Selling your soul.

[abaris]

I was 13 when the song was released. No fucking internet made information gathering a bit of a chore so it took a bit of effort to track down the Faust. Not that bad actually. I remember hearing the lyric as Mephistophanes and assumed a Greek origin, not German. We were fortunate to grow up with an encyclopedia at home so I went to look it up and ran into Mephistopheles on the way to Mephistophanes.

I'm lucky enough to own the complete works of Goethe in a 19th century edition. Came upon me from one of my ancestors, I don't know which. Faust is a work of beauty in German. It's rhymed in it's original and when I first read it, the internet wasn't around for more than a decade or so.