Just as God made covenants with his chosen people, so too did the Devil and his minions enter into legal agreements with human beings in order to lure them to their doom. These agreements usually involved people receiving some kind of material benefit in this life in exchange for renouncing the Christian faith and thereby jeopardizing their immortal souls. The earliest story about this kind of diabolical contract involved a Christian saint named Theophilus of Adana, who lived in the early sixth century. Told and retold over the course of the Middle Ages, this legend related how Theophilus made a deal with the Devil in order to restore himself to a church office, but he soon had second thoughts and was eventually freed from his contract by the Virgin Mary.
In Sicily in the year 537 there was a certain man, Theophilus by name, the deputy of a certain bishop, as Bishop Fulbert of Chartres says, who managed ecclesiastical affairs so prudently under his bishop that, when this bishop died, all of the people declared him worthy of the office. But this man was content being the deputy and preferred someone else to be ordained as bishop. At length, he was deposed from his office against his will by the new bishop and fell into such a great despair that he sought the counsel of a Jewish sorcerer to recover his sense of dignity. The sorcerer summoned the devil, who quickly answered the summons. At the demon’s command, Theophilus denied Christ and his mother, renounced the Christian faith, and wrote out this denial and renunciation in his own blood and sealed what he had written with his ring and handed the sealed document over to the demon and yielded himself to its service. Therefore, on the next day, through the demon’s machinations, Theophilus was received into the grace of the bishop and restored to the dignity of his former office.
At length, with a change of heart about what he had done, he lamented greatly and fled to the glorious Virgin with the full devotion of his mind in the hope that she might assist him. Soon the Virgin appeared to him in a vision, berated him for his impiety, ordered him to renounce the devil, and made him acknowledge Christ the son of God and all the teachings of Christianity. And thus she restored in this man both her grace and the grace of her son. As a token that he had been forgiven, she appeared to him a second time and returned to him the sealed document that he had given to the devil and placed it on his chest, so that he did not fear that he was still a servant of the devil, but rather rejoiced that he was made free by the Virgin. Once he had received this, Theophilus was overcome with joy. He related everything that had happened in the presence of the bishop and all of the people and with everyone marveling and praising the glorious Virgin, he fell asleep in peace three days later.