It is not a coincidence that the two most significant stage pieces of 19th-century Europe, Goethe’s Faust and Wagner’s Das Ring des Nibelungen, deal with what the famous Wagnerian C.S. Lewis described in The Abolition of Man as the “magician’s bargain.” For Lewis, the “magician’s bargain” is “that process whereby man surrenders object after object, and finally himself, to Nature in return for power.”
