Among the oldest songs that Indo-European poets sang, mythologists tell us, is one about a smith who makes a pact with a devil. Having swapped his soul for the power to weld any materials together, the smith cunningly welds the devil to an immovable object. The Brothers Grimm collected variations on this theme in rural Germany in the nineteenth century. It is the kernel of Faust, a story reworked by Marlowe, Goethe and Mann. If the mythologists are right, however, it is at least six thousand years old – old enough to have been inspired by the smiths at Varna, those alchemists who, wreathed in
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