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The Satan's Shop Book of Pacts

How to sell your soul, and everyone who tried before you.

You have questions about selling your soul. This is reasonable. It is one of the oldest continuous business relationships in the Western record, older than banking and considerably better documented, and almost everyone arrives at it eventually.

The Book of Pacts is our history of the arrangement: fifteen centuries of people who wanted something they could not honestly obtain, and the office that was always willing to discuss terms. The names are real. The contracts are real. Several of them survive, and we have reproduced the best at the back, complete, so you may judge the standard of drafting for yourself.

What follows on this page is a sample, free and unguarded. The full illustrated edition is also free, and further down. There is no obligation. There is never, technically, any obligation, right up until the moment there is.

Read a sample Get the free book

The contents

Nine chapters, one contract, fifteen centuries.

Each chapter follows the same document as it changes hands and changes its terms, from the first soul signed away in the sixth century to the specimen deed at the back.

  1. The First Buyer

    Theophilus of Adana, the sixth-century steward who signed, repented, and was saved by having the document physically stolen back. The pattern every later pact would inherit.

  2. The Clerks of Hell

    The Grand Grimoire, Lucifuge Rofocale, and the discovery that Hell is run less like a furnace than like a notary's office, with hours, tribute, and a minister who signs the cheque.

  3. The True and the False Pact

    The Grimorium Verum, the Grimoire of Honorius, and the medieval distinction between the signed bargain and the tacit one that could be laid at the door of anyone who knocked on wood and half meant it.

  4. The Doctor of Wittenberg

    The Faust legend, from the German chapbook to Marlowe's deed of gift to Goethe's wager, and why the terms of the deal with the devil kept changing.

  5. The Priest of Loudun

    Urbain Grandier, the pact written in mirror-Latin, the demons' reversed signatures, and the trial that burned a man alive on the strength of a contract he never signed.

  6. The Painter's Two Deeds

    Christoph Haizmann, who signed once in ink and once in blood to become the Devil's bounden son, and whose file Freud would reopen two centuries later and read as grief.

  7. The Crossroads

    The folk pact stripped of its paperwork. Tom Walker, the guitar at midnight, and the American habit of meeting the Devil at a place where two roads cross.

  8. How to Read a Pact

    The recurring clauses laid flat on the table: the parties, the renunciation, the consideration, the term of years, the tribute, the signature, repossession, and the escape hatch.

  9. A Specimen Deed

    The consolidated contract, reproduced in full and annotated to show which clause descends from which century, and the single clause that none of its ancestors possessed.

A sample

Read some of it.

Four openings from the book, exactly as printed. The engravings, the footnotes from Contracts, and the rest of the history are in the full edition.

Chapter One

The First Buyer

Theophilus of Adana, sixth century

In the sixth century, in a town called Adana on the southern coast of what is now Turkey, a man sells his soul to the Devil. His name is Theophilus, and he is the first person in the Western record to make that bargain in writing. He is also the only one who ever manages to get the contract back.

Underneath the miracle there is a machine, and the machine has three parts. The first is a renunciation of God, the Virgin, and the sacraments. The second is a written contract, signed and sealed and, from the very beginning, in blood. The third is a way out.

Chapter Four

The Doctor of Wittenberg

Faust, Marlowe and Goethe

A scholar sits alone in his study at midnight with a knife and an open vein. He has agreed to sign away his soul, and the buyer has asked for the signature in blood. He cuts his arm, dips the pen, and begins to write. Then the blood thickens and stops. It will not flow, and for a moment the deed cannot be finished, as though his own body were trying to talk him out of it.

This is the most famous signing in the whole history of the pact, and it comes from Christopher Marlowe's play The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus, written around 1592. But the man at the desk was real once, or began as someone real.

Chapter Five

The Priest of Loudun

Urbain Grandier, 1634

In a courtroom in western France, in the summer of 1634, the prosecution produces its most extraordinary piece of evidence. It is a contract with the Devil. The document is written in Latin, but written backwards, in mirror script, and scattered across it are strange symbols and marks. At the foot of it are the signatures, and they are not human.

The man it will send to the stake never signed it. He never signed anything at all. There was no bargain.

Chapter Nine

A Specimen Deed

Article the Eighth, of Repentance Foresworn

The whole of this book has been the biography of a single document, followed across fifteen centuries as it changed hands and changed its terms. Here it is, assembled.

I renounce the intercession that would recover this parchment out of infernal keeping; I renounce the contrite heart and the late-come tear; and I declare that no exorcism, recantation, nor prayer of mine or of another shall be pleaded to unmake what I this night have freely made. What is written is written, and by me, and shall not be blotted out.

The full illustrated edition

Take the whole book.

The complete history, the period engravings, the footnotes from Contracts, and the specimen deed reproduced in full and annotated. Free, by either door.

The short way: give Leslie an address.

Leave an email and the illustrated Book of Pacts is yours, downloadable on the spot. You will also get word when there is something new worth being tempted by.

This adds you to Leslie's list. Yes, this is the part where we take your email. We are, after all, evil. Unsubscribing damns no one.

The long way: sign for it.

Or take the book the way the Petitioners did. Have your soul appraised, choose your grand bargain, and sign your own personalised deed. The book is delivered with the contract. This door also gets you an official soul valuation and 666 Corruption Credits, which the email does not.

Get appraised and sign

Before you go

First, find out what YOUR soul is worth.

The book is the history. The appraisal is the part where it becomes about you. Ten pieces of evidence about your pettiest instincts, one official valuation, and one grand bargain you would probably take.

Appraise my soul

People also ask

Questions people actually ask.

Can you really sell your soul?

No. A soul is not recognised property in any jurisdiction we have managed to get a lawyer to check, so there is nothing to convey and no court to enforce it. What people have actually done, for about fifteen hundred years, is sign a document saying they did. The Book of Pacts is the history of those documents. Satan's Shop will draw you a magnificent one. It is a parody, and it is not binding, a fact our own contract admits at the bottom in the smallest available type.

How do you sell your soul?

Historically it took four things: a renunciation, a written contract, a signature in blood, and a term of years, all set out in Chapter Eight. At Satan's Shop it takes less. You have your soul appraised, you are handed one grand bargain, and you sign a personalised deed in red biro. No crossroads, no candles, no hazel rod cut at sunrise. Most people now sign with a mouse.

How much is a soul worth?

It varies, and the variation is the entertaining part. In the old accounts a soul bought knowledge, buried treasure, a beautiful face, or twenty-four years of getting away with things. At Satan's Shop the figure is calculated live during your appraisal, from evidence you supply about your own worst instincts, and issued as an official valuation you are welcome to find insulting.

Is selling your soul online real?

The selling is not real. The website is extremely real: the appraisal runs, the contract personalises with your name, and the deed is issued instantly, in red, no candles required. What you receive is a novelty document and a free history book, not a metaphysical transfer. Nobody at this office can actually take delivery of a soul, which we find more disappointing than you do.

What is a Faustian bargain?

A deal in which someone trades something they cannot afford to lose, usually the soul, for something they want very badly right now. It is named for Doctor Faustus, the sixteenth-century scholar who swapped his for twenty-four years of knowledge and pleasure and did not, on the whole, spend them well. Chapter Four covers him. Our own deed keeps the spirit of the arrangement and quietly removes the part where he might have escaped.

Has anyone ever gotten their soul back?

Once, properly, which is the whole reason the story is worth a book. Theophilus of Adana signed in the sixth century, repented, and had the actual contract recovered and returned to him, the only successful return in the office's history. Everyone since has had a worse time of it. Our current deed forecloses the escape hatch in writing. We read the file. We closed the door.