What would you trade your soul for? This deep dive explores the surprisingly bureaucratic world of the Faustian bargain, tracing how selling your soul evolved from a deadly serious medieval accusation into a marketing stunt for virtuoso musicians and finally a modern metaphor for moral compromise. Medieval people imagined the supernatural running on the same feudal rules as their own society, complete with oral pacts sealed by a painless witch’s mark and written contracts signed in blood, or, as some demonologists debated, acceptable red ink.

We follow the story from the temptation of Jesus and the sixth-century tale of Theophilus of Adana, through legends smearing brilliant scholars like Pope Sylvester II, to the Malleus Maleficarum and the real executions of John Fian and Urbain Grandier. Then we watch the accusation migrate from courtroom to concert hall with Tartini, Paganini, Tommy Johnson, and Robert Johnson, and finally to the agonizing modern case of Rudolf Kastner.

• How the Malleus Maleficarum turned infant mortality into evidence against midwives
• The Icelandic priest who voided a demonic pact by smacking a seal with a Bible
• The Codex Gigas legend of a monk who wrote a book of all knowledge in one night
• Why stringed instruments and the tritone were linked to the devil
• The crossroads myth and how Tommy Johnson’s story was conflated with Robert Johnson