Faust’s encounter with the witch is a pivotal moment in Goethe’s drama. It not only marks the turning point in the action when Faust takes the potion that causes his fateful passion for Margareta, it captures one of the fundamental dichotomies explored in the work. The erudite Faust, gorged on the esoteric mysteries of philosophy and theology, sustained by a steady diet of pedantry and sophistry, tantalized yet already disillusioned by magic, has thus far been acquainted only with a devil after his own taste, a Mephistopheles who is no more than the incarnation of Faust’s own worst defects and blindspots. Mephistopheles, the cavalier in his scarlet cape, is the devil that Faust conjures, who at his first meeting with the mortal man engages him in the kind of semantic debate and specious reasoning that merely mirrors and reinforces Faust’s own trajectory away from heaven. But Satan is Satan, whether disguised as a "traveling scholar" or a hideous creature with horns and bats’ wings, and he is not content to let Faust go down so cleanly, through a corruption of intellect and faith so unworldly it is almost noble. First, he will make Faust base, a slave to his body as well as his mind and victim of the corruption of the flesh. The devil is present in the hags and crones who serve him, and they complete his identity and his work. The Witch’s kitchen is the other half of hell, the stinking cesspool with which Mephistopheles will complete the destruction and damnation of Faust.

Mephistopheles is sophisticated and refined, and he appeals to Faust’s vanity, but vanity is not how the devil plans to secure his victim. He appears as a man after Faust’s own heart, one who has also become somewhat embittered by glorious schemes that have failed. Like Milton’s Satan, he is very human in the way he elicits sympathy, and he knows how to deal with men in their own language. In the prologue, the Lord has an apparently unfounded and rather naïve assumption that Faust will not stray far because "a good man, in his dark, bewildered course will not forget the way of righteousness." (pg. 42) Mephistopheles is far wiser in the ways of the world than God, this "first of gentlemen." He treats Faust familiarly, as though he were "someone who could understand" a fellow in a similar plight. "I give your learned worship my salute, and own, you put me in a pretty sweat," (pg. 74) he greets the mortal man casually. As Faust observes at their first meeting, "Your powers of grand annihilation fail, and so you traffic on a smaller scale." (pg. 76) Mephistopheles is only too happy to let Faust believe this, and in a way, it is true; he is trafficking on a smaller scale, but though the efforts be humble and unspectacular, whether he wins men through distortions of Scripture, through pride and casuistry or through the local tavern and the local house of pleasure, he is still winning souls. Men who mistake the devil for a red-tailed spook are deceived, but so is Faust deceived by this devilish gentleman who lends such a commiserative ear to his tales of frustration. Although corruption of spirit is a greater fall (the fall of the devil himself, who was once an angel of light) Mephistopheles does not rely only on philosophy and theology gone awry to trap Faust. For the rest of humanity, his methods are even more banal and predictable, but effective as we see in Auerbach’s cellar. The ubiquitous vices of drunkenness and licentiousness are as good for dragging men to the devil as the resplendent mega-sins of spiritual pride or despair. Mephistopheles first appears to Faust as a dog, and that subtly sets the tone for his character development. He deceives Faust about his true nature from the beginning; although he doesn’t disguise his identity as the devil or his intent to win Faust’s soul, he charms his mortal victim with his ethereal yet godless academic world, and only later does he bring Faust to the tavern, to the witch’s kitchen, to the base lusts of the flesh. "Shall I rank then with gods?" asks Faust. "Too well I feel my kinship with the worm." (pg. 52) From the very beginning, with his pursuit of metaphysics and magic, Faust intended to rise above his mortality, and if he couldn’t do it spiritually than he was willing to seek demonic assistance. Mephistopheles uses that as his ticket in, but his intention all along is to unleash in Faust the deepest, basest desires of his human nature, to truly return Faust to his kinship with the worm. The devil may snare man through his pride, but he will not leave him with any dignity.

Mephistopheles brings Faust to the witch’s kitchen to secure for him the promise he made him, that he would do everything in his power to provide sheer, untempered pleasures for this jaded and weary scholar. In the kitchen, he sets the stage for his real seizure of power, which occurs when Faust downs the flaming liquid. Just as Faust rightly guesses, he does not specifically need the services of the witch in order to carry out his plan, although he lamely protests that for him to make such a brew himself would be too much of a bother. He is slowly working against Faust’s psyche and is preparing to catch the sharp, alert professor and amateur necromancer unaware. "This witch’s quackery disgusts my soul," (pg. 110) Faust first cries when he comes upon the hearth and the cauldron with its strange fumes rising up from it. He is completely blind to Mephistopheles’ true intent and his methods to achieve his goal; he still has delusions of grandeur despite the fact that the devil has won his soul, and it is really no longer his own to be disgusted. Faust believes that because the devil’s bread will never satisfy (and that is certainly true,) he will never be sucked in by it. Although he makes the pact and gives his bloody signature in exchange for the hope that he will be made one of "pleasure’s devotees" (pg. 87) he is confident that it will never happen. His introduction to the witch is the beginning of the process by which Mephistopheles dispels his delusions and breaks him down. The intention of Goethe’s devil does not seem to be to recreate man in his own image, because mere man is hardly capable of such evil, but to make man disgusting and yet have him retain the pride which will prevent true self-awareness from causing him to turn to the only source which will free him from his bonds. In the prologue, the Lord seems confident that Faust will not forget his "true source", but Mephistopheles "little doubts" that Faust will bite the dust, and for him, that is enough, because what he hates most of all is a son of heaven, and to unseat Faust from his heavenly throne (which we might question his sitting on anyway) he has only to drag him to earth and no further. Hell starts above ground. Faust tried everything to attain a celestial level on his own, philosophy, theology, law, medicine, magic, but "man’s conversion is beyond [his] reach." (pg. 43) Apparently, he did not realize the full importance of that conclusion, that his own conversion is out of his own hands, for although he thinks he can quell scruples and doubts, and though he does not fear devil or hell, he is merely deceived, because the drama forces us as well as Faust to conclude that the devil was to be feared after all. He starts out convinced that he is independent of heaven and of hell. "I’ve nothing with this simple life akin," boasts (and/ or laments) Faust, but Mephistopheles will soon dispel that notion and teach him that he is a man of the clay and dust whose kinship is with the worms, not the angels, and that man must have either God or the devil on his side.

Many sorts of characters set the tone in the witch’s kitchen, and they represent the different characteristics of the devil and mirror his varying strategies. Faust is blind to their significance, but the monkeys tending the cauldron are vulgar extremes of the same fate to which he is being steered. "Revolting beasts, " (pg. 112) he calls them, little heeding Mephistopheles’significant reply, "I disagree, for discourse of this kind has qualities exactly to my mind." Monkeys (even pre-Darwinian monkeys) are the animals closest to human beings, but Faust, with all his learning and metaphysical aspirations, is far from recognizing his kinship to these "disgusting creatures." These greedy monkeys, however, share Faust’s sins and failings in less refined form. "Given gold, I’d be consoled," (pg. 112) says the male monkey, just has Faust has also resolved to seek pleasure and consolation in the earth and her fruits rather than in heaven. These monkeys are also keenly aware of the state of the world, and the precariousness of seeking happiness and surety therein. "The world, behold, is thus forever rolled, with ceaseless up and down, and lo, its hollow crown resounds like glass most apt to break." (pg. 113) The animals that Faust so scorns warn him gravely yet mockingly that his crown will shatter, his illusion made of glass, glass like the mirror in which he first glimpses Maragareta. "This sphere of clay will splinter on a day." (pg. 113) In Goethe’s Faust, both as a part of the period and a part of the plot, art and philosophy and theology are set up as achievements man accomplishes independent of God, as aspirations to celebrated for their nobility even though their limitations must ultimately be disclosed. The monkeys see clearly that man is deluded about his own capabilities, and because of this perception and foresight, Mephistopheles calls them the "genuine poets of the day." (pg. 115)

The witch herself is an interesting comparison to Mephistopheles; she stands for a kind of old school deviltry while her master is an up to date Lucifer. "Culture spreads now, even to the devil." (pg. 116) She is a vestige of a era when the horn, tail, and claw filled the north with awe, a time when piety was innocently naïve and the devil did not need to resort to elaborate disguises to frighten poor souls. She is not, however, an obsolete relic, for although the world has grown cynical of the simplicity of the struggle between good and evil, Satan’s power is only "almost turned to fairy-tale." (pg. 117) "The Evil One is banned," observes Mephistopheles, but "evils prevail." (pg. 117) The world may call the Evil One or the witch a fairy tale, but there they both are, and they both still have vigor and skills which complement each other’s power. The witch works through potions and spells which might offend the now genteelly corrupt world, but the consequences they effect are timeless. Faust drinks a brew which excites in his heart the lust that is his undoing, and lust is one of the most time-honored ways of going down. That is the irony of Faust’s fall, that this man who was set apart from the common run of man, who was set up from the beginning as another Job, is not defeated by the elaborate casuistry of his investigations into the Gospel of John, is not brought down by any heresy or great tragic flaw (except for the flaw which led him to the devil in the first place) but by sex, by the body. His glass world which he built for himself, an intellectual, metaphysical world into which he tried to also incorporate the devil as he saw fit, is shattered when Mephistopheles pops the ethereal bubble and wages battle from within Faust’s own flesh. The witch, the "old bag of bones," although she seems a minion unworthy of her master’s refinement and enlightened approach to damnation, is the instrument and representative of Mephistopheles’ most powerful weapon.

Faust has a last chance at redemption when his passion for Margareta begins to metamorphose into a love that Mephistopheles had not planned for, when despite himself it flourishes and begins to grow upwards from the seed of lust planted by the witch. "Oh mighty spirit... you taught me in [Nature’s] deepest heart to gaze." (pg. 145) Faust pours out affirmations of new-found bliss and can only lament that he is now bound to the companion who provided them; his gratitude he directs not to Mephistopheles but to some power that is neither God nor devil, but which is probably a force that arises from within and which Faust mistakenly attributes to an external cause or source. Even lust gives birth to this hope, but despite his discovery of this spirit, Faust remains a "poor son of earth" (pg. 146) as Mephistopheles jeeringly calls him. The devil mocks this mortal’s divine ecstasy, "love’s all-pervading blissful tide." "Your Son of Earth, transcending this condition, then brings this noble new-born intuition- (he makes an obscene gesture) I hardly like to say to what fruition." (pg. 147) The devil once again drags Faust out of the clouds and back into kinship with his lustful, wormlike self. The seeds of possible redemption have been planted in Faust, the seeds of love, but the seed of lust planted in the witch’s kitchen proves stronger. He swears he loves Margareta, but he fails to save her life because his love is insufficient and tainted. Because of his lust she poisoned her mother and begot the child she drowned, and most significantly, his lust was the seed for the lust that grew in her innocent heart. She refuses to follow her lover when his kisses are too cold. Those kisses became the chain with which he imprisoned her, and when at last, he desires to do her good and tries to free her, the chain breaks, his kisses grow cold, and she is immovable. The devil’s bread is insufficient; it will not carry through. Faust became reacquainted with his baser self, the lustful flesh, and from that baser even Spirit itself arose (the Spirit that Faust blissfully thanks in the throes of his passion,) but ultimately the flesh fails. And flesh is all that Mephistopheles has left his victim, the one-time philosopher, theologian, magician and seeker of the great Geist.