Christoph Haizmann: The Man Who Signed a Contract with the Devil

I’d previously written a blog post about a musician with a “sold his soul to the devil” story. The Devil’s Violinist - Niccolò Paganini >>  But this time I came across a painter who was also alleged to have sold his soul to the devil, and this one feels a bit more serious. Meet Christoph Haizmann, a figure with a story so strange that it even caught Sigmund Freud’s attention.

Haizmann was born in Austria around the mid-17th century, a poor painter. After his father’s death, he began to collapse psychologically. He fell into a severe melancholy, so intense that he became unable to handle even everyday tasks. Unable to endure it any longer, he went to a local priest.

The priest listened and diagnosed him with spiritual possession. He was then sent to a place that was half church, half medical institution. Haizmann did everything he was told, prayed, followed the rituals, but he still could not find peace. The fears, spasms, and hallucinations continued.

One day, while fully awake, he saw the devil as he was praying in a church (according to one account, he saw the devil in the form of a black dog) and made a deal: the devil would cure him for nine years, and at the end of that time, his soul and body would belong to the devil. Haizmann recorded this agreement with the Chinese ink he had with him. (This document is still kept in the church archives.)

After everything unfolded, the events were reported to the priests and the document was presented. Interestingly, the Church officially accepted the case.

This image shows a handwritten copy of the so called “blood pact” linked to the painter Christoph Haizmann. The Latin line at the top means “How this was restored is read below,” and the German heading identifies it as a copy of a written pledge made “with blood.” In the Haizmann case narrative, the text records a promise dated 1669, where the signer claims to bind “body and soul” to Satan for a fixed term. The page is associated with the Mariazell compilation preserved in Vienna, commonly cataloged under the Austrian National Library manuscript tradition known as Trophaeum Mariano-Cellense.

After the deal, our painter still doesn’t recover, and his mental state deteriorates even further. Six months later, he sees the devil again. This time, he cuts the tip of his finger and, using the blood that flows, draws an image of the devil. Beneath the drawing, he adds a second agreement, noted in sentences similar to the first.

According to the accounts, Haizmann doesn’t fully heal after the second agreement, but he does find a measure of peace. He lives relatively calmly for nine years. However, as the deadline approaches, his mental health begins to unravel again. He goes back to the Church to break the pact and asks the clergy for help.

Haizmann takes part in many exorcism rites. He withdraws into seclusion within the church. He undergoes treatments, but he never fully recovers. Some accounts even suggest the Church uses him as a kind of subject for observation.

Unable to find what he hoped for in the Church and in seclusion, Haizmann returns to the town to stay with his sister, and shortly afterward, he dies. Throughout his life, Haizmann repeatedly dreams of the devil and of hell, and he paints what he sees.

Haizmann's votive painting (triptych). Left: Satan appears as a fine burgher, and Haizmann signs a pact with ink. Right: The Devil reappears a year later and forces Haizmann to sign another pact with his own blood. Middle: The Virgin Mary makes the Devil to return the second pact during an exorcism.

Centuries after the events, the documents resurfaced. After learning about the case through materials sent to him by a friend, Sigmund Freud decided to examine it (and wrote an article on the subject). Out of the roughly ten works drawn by the painter, two in particular caught Freud’s attention. The first image is the devil as he was first seen, painted shortly after the father’s death:  

In the first image, the devil appears as a fairly healthy, vigorous man, roughly the same age as the painter’s father when he died. He is dressed in local clothing and holds a cane. In the second image, made six months later, the same devil is depicted as grotesquely ugly: horned, carrying a club, with a snake-like penis, and portrayed as a large-breasted figure.

The late Serol Teber explains that Freud offered the following interpretation:

“Because when the first image was made, only a very short time had passed. The father still retained his image of respect. But in the second image, that image of the father has slipped away. Now the real devil in the unconscious has emerged. Yet the real devil is a symbol of the father metaphor. It is the symbol of our instincts and the protective forces over us. What we curse as the devil is the ancestral god. It is a power that has been pushed back by the new fathers, the new gods. And when we are trapped, we do not call on the new fathers, but on the old fathers for help.”