This book is founded on convergences of contradictory elements. At its center is the Walpurgis Night, a supposed celebration of evil that is named after a British saint whose good deeds took place deep inside what is now Germany. That fabled convergence of good and evil was treated in literature in a short ballad and two topically related scenes of the Faust tragedy by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832), a pantheistic scientist, draftsman, and poet. The earliest of Goethe's literary treatments is the one that most overtly sympathizes with the participants of the Walpurgis Night revelries, but it is also the one that became the basis of a complex cantata by Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy (1809–47), a devoutly Lutheran composer of Jewish descent and grandson of the Enlightenment's most influential philosophical advocate for the assimilation of Europe's Jewish and Christian citizenry. Goethe's ballad and Mendelssohn's cantata both center on the struggle for religious freedom and the nature of historical processes by mediating between the legend of the Walpurgis Night and a conjectural reconstruction of its historical basis, the conflict between Christianity and paganism a millennium before they took it up.