Editing Mephistopheles (section)

==In the Faust legend==
{{Further|Faust}}
[[File:Teufelspakt Faust-Mephisto, Julius Nisle.jpg|thumb|Engraving of [[Faust]]'s pact with Mephisto, by Adolf Gnauth (circa 1840)]]Mephistopheles is associated with the Faust legend, based on the historical [[Johann Georg Faust]]. In the legend, Faust, an ambitious scholar, makes a [[deal with the Devil]] at the price of his soul, with Mephistopheles acting as the devil's agent. The legend has come to symbolize the consequences of what happens when the quest for empowerment and realization escape the "intellectual and moral restrictions of the Christian medieval order."<ref name=zapf>{{Cite journal |last=Zapf |first=Hubert |date=2012 |title=The Rewriting of the Faust Myth in Nathaniel Hawthorne's "Young Goodman Brown" |url=https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5325/nathhawtrevi.38.1.0019 |journal=Nathaniel Hawthorne Review |volume=38 |issue=1 |pages=19–40 |doi=10.5325/nathhawtrevi.38.1.0019 |issn=0890-4197}}</ref>

The name appears in the late-sixteenth-century [[Faust chapbooks]] – stories concerning the life of Johann Georg Faust, written by an anonymous German author. The first of these chapbooks, ''Historia von D. Johann Fausten'' (1587) is believed to be the first literary appearance of the Faust  and Mephistopheles character.<ref name=zapf/>
In the 1725 version, which [[Johann Wolfgang von Goethe|Goethe]] read, ''Mephostophiles'' is a [[devil]] in the form of a [[Franciscans|greyfriar]] summoned by Faust in a wood outside [[Wittenberg]].

From the chapbooks, the name Mephistophilis entered Faustian literature. Many authors have used it, from Goethe to [[Christopher Marlowe]]. In the 1616 edition of Marlowe's ''[[The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus]]'', ''Mephostophiles'' became ''Mephistophilis''.

In later adaptations of the Faust material, Mephistopheles frequently figures as a title character: in [[Meyer Lutz]]'s ''[[Faust and Marguerite (opera)|Mephistopheles, or Faust and Marguerite]]'' (1855), [[Arrigo Boito]]'s ''[[Mefistofele]]'' (1868), [[Klaus Mann]]'s ''[[Mephisto (novel)|Mephisto]]'', and [[Franz Liszt]]'s ''[[Mephisto Waltzes]]''. There are also many parallels with the character of Mephistopheles and the character Lord Henry Wotton in ''[[The Picture of Dorian Gray]]'' by [[Oscar Wilde]].<ref><nowiki>{{Cite He is also interpreted as a mysterious figure in the movie Ghostrider.
web|url=</nowiki>https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/english/currentstudents/undergraduate/modules/fulllist/special/interdisciplinaryandcreativecollaboration/faustbooks/doriangray/|title<nowiki> = The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde (1891)}}</nowiki></ref>