Christoph Haizmann (d. 1706)

Johann Christoph Haizmann (1651/52 – 14 March 1700) was a Bavarian-born Austrian painter who is known for his autobiographically depicted demonical neurosis. The so-called Haizmann case has been studied in psychology and psychiatry since the early twentieth century, especially by Sigmund Freud and Gaston Vandendriessche.

Early life
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Christoph Haizmann was born in Traunstein, Bavaria, in 1651 or 1652.

Facts
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Little is known about him before 1677. He was an impoverished painter, and when he lost a parent, he allegedly sold his soul to the devil in 1668, to be his bounden son for nine years; after that time, Haizmann’s body and soul were to belong to the devil. Haizmann claimed that he gave two pacts to the devil, one written in ink and the other in his own blood.

Exorcisms
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However, in 1677, when the pacts were due, he became anxious and made a pilgrimage to Mariazell, and after a successful exorcism, the pact in blood was given back to him by the devil.

As the demonic infestations continued, Haizmann concluded that another exorcism was necessary to retrieve also the pact on ink; that happened in 1678.

Painting
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Haizmann painted several pictures of the appearances of the devil (a triptych and a series of eight portraits with captions) and kept a diary of his visions.

Later life and death
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After his demonical neurosis, Haizmann became a Brother Hospitaller. He died in 1700 in Neustadt an der Mettau in Bohemia (currently Nové Město nad Metují in Czech).

Manuscript record and research
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To preserve the details of the successful exorcism, a manuscript, partly in Latin, partly in German, was composed sometime between 1714 and 1729, titled Trophæum Mariano-Cellense. It was rediscovered in the archive in the early 1920s, and Sigmund Freud was the first to analyze it in an article entitled “A Seventeenth-Century Demonological Neurosis” (1923). After him, several other writers have discussed the case. The most extensive research (including two books) has probably been carried out by the Belgian psychologist Gaston Vandendriessche; other notable writers include Michel de Certeau and H. C. Erik Midelfort.

A facsimile of the Trophæum Mariano-Cellense manuscript, along with an English translation, colour illustrations and critique of Freud, was published in 1956 by Ida Macalpine and Richard A. Hunter: Schizophrenia, 1677: A Psychiatric Study of an Illustrated Autobiographical Record of Demoniacal Possession.

Haizmann in popular culture
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In 2003, a low-budget horror mockumentary Searching for Haizmann was released. According to the storyline of this movie, Haizmann, as the son of the devil, is the Anti-Christ, and he didn’t die in 1700 but was smuggled to America and he still lives there.

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