Deceptively real – The demonic origin of the illusion

On White Sunday, students came to D. Faustus’ house for dinner. As the wine flowed, there was talk at the table of beautiful women; one of them said that he would rather see no woman than the beautiful Helen of Greece, for it was because of her that the beautiful city of Troy had perished. She must have been beautiful because she had been stolen from her husband and because of her such a conflict had arisen.

Doctor Faustus replied: “Because you are so eager to see the beautiful apparition of Helena, I want to show her to you here so that you can personally see her spirit in appearance and form as if she were still alive.”

Doctor Faustus then forbade them to speak, to get up from the table or to touch Helena and left the room. When he came back in, Queen Helena followed closely behind him, so beautiful that the students were no longer in their senses, so confused and inwardly inflamed were they.

Helena appeared in a precious black purple dress. She wore her beautiful, golden-blonde hair loose and it reached down to her knees. She had coal-black eyes, a pretty face with a round head, cherry-red lips with a small mouth, a neck like a white swan, pink cheeks, a radiantly beautiful face, tall and slim.

The students ask Faust to conjure her again so that a painter can portray her. Faust refuses, saying that he cannot summon Helena at any time, but assures them that he will send them her portrait, which they can then paint.

When the students went to bed, they could not sleep because of the sight that had greeted them. This shows that the devil often makes people fall in love and blinds them, causing them to lead dissolute lives that are then difficult to give up.

The Historia of D. Johann Fausten was published in 1587 by the Frankfurt printer Johannes Spieß. The anonymously written prose novel deals with the life and work of D. Johann Fausten. He makes a pact with the devil and then lives with his demon Mephostophiles for 24 years until he is finally killed by the devil. The Historia is based on oral traditions about a historical figure named Faust but is mixed with various textual sources (such as demonological treatises and collections of proverbs), which make it difficult to work out the historical core. As early as 1587, the Historia was reprinted several times, and in the same year an edition appeared with additional chapters containing further short stories about Faustus and his magic. The work is considered one of the most successful prose novels of the 16th to 18th centuries.

In the early modern period, in the wake of the first systematic ‘witch theory’, the Malleus Maleficarum (Latin Malleus maleficarum, 1486/87), numerous demonological treatises emerged, particularly in French and German-speaking countries, which took a stand for or against the persecution of witches. A central point of contention in this debate is the deceptions caused by demons. The authors of the treatises agree that demons especially use optical illusions to cause harm. At the same time, the narrative discussion of optical illusions takes up a striking amount of space in the treatises. This shows that the fear of the illusion and the fascination with it can certainly mix. Proponents of the persecutions argue that witches cause considerable damage, for example by causing crop failures with hail or by pretending to turn people into animals.

Opponents of witch-hunting, however, react with other explanations: For example, the physician Johann Weyer first wrote in 1563 in his treatise On the Illusions of Demons (lat. De Praestigiis Daemonum) that women themselves were deceived by demons who made them believe they had illusionary powers. According to Weyer, these demonic deceptions also explain the confessions of supposed witches who actually believe they have committed the acts in question. He maintains that the danger of demonic-magical deceptions comes more from educated magicians who make pacts with the devil in order to be able to use illusionary powers.

The Historia by D. Johann Fausten is also based on this theoretical foundation, which verifiably takes up demonological knowledge and narrative elements from Johann Weyer’s treatise and integrates them into its story: the learned magician Faustus makes a pact with the devil and uses his help to conjure up fascinating visual illusions – for example of ancient heroes or the beautiful Helena, which are intended to entertain both the audience in the Historia and the contemporary readership.

The characteristic mixture of insecurity and fear as well as fascination and attraction towards hyper-realistic illusions – in this case an illusory beautiful female figure – does not only concern authors in the 16th century. The game with beautiful appearances is just as relevant and spirited in the digital age.

The 19-year-old Miquela Sousa, known on social media as Lil Miquela, is an influencer of Brazilian-Spanish origin created by the Californian start-up Brud digital. Since 2016, she has had an Instagram account on which she advertises clothes, for example from Calvin Klein or Prada, to her now around three million followers as a model.

Miquela has now released several songs on the streaming platform Spotify in which she deals with her heartbreak, among other things. She is also an advocate for social justice on the social networks Twitter, Tumblr, TikTok, YouTube and Instagram and supports feminist movements and Black Lives Matter.

In the Historia, Faustus uses his demon to create a hyper-realistic appearance of Helen of Troy. The rhetorically adept description from head to toe – “round head, cherry-red lips with a small mouth, a neck like a white swan, pink cheeks” – breaks the overall picture of her appearance into individual parts. This reduction to individual aspects of the appearance makes it impossible to perceive the illusory figure in its entirety and thus encourages its eroticisation. In the rest of the text, this erotic desire of the students and Faustus (to whom the incarnated Helena will later give birth to a son) is juxtaposed with a warning about the consequences of a life that indulges in such deceptive illusions. Behind the beautiful appearance, the text is trying to convey, hides the master of lies and deception: the devil himself. The hallmark of the devil’s work is precisely the illusionistic perfection that is literally too good to be true. So Helena leaves Faustus and the group of students relatively quickly. And the son, whom she conceived with Faustus, also vanishes into thin air. All that remains are images: in the students, in Faustus and finally in the reader. It is precisely these strong inner images - caused by the power of words - that are offensive to contemporary critics of the Faust book. This is countered by the success of the Historia and its numerous adaptations and adaptations, which arouse keen interest among readers. It is precisely the forbidden that has fascinated them.

While Helena is conjured up in the medium of text and the images arise accordingly in the imagination, Miquela appears more directly in the medium of images. Behind Miquela are the founder and founder of the company Brud, Trevor McFedries and Sara Decou, ​​who orchestrate the ‘appearances’ of her digital beauty. What is striking is that Miquela embodies the typical ‘Instagram look’: full lips, expressive eyebrows, a narrow waist. She is the ideal woman of the early 21st century: young and pretty, but also socially and politically active. Her appearance provokes numerous, sometimes very different reactions: some followers approach her with ‘immediate’ erotic interest, others wish for a friendship, others are concerned with the technical subtlety of her creation, but also her influence on current social and political processes. But criticism is also being voiced: American author Rosa Boshier points out that the company Brud is profiting from a digitally created woman of colour without working with a real woman of colour. If the ethnic background is as carefully curated as the selfie in the Californian sun, social justice becomes a commodity on the capitalist market.

In Miquela’s case, the boundary between the analogue and digital worlds is blurred from two sides: On the one hand, the digitally generated portrait in its hyper-realistic design comes closer to our own analogue world, and on the other hand, the digital processing of our own portraits (from beautifying filters to deepfake technology) can be interpreted as ‘avatarisation’. In contrast to the demonic illusion, the postmodern, digital aesthetic illusion no longer has anything devilish about it. However, an uncanny feeling of unease remains: the ‘uncanny valley’ effect or the acceptance gap describes the paradoxical phenomenon that the acceptance of technically simulated avatars does not increase steadily with the figure’s similarity to humans, but rather drops sharply within a certain range. Acceptance only increases again with a very high degree of similarity and reaches its presumed peak when the deception can no longer be distinguished from humans at all.

In the 18th century, illusion solidified into an aesthetic concept. Philosophers and poets such as Immanuel Kant, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing and Friedrich Schiller established appearance as a central component of the arts. This pleasurable and harmless enjoyment of deception requires a distance in reading. In the 16th century, however, which assumed that the devil could deceive the senses, this distance was (still) precarious. For in the description of the conjured Helena, the demonic is mixed with the artistic - Helena is portrayed eloquently and is even to be painted. She is a devilish illusion and object of erotic desire and at the same time a work of art. Through this simultaneity, not only the aesthetic potential of the demonic is put up for discussion, but also the demonic potential of the aesthetic. The fact that this unease does not end with pre-modernity is shown by the influencer Miquela, who confronts us – not as a devilish, but as a CGI illusion – with the fluid boundaries between reality and fiction, between art and truth.