Note 1 — Chapter XXV · Faust and Mephistopheles.

The name Mephistopheles has in it, I think, the priest’s shudder at the fumes of the laboratory. Duntzer1 finds that the original form of the word was ‘Mephostophiles,’ and conjectures that it was a bungling effort to put together three Greek words, to mean ‘not loving the light.’ In this he has the support of Bayard Taylor, who also thinks that it was so understood by Goethe. The transformation of it was probably amid the dreaded gases with which the primitive chemist surrounded himself. He who began by ‘not loving the light’ became the familiar of men seeking light, and lover of their mephitic gases. The ancient Romans had a mysterious divinity called Mephitis, whose grove and temple were in the Esquiliæ, near a place it was thought fatal to enter. She is thought to have been invoked against the mephitic exhalations of the earth in the grove of Albunea. Sulphur springs also were of old regarded as ebullitions from hell, and both Schwarz and Roger Bacon particularly dealt in that kind of smell. Considering how largely Asmodeus, as ‘fine gentleman,’ entered into the composition of Mephistopheles, and how he flew from Nineveh to Egypt (Tobit) to avoid a bad smell, it seems the irony of mythology that he should turn up in Europe as a mephitic spirit.