Kepler's Witch (34 page)
Authors: James A. Connor
Some of the events reported in these accusations actually happened. Katharina Kepler's aunt had indeed been tried and burned as a witch. Katharina was an amateur apothecary, an herbalist who gathered flowers from the fields and boiled up potions and healing tonics for all occasions. She was not unusual in this, because about half the women in town did the same. She was unusual in that she pushed her concoctions on just about every visitor who happened by. Moreover, it is a real possibility that some of her potions might have been breeding grounds for
Escherichia coli
and perhaps
Clostridium botulinum,
maybe even the virus that causes poliomyelitis. It is also true that Katharina requested her father's skull, so she could turn it into a drinking cup, which she wanted to give to Johannes. She did offer a bribe to Einhorn, and she did leave town at the behest of her children. The rest was codswallopâhalf vindictive rumor and half superstitious fantasy. The accusations about riding calves to death were part of the folk tradition on witches; if Katharina had been a witch, then midnight death rides on people's livestock would have been a requirement according to the tradition.
The witness accounts bear this out. Jacob Koch's bits of hearsay about what Heinrich Kepler, the unfortunate son, may or may not have said, along with other bits of hearsay about what the saddler told him about noise in his barn late at night are typical:
Jacob Koch, citizen of Leonberg (forty years old):
Some time ago (day and year cannot be recalled by witness), witness ran into Heinrich, the Kepler woman's son, in Palin Theuerer's shop. The men asked each other about how things stood (because at the time both of them were somewhat ill). Heinrich then said that he was the Kaiser's messenger and thought that his condition may have come from the Keltin.
So, the witness said, he personally has it quite good, since his mother could care for him. Kepler then said that his own mother might care for him as well, but she was leading such a scandalous life that he had half a mind to move to his sister's house in Heumaden, and then, when he had returned [to Leonberg], he would report his mother himself. The witness did not recall anything about a calf.
After interrogation: If he spoke out of habit, then one should accept same from the witness out of habit.
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He knew from the common talk that Heinrich Kepler had said that his mother had once ridden a calf to death and then offered to make him a meal from itâ¦.
Also, witness said that Michael Stahl, the saddler, was at Martin Weishaubten's house, where he told the witness that he thought that the Kepler woman had once caused a ruckus in his barn. It happened at eleven o'clock at night, just as the watchman called out the hourâthere was such a commotion in his barn, back by the shed, so that he called out to the watchman. His own mother, who had already taken to her bed, lamented. She was afraid and did not want to rise to see about the noise, so he [the saddler] finally worked up the courage to go into the barn himself. There the cows were unruly and angry. He then called his neighbor Hanns Nestler
to help him, and the man did him a favor and came (despite his somewhat weak health). Hanns Nestler then asked the saddler and his mother who they thought had caused this disturbance, but they didn't know.
It is amazing to modern readers that most people in the seventeenth century considered such testimony to be quite reasonable when it came to witchcraft trials, for such cases formed a category all their own. If an accused womanâand almost three-quarters of all cases were against womenâdid not have powerful political influence, she could easily end up being roasted alive.
Johannes, who was still off in Linz, was the most powerful support old Katharina had, but he was less influential than he might have been. His own reputation in the duchy was not very clean. During his struggles with Pastor Hitzler, Kepler had written to his old teacher Matthias Hafenreffer, the theologian at Tübingen, asking him to intercede on his behalf. In typical Kepler fashion, he tried to explain himself, passionately outlining his theological ideas as well as his personal reasons for refusing to sign the Formula of Concord. Behind it all was his desire for reconciliation between the different strands of Christianity, his fear of the coming war, and his belief that God's will was always a force for peace, for harmony between people, even as it was among the stars.
Hafenreffer exchanged two letters with Kepler, and then showed Kepler's letters to the rest of the theological faculty, and from there they went to the consistory. Their response was final. “Either give up your errors, your false fantasies, and embrace God's truth with a humble faith, or keep away from all fellowship with us, with our church, and with our creed.” On July 31, 1619, Kepler was excommunicated not just from his local community, but from the Lutheran church. This did not mean that he believed himself to be any less Lutheran, for later, when pressed by the Counter-Reformation, he refused to budge and had to flee Linz, just as he had left Graz rather than convert. It just meant that the Württemberg Lutherans did not want him.
Would Einhorn have had the freedom to persecute Katharina had Johannes obediently signed the Formula of Concord? Perhaps not. He was, after all, merely the lower magistrate of one town in one corner of the duchy. His association with the duke was largely through Kräutlin, the duke's barber and a crony of the young prince. Hidden in the shadows behind Luther Einhorn, therefore, may well have been Matthias Hafenreffer, of the theological faculty of Tübingen, and the Stuttgart consistory, and the sufferings visited upon a half-mad old woman may well have been a punishment for the sins of her famous son.
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The duke's consistory had accused Kepler of heresy. Could not his mother also be a witch? How great a jump was there from the first to the second? The duke, of course, had to contend with Kepler's fame throughout Europe. How would it look if he had arrested so famous a mathematician, a friend to dukes and barons throughout Germany, Protestant as well as Catholic, the personal mathematician of three Habsburg emperors, on heresy charges? Kepler himself was nearly invulnerable, but Katharina was another matter. They could go after her, and no one would complain. After all, witchcraft trials had been occurring all over Germany for several hundred years, in Protestant and Catholic territories alike. What was one more old woman?
Most of all, what Katharina Kepler had against her, however, was the fear of shadows, fear that blocked people's minds and strangled their sense of justice. So many people suffered so many mysterious illnesses. Children died unexplained. Cattle went mad. There had to be a reason. More than a reasonâthere had to be a conspiracy, a conscious group of secret malefactors out for ruin. Just as alienation envelopes people of our time, fear choked the people of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Nighttime visions had plagued Albrecht Dürer all his life. His prayers were screams for help, for the terror of the night, of demons, and of eventual damnation twisted his sleep. So too for the good citizens of Leonberg and the duchy of Württemberg. They were victims of their own imaginations and, tragically, odd little women such as Katharina Kepler paid the price.
In some ways as well, the little town of Leonberg was a Freudian Disneyland. Upwelling sexual fantasies, rejected as sin and too horrible to
admit, still bubbled away like mud pots and sometimes ended up in witchcraft testimony:
Dorothea Hanns Klebling, hunter's wife, about thirty-three years old:
Five years ago, Barbara, the daughter of Schützenbastian, was at the witness's home for some sewing and told her that she had also been to the Kepler woman's house for sewing and that the Kepler woman had asked her to stay the night. Around midnight, the Kepler woman got out of bed and walked around the room. The seamstress asked her why she did that and would not lie in her bed. The Kepler woman then asked her if she might have a desire to become a witch. There would be much joy and fun in it, the Kepler woman said, where otherwise this world offered neither joy nor comfort. To this the girl answered that if one had joy and fun for a long time in this world, one would have to pay for it eternally. The Kepler woman, however, disagreed. She said there is no such thing as eternal life, but when a human dies, he dies just as the common beast. To that the girl responded that the clergy preach that whoever believes and is baptized shall be blessed, but whoever does not believe, shall be damned. To that the Kepler woman said the reason we have clergymen is so that we feel safe walking down the streetâ¦.
She did not hear anything about a Bülen [possibly a young boy], but heard that [the Kepler woman] wanted to give the girl [Barbara] a man so that she would have joy and voluptuous pleasure all the time.
The forty-nine accusations were based on witness accounts like these, accounts that were hearsay or that waffled or admitted to an ignorance of the facts, but they were read into the record nonetheless. Part of the problem was Katharina herself, for when she was confronted with these witness accounts, her memory failed her and she confused names and dates. She was on the shy side of seventy-five years old and utterly uneducated. It is not really surprising that she could not remember. It is significant,
however, that what had started off as gossip and what was admitted to be gossip by some of the witnesses had magically become official court record. What had started off as a dispute between two families and two old friends had become a fight to the death. Leonberg had already burned five other women for witchcraft. Why not one more?
The slander case against Ursula Reinbold had been filed in 1615, four years before, and although the court had gathered witnesses and heard testimony, nothing ever happened. The case simply disappeared into the mist. Not so with the witchcraft trial. On September 9, 1619, the court ordered the trial against Katharina Kepler to go forward and set the date for November 10, 1619. The magistrate examined his twenty-two witnesses, took down their stories, and entered them into the record. But what survives is not verbatim. There are no actual transcripts of what the witnesses said, only Einhorn's summaries. Luther Einhorn, therefore, led the dance. What the witnesses said, believed, or felt about Katharina and how they might have interpreted their experiences were lost, and all that was left was the word of Luther Einhorn.
On December 23, 1619, the court assembled a protocol and began the witchcraft trial. A few weeks later, on January 23, Einhorn sent the protocol, gathered under the directives of April 3 and September 23, 1617, to the duke's chancellery. The chancellery then presented the protocol to the duke, but he found the whole matter distasteful and let the case sit for a time. It is possible that the duke perceived that the charges were trumped up, but, like all men of power, he was caught in a web of his own bureaucratic creation. On February 11, the Reinbold faction contacted him asking for a decision. The Keplers, meanwhile, were still waiting for some closure on Katharina's slander case against the Reinbolds, closure that would never arrive. On March 20, 1620, Johannes Kepler appealed to the duke personally and asked that his mother's trial against Ursula Reinbold be expedited and brought to court as soon as possible. Instead, the duke passed the issue on to the high court, which voted in favor of the Reinbolds and ordered Katharina's arrest.
The days in August around Stuttgart are warm and humid. The low trees along the riversides sip water as if through straws and puff it into the
air. Morning rises with a thin mist, which evaporates as the day heats up and becomes invisible, though you can still feel it on your skin. Some days promise cool breezes off the Alps. Other days promise heat and still more flaccid air. On hot days, everything wilts, and people take what time they can to sit in the shade somewhere and drink cool wine. August is a time for peace and for children laughing, with their feet splashing in the streams. With evening, the heat relents, and the air softens. Crickets in the fields. Frogs in the streams. The farms and towns gradually settle into sleep. It was on such an August night in Heumaden that Marx Waltter, the Stuttgart magistrate, appeared at the house of Pastor Georg Binder to arrest his mother-in-law, Katharina Kepler. He arrived long past midnight, in the deep morning, August 7, 1620, when it was still dark but with a hint of sky, long before the town was stirring, before anyone could see what was happening. Marx Waltter had come with a detachment of armed guards, large men with swords, helmets, and grim beards. They pounded on the door, awakening the household, and shouldered their way in. Waltter announced the court order to Pastor Binder, then set about his business, in a hurry to get away. He could not have been proud of what he was doing, or he would not have come in the middle of the night. The men roughly shook Katharina awake, then stuffed her still half asleep into a wooden chest, and carried both the old woman and the chest out of town before anyone noticed.
Because of the general fear of witches, the men may have been as afraid of Katharina as she was of them. Who can say what a witch can do? Katharina sat alone in a jail cell for the next four days. Perhaps at night, when the jailers heard her weeping, they thought that she was weeping over her sins. The presumption of guilt was often so strong in witchcraft trials because the fear of witches was so greatâeach time they struggled, each time they complained, each time they protested their innocence, it was another proof of their cleverness. They were presumed guilty because the crime as imagined, as with child molesters and serial killers, was so horrible. The point of leaving her in jail for four days, barely attended, alone with her thoughts, was to accelerate her fear, to incite her imagination and inject terror.
On August 11, she was led to the courthouse, possibly still in chains, where the magistrate read her the charges, questioned her fiercely, and confronted her with her accusers and the accounts of witnesses. By law, she would have had the support of an advocate and of her family as well as the support of the war magistrates, since she was a widow, but Luther Einhorn was not particularly fussy about the niceties of law.