Kepler's Witch (23 page)

Under the influence of the Spanish Catholic faction at court, who deemed all occult matters as heretical, Rudolf imprisoned a few alchemists who had cheated some noble, but he executed none. Those who
had to flee Prague, however, were often not so lucky outside Bohemia. Philip Jakob Güstenhofer, after a famous career in Prague, was finally hanged in Saxony. Another, Count Marko Bragadino, who had successfully played the part of Greek nobility, and with great theatrical flourish, set Prague atwitter as he strode through the city leading his black hounds. He was finally executed in Munich, stylish to the end, dressed in his best suit, and covered with jewelry made of fake gold. An Italian named Alessandro Scotta, for a time the talk of the city, eventually fell so far out of favor that he ended up in the Old Town Square, where he was reduced to displaying his magical wonders from inside a little wooden booth. Later on, he had a quick tryst with the duchess of Coburg and gave her a child, something she wanted desperately. Since this was not achieved by magic, but by the old-fashioned way, Scotta fled the scene before her relatives could find him and cut his throat.

What kings and emperors wanted from the likes of Kepler was knowledge that they could turn to power. From his earliest days in Tübingen, Kepler had accumulated a reputation as an astrologer, a reputation he was not really happy about, but one he had nevertheless. Rudolf II was no different. He was, to be sure, a Renaissance man who was enthralled with the natural world, but behind this there was always burning that royal need to know the future, to turn lead to gold, or to read the mystic encryptions of angels. In the early 1580s, John Dee and Edward Kelley arrived in Prague. Dee had already achieved some notoriety invoking spirits through a magic mirror, supposedly from Aztec Mexico, as well as through a crystal ball fashioned from polished smoky quartz, once given to him by the angel Uriel.
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According to legend, he could speak the original language once spoken by Adam, the language that the angels themselves use to speak to one another. He could also understand the language of birds. In England, he achieved notoriety by gathering an astounding occult library full of ancient manuscripts written by long-dead magi, both forgotten and fabled. Because many of these books concerned old Gnostic theologies and philosophies, some in England questioned his Christianity. Eventually, he came to the attention of Queen Elizabeth and advised her on matters both naval and dental, assisting her not only with matters of
military deployment, but with her bad teeth. She summoned him to Richmond on several occasions to visit with her and even visited him at his home in Mortlake, in Surrey, on the banks of the Thames. Like Kepler, Dee wanted to plumb the secrets of the universe, and at first he believed that this could be achieved through mathematics. Unhappy with the rhetorical program of a university education, he abandoned his early interest in mathematics, patterns of numbers that give structure to the world, and became interested in their arcane meaning. Soon after, in 1581, he held a séance in his house to call down the angels and to learn their secret wisdom. He believed that with the help of the right translator, or “skryer,” he could seduce the angels to speak to him and could thereby read their language, much of which involved interpreting numerical codes.

For all his oddities, however, Dee was a serious scholar. It was simply his bad luck to run into Edward Talbot, alias Edward Kelley. Kelley had a hooked nose and beady, rat's eyes. Born in Worchester, he had been an apothecary's apprentice, had studied at Oxford for a time, and, while working as a scribe in Lancashire, had falsified official documents. The court sentenced him to have his ears cut off, and for the rest of his life he wore long hair and a black cap with long side flaps to hide his disfigurement. It was also designed to make him look wise and scholarly. Still afraid of the hangman, he changed his name to Kelley and then roamed about England until, while staying at an inn in Wales, he happened across a manuscript supposedly unearthed from the grave of a bishop who was also a magus. The manuscript came equipped with two ivory vials, one with red powder and the other with white. Immediately, he set out for Mortlake, appearing there on March 10, 1582. Within a short time, he had become Dee's assistant, and in one séance after another, he convinced Queen Elizabeth's astrologer that he was indeed speaking to angels and bringing to earth a wealth of arcane knowledge.
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Likely it was Kelley's idea that they both travel to eastern Europe, ostensibly to study occult knowledge at the court of the emperor, but also to make a pound or two. They traveled to eastern Europe at the invitation of a Polish nobleman, the palatine of Sieradz, Olbrecht Laski, who traveled through England in June 1583, where he visited them at Mortlake. Dur
ing one séance, a spirit spoke through Dee's mirror predicting that Laski would succeed Stephan Báthory on the throne of Poland. Of course, this had to be true, because the angels had said it, and besides, it was what Laski wanted to hear. Dee and Kelley traveled to Cracow on Laski's invitation. Dee brought his young wife, Jane Fromond, who people said was more than pretty, and his son, Arthur. While Dee and Kelly were in Poland, the spirits continued their predictions of Laski's ascendancy, right up to the time that Dee and Kelley decided to move on to Prague. The Spanish ambassador Guillén de San Clemente arranged for them to meet with the emperor. The audience did not go well, however, because Dee, in a fit of enthusiasm, prophesied that a glorious new age would fall upon the empire, starting with the conquest of the Turks, if only the emperor would repent and change his sinful life. Rudolf was dubious. Later they wrote a letter to him, intimating that they had achieved a prior success in transmuting metals, which they would be willing to do for him as well. It didn't help.
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Rudolf ordered one of his secretaries to investigate the pair. The papal nuncio, supported by the Spanish faction at court, eventually convinced Rudolf to banish Dee and Kelley from his lands. They never made it out of Bohemia, however, because Vilém of Rozmberk offered them asylum at his estate in Třeboň, where Rozmberk spent an astonishing amount of money on them as they continued their experiments in secret knowledge.

Somewhere in there, Kelley decided that he no longer wanted to interpret angelic scripts, with all their numerical codes, and told Dee that he wanted to leave. Dee was convinced by that time that he would be lost without Kelley, and so, after some fighting and much blackmail, he signed an agreement with Kelley that they should hold all their assets in common, which ostensibly included their wives. Jane Fromond put a stop to that, and then Queen Elizabeth recalled Dee to England, where he died penniless, having been rejected by James I, Elizabeth's successor. In the years before he died, he sold off what remained of his library, book by book, just to pay the bills.

Kelley's end was more tragic. For a time his star seemed to rise, and he took Bohemian citizenship, gathered powerful protectors about him, and
was even knighted by the emperor, which included a title, “de Imany,” referring to his supposed Irish heritage. He married a rich, well-educated Czech woman who gave him a son and a daughter as well as a sizable dowry. In 1590, Rožmberk aided him in acquiring the town of Libeřice, an estate in Nová Libeň, and several villages, including the peasants who lived there. Then from his dowry he purchased a brewery, and then a mill, and then a dozen more houses in a gold-mining region. He bought two more houses in Prague, in the New Town, one near the Emmaus monastery. This house is known today as “Faust's house.”

Then he did it. He got himself into a duel on the hospital field outside the Poříč Gate, and killed a Bohemian officer. Rudolf had forbidden all dueling and ordered Kelley thrown into prison at Křivoklát Castle. Agents stood by to question him, by torture if necessary, and to drag out of him the truth about his tinctures and his séances. They wanted to know especially about the
aurum potabile,
the liquid gold that bestowed eternal youth, and about the hidden meaning of strings of numbers they found written down among his papers, supposedly taken down during angelic séances. During his incarceration, Kelley attempted an escape by jumping out of a high window, but he crushed his leg on the rocky ground where he fell. Eventually, they released him so that he could get medical treatment, which didn't help much, because they amputated his leg.

But then Rudolf, goaded on by the Spanish faction, ordered Kelley's imprisonment once more and had him sent to Castle Most, in the northern part of Bohemia. Kelley tried to escape again and leapt once more from a high window, this time into a carriage driven by his son, breaking his other leg. Knowing that he would certainly be caught and, if caught, would spend the rest of his life in prison, Kelley mixed up a poisonous potion for himself and committed suicide.

This was the world that Kepler came to—civilized, urbane, Byzantine, dangerous. Four years after Kelley's death, Kepler arrived in Prague and began his work on the orbit of Mars, struggled on with the problem, nearly despairing of it in 1604, and falling into another depression. A year later, during the Easter season, he suddenly came upon the insight he needed and formulated his area law.

That same year, he wrote a short book on the new star that had appeared in the constellation of Ophiuchus, near the conjunction of the three upper planets, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. What more auspicious event could have occurred? On the night of October 17 the weather cleared, and Kepler saw it, the new star, nearly as bright as Jupiter, shimmering with color. Everyone, from the emperor on down, waited for Kepler to speak. His little book was funny, intelligent, and thoughtful, full of astronomical and theological reflection on the ways of God. God teaches mere humans by such signs. The new star was no accident, but a way in which God made his will known. While many others predicted Armageddon, the defeat of the Turks, revolution, and the coming of a new king, Kepler wrote about the conversion of America and of vast migrations of peoples out of Europe, as people had once migrated westward into Europe. Still, this kind of speculation was painful for him, and his arguments disputed with themselves. Kepler finally did not know the significance of the new star. He was no prophet; that wasn't his job, and he told people that they should just go on with their lives and examine their consciences.
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Reflections on the new star did not immediately raise Kepler's spirits, however. As they had done so many times in the past, his thoughts turned toward death and fixed there. What if he could not finish his manuscript? What if he died beforehand? He even planned to have his unfinished work sent to Tübingen for deposition in the archives. Eventually his depression lifted, and he pushed on toward publication, dropping his plans for Tübingen. Finally, the manuscript was complete. He titled it, rather forwardly,
Astronomia Nova
seu Physica Coelestis, Tradita Commentariis de Motibus Stellae Martis
(“New Astronomy Based on Causes or Celestial Physics Treated by Means of Commentaries on the Motion of the Star Mars”). Indeed, it was a new astronomy, for it was the first truly modern work in that field.

In his dedicatory letter to the emperor, Kepler joked that his book was the result of his long war with Mars and that he had brought that most noble captive to the court of His Majesty. “He has been constrained by bonds of computation,” Kepler wrote. Mars was a captive because up
until that time, its orbit was so unpredictable that it could not easily be caught. Kepler quotes Pliny, saying that “Mars is the elusive star.” In the middle of his self-deprecating humor, Kepler could not resist the temptation to complain a bit about his suffering. “Meanwhile, in my encampment, has there been any sort of rout, any kind of catastrophe that has not taken place? The overthrow of my most distinguished master [Tycho Brahe], revolution, epidemics, plague, pestilence, household matters both good and bad, destined in all cases to use up time…”

Then Kepler set forth two schools of thought that existed among astronomers. The first was led by Ptolemy and the second by Copernicus and Tycho, and though this second school was more recent, it had its roots in the work of the ancients. Ptolemy's theory treated the planets individually and hunted the causes of each planet's heavenly movement separately, while the second school treated the planets as a system. The second school was then divided again. Copernicus, who led the first division, tried to treat the earth, sun, moon, and all the planets as a single system, with the sun at the center and all the planets, including the earth, moving around it, thus showing that the motion of each planet was in relation to all the others. The retrograde motion of Mars and the other upper planets—Jupiter and Saturn—was therefore the result of the relative motion of earth in relation to those planets. The other division was led by Tycho Brahe, who created a two-tiered system that kept the earth at the center, following Ptolemy, and sent the sun spinning around the earth, with the planets spinning around the sun.