May 9

Blood Pact: Christoph Haizmann and the Devil’s Contract

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On May 9, 1678, Bavarian painter Christoph Haizmann knelt at the shrine of the Virgin Mary in Mariazell, Austria, and retrieved—physically, from the hands of the Devil himself—a document he had signed twelve years earlier in ordinary ink, promising to be Satan’s son.

Three centuries later, Sigmund Freud would read the case file and conclude that none of it had anything to do with the Devil at all.

Both men were probably right.

A Diabolical Negotiation

Christoph Haizmann was born in Traunstein, Bavaria, around 1647 or 1651 (the records are inconsistent) and worked as a painter of modest reputation in the Austrian provinces. In 1666, his father died. Haizmann, by his own account, was the sole surviving member of his family, and the loss pitched him into a depression so severe he couldn’t work. His response was to perform a ritual invocation of the Devil.

According to legend, the Devil appeared, first as a noble gentleman—light beard, fair complexion, red cape, black hat, black walking stick, a black dog at his heel. The iconography was precise and traditional (and quite in line with an artist like Haizmann’s assumed vision): the Devil in his gentlemanly guise, the one who appears at crossroads and in studies and in moments of human desperation, offering what seems, at first, like a reasonable arrangement.

Surprisingly, Haizmann rejected him. And yet, the Devil returned. And again—and again. Nine times, in fact, over two years, each appearance more grotesque than the last, the elegant nobleman giving way to forms of increasing monstrousness as the negotiation continued.

Nine refusals is a remarkable number—it suggests a man who genuinely wanted what the Devil was offering but kept pulling back from the transaction, circling the decision, approaching it and retreating. Or perhaps, quite astonishingly, negotiating. However, the Devil, it seems, was patient.

On September 24th, 1668, the Devil appeared once again—this time asking Haizmann why he seemed so sad. Haizmann told him bluntly, he missed his late father. There was, he claimed, no one left in the world to care for him. The Devil said he understood, and would help in every way. And then he showed Haizmann his true form—a ferocious scaled dragon with a human face—and offered to assume the role of the deceased father. Haizmann, staring at the dragon, finally agreed.

The first pact was penned in German by Haizmann’s own hand in ordinary black ink. Its terms were simple to the point of being startling: "I Christoph Haizmann, am writing to this Gentleman to be his son for the next nine years." Not his servant, not his slave—his son. The painter had not sold his soul for wealth or power or knowledge or any of the standard Faustian commodities. He had sold it, quite literally, to resolve his Daddy Issues.

The Blood Pact

For approximately a year, the arrangement held: his depression lifted, Haizmann returned to painting. The Devil, in whatever form he took during this period, seemed to have fulfilled his end of the bargain. Then, in 1669, he returned and demanded a second pact—this one written in blood—and with significantly more specific terms. The new document read: "Christoph Haizmann. I pledge myself to Satan, to be his bondage son, and in nine years to give him my body and soul."

The language had shifted: the first pact was a request for a father, while the second was a deed of indenture. The warmth of the filial relationship has been replaced by the cold vocabulary of ownership. And the clock was now running on a specific deadline: in nine years, body and soul. The date of the blood pact was 1669. Nine years from 1669 is 1678.

Again, Haizmann complied … yet soon regrated his decision. He had until that very year to find a way out—or to accept the diabolical terms.

He found work as a painter in Pottenbrunn, in Lower Austria, and lived there quietly for years. The Devil appeared to him periodically, in forms his later paintings would document with remarkable precision: human figures with multiple breasts, with dragon wings, with serpentine tails, with animal heads. Haizmann painted all of them, creating a visual record of his supernatural encounters that survives—in copies made in 1714 by a church historian, the originals having since been lost—as one of the most extraordinary documents of seventeenth-century folk demonology.

The Breakdown at Pottenbrunn

As 1677 approached—the year the first pact came due—Haizmann’s mental state deteriorated catastrophically. On August 29th, 1677, he entered the church in Pottenbrunn and collapsed, his body wracked with convulsions and spasms. The parish priest, Father Leopold Braun, examined him and described him in a letter that has survived: "a wretched man, destitute of all help."

The letter Father Braun subsequently sent to the Basilica at Mariazell told the story in full: the pacts, the Devil’s appearances, the approaching deadline, the painter’s terror. Mariazell was the most important Marian shrine in the Austrian lands, home to a miraculous wooden statue of the Virgin that had been venerated for centuries and was credited with extraordinary powers of intercession. If there was anywhere a diabolical pact might be successfully contested, it was here.

Haizmann arrived at the Basilica of the Mariä Geburt on September 5th, 1677. The church fathers brought him immediately to the altar of the Virgin for an exorcism that lasted three days. At midnight on the third day, the Devil appeared in the chapel—the records describe it as a physical confrontation, a moment of genuine encounter between the painter and whatever force he had been dealing with for nine years—and surrendered the blood pact. Haizmann retrieved it from the Devil’s hands and returned it to the priests.

He was not finished. The demonic attacks continued in Vienna, where he moved after the first exorcism and resumed painting. Visions of holy figures—Christ, angels—urged him to join a monastery and lead a humble life. The Devil appeared again, trying to renegotiate, attempting new pacts. Haizmann returned to Mariazell in May 1678 and requested a second exorcism, this time for the original ink pact. On May 9th, 1678, the retrieval was successful. Both contracts were back in the hands of the Church. The case was—officially, liturgically, sacramentally—closed.

The Analyst Chimes In

The documents were gathered into a single file by a church historian in 1714: the pacts themselves (copies, by that point—the originals possibly too damaged to preserve), Haizmann’s diary of his visions, Father Braun’s letters, and copies of Haizmann’s paintings of the Devil’s appearances. The file was titled the Trophaeum Mariano-Cellense—the Trophy of Mariazell, a document of the Virgin’s triumph over the diabolical. It was deposited in the Austrian National Library and largely forgotten.

In the early 1920s, a Viennese court librarian named Rudolf Payer-Thurn rediscovered it … and promptly brought it to Sigmund Freud.

Freud’s response appeared in 1923 within the journal Imago, under the title "Eine Teufelsneurose im Siebzehnten Jahrhundert"—"A Seventeenth-Century Demonological Neurosis.” It is one of the more remarkable documents in the Freudian corpus, not because its conclusions are correct but because of the genuine intellectual seriousness with which Freud engaged with material that most of his contemporaries would have dismissed as mere superstition.

Freud’s argument was precise: the Devil, in Haizmann’s psyche, was a substitute for his dead father. The painter had lost the figure of paternal authority and support, and in his depression had constructed—or summoned, or encountered; Freud was carefully agnostic about the phenomenology—an entity that offered to fill that role. The pact’s specific language confirmed it: not servant but son. Not slave but bondage son. The relationship Haizmann sought was filial, not contractual. The Devil wasn’t being hired; he was being adopted.

What Freud found most illuminating was the apparent contradiction in the pact’s terms: Haizmann was giving up his body and soul in exchange for having a father. This seems, on the surface, like a terrible bargain. But Freud’s reading reframes it: the Devil was not demanding the body and soul as payment for services rendered but, rather, receiving them as the natural property of a father over his son.

Freud also noted, with characteristic directness, that the exorcism worked—and concluded that this was not surprising. The Church had provided Haizmann with a substitute for the substitute: the Virgin Mary as the merciful mother, the church community as the family, the monastic order he eventually joined as the structure of belonging and purpose that his actual father’s death had destroyed. The cure was, in Freud’s framework, a transference—a redirection of the same needs that had driven Haizmann to the Devil, now satisfied by legitimate religious institutions. The exorcists were, he wrote with some admiration, unexpected allies of psychoanalysis.

The Unanswered Question

What actually happened at midnight in the chapel at Mariazell in September 1677 is a question the Trophaeum documents carefully and leaves entirely unresolved. The physical pact—a piece of paper, written in blood—was retrieved. It existed. It was copied by the 1714 historian. A deposition from the Mariazell Abbot in 1729 confirmed the provenance of all the documents from the 1677–1678 events. Something happened in that chapel at midnight, something was handed over.

The cynically inclined will note that Haizmann himself could simply have brought the pact with him and handed it to the priests, having constructed the entire narrative of demonic retrieval for reasons of his own—social protection, institutional validation of an experience he needed to be taken seriously, the drama of a resolution commensurate with the drama of the crisis. This is possible.

It’s also possible that a man in severe psychological distress, praying at the most powerful Marian shrine in the Austrian lands for three days and nights, had an experience of genuine numinous force that resolved his crisis in ways that no merely psychological account fully captures.

However, the occult tradition would add a third possibility: that what Haizmann had done in 1668 was very real—that what he encountered at Mariazell in 1677 was real, and that the Virgin Mary and the Devil are not merely psychological metaphors but actual forces operating in actual human lives, and that the contest between them for one Bavarian painter’s soul was as genuine as the documents that recorded it suggest. Haizmann himself clearly believed this. He went on to paint his experiences with the same professional care he brought to any commission, documenting the Devil’s nine forms with the descriptive precision of an eyewitness rather than the symbolic vocabulary of allegory.

He joined the Brothers Hospitallers after the second exorcism, took the religious name Brother Chrysostomus, and lived in a monastery until his death in 1700. The demonic attacks continued when he drank too much wine. Otherwise, the records describe him as gentle and comforting—a man who had been to very dark places and returned from them with a quality of hard-won peace.

The Trophaeum Mariano-Cellense sits today in the Austrian National Library in Vienna, manuscript number 14086. The copies of the pacts are there. The copies of the paintings are there. The letter from Father Braun describing a wretched man destitute of all help is there. And the question of what exactly Haizmann signed in 1668—and what exactly he retrieved from the chapel at midnight, eleven years later—remains, as it has always been, magnificently open.

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