Please help us continue having these discussions on Patreon, or follow us on other Podcast channels here: https://linktr.ee/solomon_smith
Richard Barakat's *Faust the Magician* is available here: https://shorturl.at/CDWx0
See also the below discussions:
Richard Barakat: The Literary Collective (Spring 2025): https://youtu.be/rwecUdt0p28
Richard Barakat: Philosophic Dialogues from La Frontera (Spring 2024): https://youtu.be/YiiZbUErFcA
Richard Barakat joins us to explore the strange relationship between poetry, magic, and the Devil, beginning with Marlowe and Goethe’s Faust tellings and ending with Richard’s own apocalyptic Faust for the 21st century. Along the way: Pindar raises men towards the gods, Ovid turns poetry into immortality, Yeats makes images into magical powers, paganism and Christianity collide and combine, artistic genius edges towards possession, and Faust’s desire to transcend the human becomes inseparable from the old suspicion that the arts are, somehow, the Devil’s domain.
00:00 – Are the Arts the Devil’s Domain?
06:24 – What Is the Magic of Poetry?
10:15 – Marlowe, Goethe, and their Fausts
19:37 – Pagan Gods, Christianity, and Syncretism
27:43 – Pindar and Becoming Like the Gods
38:52 – What Makes Great Art Ineffable?
41:42 – Writing a Darker Faust for the 21st Century
49:50 – Faustian Knowledge, Faustian Power
52:32 – Yeats the Magician
57:20 – Ovid, Transformation, and Artistic Immortality
01:07:16 – Yeats: Leda and the Byzantium Poems
01:22:33 – Satan's Faustian Bargain
01:30:13 – Can Art Create Gods?
