Christopher (Christoph) Joseph Haizmann

Christopher Haizmann: The Painter Who Claimed He Sold His Soul to the Devil

Christopher, or Christoph, Joseph Haizmann was a minor 17th-century Bavarian painter remembered not for his art alone, but for one of the strangest recorded cases of a supposed Pact with the Devil. In 1677, Haizmann declared that he had sold his soul to Satan nine years earlier and that Demons had tormented him ever since.

On August 29, 1677, Haizmann was seized by what was described as an “unnatural convulsion.” Terrified, he went to the police and asked for protection. He claimed that nine years earlier he had entered into a pact with Satan, and the police took his request seriously enough to grant him protection.

The Infernal Pact

Haizmann later wrote and illustrated his own account of the pact. According to his testimony, the Devil appeared to him one day in the form of a burgher accompanied by a large black dog. Seeing that Haizmann was distressed and sorrowful, the Devil asked why he was so unhappy.

Haizmann wrote that the Devil offered to help him:

“He would help me out of my distress if I were willing to subscribe myself in ink to him to be his son; he would assist and help me in every possible way.”

The painter accepted. A contract was drawn up for nine years, and Haizmann signed the pact in his own Blood.

Visions of the Devil and Hell

Over the following years, Haizmann claimed that the Devil appeared to him repeatedly in grotesque and terrifying forms. In some visions Satan appeared as a monstrous dragon with breasts and talons. In others, he showed Haizmann visions of Hell itself.

Haizmann described Hell as “filled with burning flames and terrible stench.” He saw a great cauldron from which came the agonising moans and groans of human beings. On the edge of the cauldron sat a hellish devil who poured flaming resin, sulphur, and pitch over the suffering souls.

As the end of the nine-year pact approached, Haizmann became increasingly fearful of his fate.

Exorcism at Mariazell

The local police sent Haizmann to the holy shrine at Mariazell, where he underwent several days of Exorcism. During this ordeal, the Virgin Mary was said to have recovered the pact from the Devil.

However, the torment did not end. Less than a year later, Haizmann returned to the shrine, still complaining of persecution by the Devil. A second exorcism was performed, and this time the Virgin Mary was said to have ripped up the pact.

After this, Haizmann entered a Bavarian monastery. Even there, he did not find peace. He continued to experience visions of the Devil and Demons for the rest of his life. He died in 1700.

Freud’s Analysis of Haizmann

Centuries later, the case attracted the attention of Dr. Rudolf Payer-Thurn, a Viennese librarian, researcher, and court councilor. Payer-Thurn discovered documents prepared at Mariazell describing Haizmann’s exorcism and showed them to Sigmund Freud.

Freud analysed the case in his 1923 essay “Eine Teufelsneurose im Siebzehnten Jahrhundert” — “A Devil Neurosis of the Seventeenth Century.” The work became an important text in Freudian psychoanalysis.

The Mariazell papers, including paintings made by Haizmann during his possession, led Freud to believe the following:

Rather feminine self-depictions of Haizmann in his paintings show Haizmann as suppressing homosexual tendencies.
Multiple breasts in the paintings show Haizmann’s sexual associations with the Devil.
The number 9—there is a nine-year gap between Haizmann’s pact with the Devil and its implementation, and nine days in which Haizmann resisted the Devil—represents pregnancy fantasies.
A penis is painted on the Devil in every picture. This, along with the pregnancy fantasies, show that Haizmann “recoiled from a feminine attitude toward his father which has its climax in the fantasy of giving birth to his child. Mourning for the lost father, heightened by yearning for him, [Haizmann’s] repressed pregnancy fantasy is reactivated, against which he must defend himself through neurosis and by degrading his father.”
Freud found that Haizmann’s selling of himself to the Devil bought him peace of mind: “His father had died, he had become melancholy, and the devil, who came along and asked him why he was upset and mournful, promised to help him. . . . Here we have someone who gives himself to the devil in order to be free of an emotional depression.”
Ultimately, then, Freud reasoned, the Devil is a father figure.

The Meaning of the Haizmann Case

The case of Christopher Haizmann stands at the crossroads of demonology, religious possession, visionary art, psychoanalysis, and early modern fear of damnation. To the Church, his story was a case of demonic torment and deliverance through the Virgin Mary. To Freud, it was a symbolic drama of grief, father-loss, repression, fantasy, and neurosis.

Haizmann’s paintings and testimony remain disturbing because they give visual and emotional form to the terror of the Devil’s pact. Whether read as a literal case of demonic possession, a psychological crisis, or a religiously shaped expression of despair, Haizmann’s story reveals how deeply the Devil haunted the imagination of early modern Europe.

Explore Demonology Deeper

Christopher Haizmann’s story is more than a strange historical case. It opens a door into the world of Devil pacts, possession, exorcism, religious fear, visionary art, and the darker regions of the human psyche.

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