeological site which also invites audiences to enjoy a show atop the detritus of the theatre where plays were first performed four centuries ago.

The earliest performances of Doctor Faustus were dogged by supernatural associations; audience members claimed that during the scenes of magical conjuration the playwright''s words compelled demons to appear. "How am I glutted with conceit of this!" marvels Faustus in the first act of Marlowe''s play, "Shall I make spirits fetch me what I please, / Resolve me of all ambiguities, / Perform what desperate enterprise I will?" Ostensibly a description of the dark arts'' powers, but applicable to any art''s strange abilities, certainly those of the theater. How did Marlowe differ from Faustus? For he could compel spirits of the imagination to fetch what he wanted, to perform what he wanted, to generate a seeming universe from nothing but words and gestures. And, like Faustus, Marlowe too would have his punishments, stabbed to death through the eye in a Deptford tavern, purportedly after arguing over the bar tab a year after the premier of his most celebrated play. Should subsequent legends be trusted, magic apparently happened in what today looks like scarcely more than a pile of sifted rubble. During performances of Faustus, Latin incantations and magical circles inscribed upon the stage floor were said to be capable of conjuring forth demons just as if the actors were necromancers. From those circles traced with a staff into the dirt of the floor, it was believed that a wizard could summon the citizens of Hell to appear--Azazel with his curved goat horns, the snorting, red-eyed bull Moloch, or insect-winged Beelzebub, his mandibles sticky with blood. Maybe even Mephistopheles, that demon novel to the Faust legend, who first appears as if a decomposing corpse with flesh decayed away from his skull and maggots sifting through his eye-sockets and nose, only to later conduct himself in the more respectable shape of a Franciscan mendicant.

Now, for any visitor to the theater built upon the corpse of its predecessor, the thin line of lurid blood-red neon light which demarcates the rough circle of the Rose theater''s original foundation appears unnervingly like those magic circles affixed with strange alchemical symbols and numbers in which Renaissance necromancers would attempt to call upon all of the cursed demons of Pandemonium and where Satan came hidden on opening night to critique how well he''d been rendered by the playwright. When I attended a performance at the Rose of another Renaissance play known for its occult themes--think Scotland, witches, murdered kings--it was that neon light along the periphery of the darkened, damp, and musty smelling subterranean hole that most kept my attention, that luminescent circle offset in the darkness of the basement''s most distant corners, bordered by the rubble of centuries still being sifted. The production was good, albeit in the now de rigueur tic for modernization, but sitting on the rafters in that basement that smelled of water and earth, the Weird Sisters and Macbeth were far less fascinating to me than what I couldn''t see, just somewhere on the dark edge of vision, beyond a ribbon of neon intended to let me know where the walls of the Rose had once been. Imagining that premier of Doctor Faustus more than four hundred years ago--and all of that is inaccessible to us in that strange and distant country of the past--I couldn''t help but entertain those diabolical legends about Marlowe''s audience that evening. There, in that black space above the periphery, was that where Satan sat on the rafters, disguised as a ruffled Elizabethan gentleman in black and red velvet? But no, Satan is not real, those stories are anti-theatrical Puritan agitprop, folktales intended to frighten the credulous. No demons were conjured in any production of Faustus, for they are but characters, and characters are mere fiction. And yet, when the wizard''s clown reads "Sanctabulorum . Mephistopheles" (nonsense Latin, incidentally) and a demon does appear, even the skeptic in me wonders what an infernal story deftly told may conjure.

The morning following that 2013 production of Marlowe''s play, I traveled to Deptford to meet the playwright himself. When Marlowe was martyred in an upstairs room of Eleanor Bull''s tavern, Deptford was part of Kent and was regarded as a sordid, distant environ of the capital, a seedy dockyard town south of London governed by dissolute merchants and seedy dockyards. Walking down its High Street, I found that four centuries have only moderately softened that reputation. Making my way past claustrophobic pubs with their bubbled-windows and the dark abyss of their propped-open doors, the greasy fried odor of fish and chip shops and the tinny Brit Pop playing within, I spent the better part of an hour vainly looking for St. Nicholas''s churchyard while nervously eyeing grey skies and the cool wind blowing in off the Thames, for in those days I didn''t avail myself of a smartphone''s convenience. Though it was July, in my memory it was only ever October, Deptford a morass of confusing, crooked, coble-stoned streets punctuated by centuries-old dissenting churches and small brick rowhouses whose curtains were tightly pulled shut. Surely there were green leaves on the trees, but in my memory, all of those branches are skeletal, bones stripped of flesh withered beneath a sky the color of brackish water. My Gothic disposition only intensified after I finally found Marlowe''s graveyard, the opposing redbrick columns marking the entrance to the grounds topped by a pair of grinning skulls hewn from stone, their toothless grins and eyeless sockets a memento mori installed a century after the most famous resident was tossed into an anonymous pauper''s tomb.

A redbrick, ivy-covered wall demarcates the graveyard from the realms of the living, upon which is affixed a small white marble plaque mourning the poet''s "untimely death," while proclaiming that somewhere within this earth are the remains of Marlowe, his bones intermingled with other subjects in the kingdom of death. "Cut is the branch that might have grown full straight" reads Marlowe''s epitaph. It''s from Doctor Faustus. Examining the dual voids in the carved skulls welcoming me to St. Nicholas''s reaffirmed what I found so fascinating about this story of a contract with the Devil, for walking upon that hallowed ground, atoms of Marlowe now slick with the dirt on the soles of my shoes, and the part of me that is skeptical of skepticism couldn''t help but feel antique occult enthusiasms, that sense that there may be something beyond this veil of our reality, something that we can access but that we can''t control. My desire to write a cultural history of the Faust legend goes back a few years earlier than my pilgrimage to the.