Kepler's Witch (4 page)
Authors: James A. Connor
Article 9:
Witness said that even if Mt. Engelberg were made of gold and was given to him, he would not speak a falsehood.
T
ESTIMONY OF
B
ENEDICT
B
EUTELSBACHER
, G
ERMAN
S
CHOOLMASTER OF
L
EONBERG
1620
Article 6:
The witness (Beutelsbacher) said that the accuser, Ursula Reinbold, suffered great agony, especially when the moon changed. What the cause of this pain was, he did not know.
Article 21:
Several years ago, the Kepler woman often visited the witness, either to relay regards from her son, who lived in Linz and was once a schoolmate, or to ask him to read a letter for her and other things of that nature. But more important, once at the end of a long summer day, the witness came home after working in the field and locked the two doors of his house himself and therefore felt all was safe. Suddenly, as the witness was eating his supper, the Kepler woman came into the room to visit him and his wife, right through the locked doors! The two of them were startled and frightened. The Kepler woman asked him to write a letter for her to her son in Linz. The witness refused to do this with a variety of excuses, but finally, against his will, wrote the letter for her. He does not remem
ber the content of the letter, which surprises him a great deal. After all, the accused had come into his house with both doors locked! Last, on a Sunday about ten years agoâthe witness cannot remember the specific dateâhe was called to her house to read and write several letters. After finishing the task, between two and three o'clock in the afternoon, the witness asked to leave to have a light meal. She told him no, that he had gone to so much trouble for her, she wanted to offer him something to drink. She had a rather good wine in her cellar, and he had to try it. The witness refused repeatedly, because, to tell the truth, he was not thirsty. Finally, against his will he had to wait while she fetched the wine and then gave him some in a pewter cup. He only tried a little bit. At this, the accused asked him why he drank so little. Then she handed another cup to Margretta, Bastian Meyer's housewife, who was also there at the time. The Kepler woman encouraged her to drink up. She said that she knew quite well that often enough not one drink of wine turns out good in an entire week, and that a good drink of wine happens rarely, therefore they should drink up, because this bottle of wine turned out well. After that, the Kepler woman persuaded the witness into drinking a little more and convinced the other woman, Bastian Meyer's housewife, to empty the cup entirely. Very soon after, Margretta began to feel ill. She never recovered and ultimately died. The witness, however, experienced a slight pain in his thigh, a pain that increased as time went on, so that eventually he had to use a single cane at first, and afterwards, two canes. These days the witness has pains in his thighs all the time, so that he cannot move at all. The pain he experienced lingered so long and grew so intense that his manhood was taken from him entirely. If it turned out that his injury was not the result of the potion the Kepler woman brewed up and gave him, the witness would die from shock.
K
ATHARINA
K
EPLER GAVE BIRTH
to Johannes, her first child, on December 27, 1571. It was the middle of the afternoon, two-thirty precisely, on a Thursday, the feast of St. John the Baptistâa comfortable omen, for he was born as the sun was still high in the sky. At the time, Katharina and her husband lived with his parents in Weil der Stadt, one of the smaller
freie Reichsstädte,
the free imperial cities, which owed their allegiance to the emperor himself, rather than to a local duke or prince. Weil was a small town even by sixteenth-century standards, located ten miles to the south of Leonberg and about twenty miles southwest of Stuttgart.
Germany was not a separate nation then, but part of the Holy Roman Empire, which included modern-day Germany, Austria, Hungary, Slovakia, and the Republic of Czechoslovakia with bits and pieces of other countries thrown in. At the time, it consisted of a series of little principalities, duchies, counties, and baronies, ruled by princes, dukes, counts, and
barons, all of whom had the right to rule autonomously in their own territories, to determine the religion of their people, and to determine the form of governance. The emperor, traditionally with no fixed land of his own, traveled about the empire, taking his court with him and staying in the imperial cities as he traveled. The many dukes and counts and princes were loyal to him after a fashion. They supplied his taxes and his armies and supported him in other ways when they saw fit. For this, they received rewards, and some even possessed the coveted right to vote on the next emperor, which made them electors.
As an imperial free city, Weil der Stadt had certain advantages in terms of trade and taxes. Citizens of a free city were usually much better off than subjects of a duke or baron. The local ruler usually lived close by and tightly managed his people's lives, while the emperor was far away and most often left the free cities to their own devices. Imperial Weil der Stadt was loyal to the Catholic Habsburgs, the imperial family, and was therefore Catholic. All around Weil der Stadt, including nearby Leonberg, the town that Kepler grew up in and considered his home, was the Protestant duchy of Württemberg, the most contentedly Lutheran territory in the empire and a central place from which Lutheranism had spread. After the Peace of Augsburg, signed in 1555, only sixteen years before Kepler's birth, the religion of the ruler determined the religion of the people according to the formula
cuius regio, eius religio
(“whose the land, his the religion”); therefore because the emperor was a Catholic, so was Weil der Stadt. As the Reformation heated up, partly out of religious zeal and partly out of pique, the Duke of Württemberg put increasing economic pressure on Weil. But then, as the Counter-Reformation gathered strength in return, anyone who didn't want to be Catholic had to leave the city, and no one was excluded. Soon the town became a tiny island of Catholicism in Lutheran Württemberg, which caused no end of trouble.
Johannes's family was Lutheranâcompletely, utterly, and without reservationâthe most prominent Protestants in Weil der Stadt. They were a pious family, but troubled, and sometimes their piety got in the way of their Christianity. The Kepler family had lived in Weil der Stadt for about fifty years, in a narrow house tucked into one corner of the market
square, next to the city hall. His family had been the first to become Lutherans in the town, but they were respected enough that even becoming Protestants did not affect their standing. Catty-corner to Kepler's grandfather's house, now the Kepler Museum, was the Gasthaus zum Engel, the Inn of the Angel, also owned by Johannes's grandfather Sebald. He was an overbearing old patriarch with a red face that ran to fat, a quick temper, and a dignified beard that made him look important. He controlled just about everything in the lives of the people around him, starting with his family. Johannes's grandmother, another Katharina, was much the same as his grandfatherâquarrelsome, intensely pious, restless. She rarely forgot old wounds. Kepler describes her as “fidgety, clever, given to telling lies, but pious in all matters of religion. She was slender, fiery, lively, always moving, jealous, vengeful, and full of resentments.”
2
Kepler's horoscope and his memoir are the only traces left of his youth and family life, and the dark picture he painted there is accurate enough in the details, though the melancholy tone of it can be partially understood as the sadness of youth and a bright young man's jaundiced view of his family. No one knows what his mother thought of his success or fame, for her thoughts were never written down, and time has washed them away. She was not a particularly good mother, and more than likely she never understood his life and his love of the heavens, though in many ways she was responsible for both. In 1577, a great comet haunted the sky, one of the most brilliant ever seen, which was observed and described by astronomers from England to Japan. Tycho Brahe first noticed it while fishing. In Scotland, James Melvill described it this way:
This yeir, in the winter, appeired a terrible Comet, the stern [star, i.e., nucleus] wharof was verie grait, and proceiding from it toward the est a lang teall. In appeirance, of an ell and a halff, like unto a bissom or scurge maid of wands all fyrie. It rease nightlie in the south weast, nocht above a degree and a halff ascending above the horizon, and continowed about a sax oukes [weeks], or two moneth, and piece and piece weir away. The graittest effects wharof that out of our contrey we hard was a grait and mightie
battell in Barbaria in Afric, wharin thrie kings war slean, with a hudge multitud of peiple. And within the contrey, the chasing away of the Hamiltones.
3
Of all the great minds to see this comet, Johannes Kepler, then six years old, was one. His mother took him by the hand and led him up a hill outside of town where the two of them watched through the long evening. Tycho Brahe, whose life would cross so importantly with Kepler's, watched the same scene from beside his personal fish pond five hundred miles away. For Kepler, it was one of the few pleasant memories he had of his mother.
Johannes describes his father, Heinrich, as a rough and beastly man, “a vicious man, with an inflexible nature, a quarrelsome man, who was doomed to a bad end,” a soldier to his bones, perhaps the resurrected image of the long-dead family knights. The urge to go to war was strong in him, and he spent his adult life sniffing for battle. Kepler blames this on the planets, saying that Saturn was in trigon to Mars in the seventh house, which of course explained everything.
Nevertheless, Heinrich almost certainly abused his wife and perhaps his children as well, and once tried to sell his sickly young son Heinrich, his own namesake and one of Johannes's younger brothers, into servitude. An adventurer, he had no skills to speak of except gunnery, which he had picked up on one of his soldiering forays. Once he got into a fistfight in Weil der Stadt and had to pay a fine. Another time he lost an inn he owned because he got into a brawl. He fought in several wars, once in Belgium, in the pay of the emperor fighting against Protestant rebels, which did not endear him to his family. When the urge came on him he would disappear off to some war; he went twice to the Netherlands to fight as a mercenary, the first time in the pay of the emperor and the second time in the pay of the Duke of Alba.
On one such occasion, he was gone so long that when Johannes was merely three years old and baby Heinrich was merely an infant, Katharina left them with their grandparents and set off after him. Just as she was leaving, Johannes took sick with smallpox and nearly died. Katharina, in
tent on finding her husband, left anyway, handing care of Johannes over to her in-laws, who wanted nothing to do with him. Angry with their son Heinrich for running away and with Katharina for dropping their sick son on them, they tended the boy without much enthusiasm. Surprisingly, the boy recovered, but his health was shattered. The pox had weakened his eyesight, and for years he suffered from sores, scabs, and putrid wounds, possibly because his immune system had been damaged. His hands were also deformed and he moved in a clumsy, jerky way, as if the virus had also affected his nervous system. Like his younger brother Heinrich, he was accident-prone.
Nevertheless, Katharina found her husband. One can imagine the meeting: Heinrich the runaway, in his cups or at camp staring dully at a plate of stew, looking up and seeing Katharina, his partner in a loveless marriage, marching at him down the row of tents, so furious that electricity sparked around her head. If he could have run, he would have, but there was nothing else to do but follow her home. Finally, after moving his family to Leonberg and after trying his hand at innkeeping in Ellmendingen, he forced his family back to Leonberg and then disappeared altogether. Some said he died in Augsburg after fighting for the Neapolitan navy.
Johannes's mother, Katharina, née Guldenmann, was as restless as her husband. There were problems in her marriage right from the beginning. Because Katharina gave birth to Johannes only seven months after her wedding to Heinrich, all the old women in town were busy counting the months on their fingers. Certainly it is possible Johannes was born prematurely, for he was small and sickly most of his life. Kepler no doubt believed this himself. Still, one has doubts, because while Katharina was pregnant, she was regularly beaten by her parents, as if they were trying to make her lose the baby, though both mother and son survived.
4
The image of a hurried, forced marriage between an angry Heinrich, a military straight who was cold and distant, and a pregnant Katharina explains a great deal about the family's history.
Only a mother whose eccentricities hid a vast intelligence could imagine turning her own father's skull into a drinking cup just because she had
heard it was an ancient pagan custom. She possessed the kind of intelligence that could either blossom into genius, as with Johannes, or fester into madness. All her life she struggled against her illiteracy. In that time, few women could read, and through the years Katharina felt humiliated that she could not even read her son's letters and was forced to rely on Beutelsbacher, the schoolteacher, who would later turn against her in her witch trial. To make up for it, she collected herbs and mixed potions from them, and it is possible that she did in fact poison Beutelsbacher and the wife of Bastian Meyer, but almost certainly without meaning to. Her little tin jug often sat in the corner for days, unwashed and untended. Who knows what kinds of bacteria were growing in there?
Her children were a mixed lot, however. And although Johannes's youngest brother, Christoph, who became a pewterer, and his sister, Margaretha, who married a clergyman, turned out relatively well, the middle brother, Heinrich, teetered on the edge of insanity. Possibly a borderline schizophrenic, he was accident-prone, was constantly being beaten by other children and bitten by animals, nearly drowned, and was almost burned alive. Eventually he wandered off when his father tried to sell him, only to show up in Prague as a palace guard when Johannes was there as imperial mathematician, and then to return to live with his mother years later, much abused by life.
The Keplers, all boxed into that little house, argued eternally. They were not poor, however, and they could even claim some echoes of nobility. The angel in the name of the inn referred to the Kepler coat of arms, which may or may not have been a last remnant of some long-lost nobility. Grandfather Sebald acted as if there were no question of his knightly roots, since he could trace them back to Sebald Kepner, a nobleman who became a bookbinder after a sudden descent into poverty and then moved to Weil der Stadt. Four generations later, the Sebald who was the grandfather of Johannes Kepler the astronomer, no longer obviously noble, ended up as the mayor of Weil der Stadt. He served for ten years before Johannes came into the world and remained a prominent burgher in town throughout the boy's youth.
Towns like Weil could easily maintain their independence simply by
paying their taxes and helping the emperor out when he needed them. The emperor asked little more than this, because the
freie Reichsstädte
were not his property, but were individual republics, each with its own representative in the Imperial Diet. Weil had its own magistrate, either the mayor of that year or the one of the previous year; its own police force; its own laws; and its own justice system.
The mayor, in his day old Sebald, reported directly to the emperor, wherever he happened to be, and thus had direct contact with the imperial court. The republics all had trading rights and privileges and enjoyed economic benefits stemming from the fact that the town paid no tithes to the local prince or duke, but only the standard imperial tax. For Americans, this would be like paying federal, but no state income tax. The mayor of Weil was elected by a select group of the people. Only burghers (citizens, men with land), merchants, and craftsmenâgoldsmiths and tinsmithsâcould vote. The men who sat on the town council were those with enough money and leisure time to concern themselves with government. These were the people who produced Johannes Kepler, and this was the town that fashioned the character of his family and, through them, his own character as well. What feistiness he showed in his later years derived at least partly from that soil. What genius he showed derived, at least partly, from there as well.
Because of its position in the empire, there was a great sense of independence in Weil der Stadt. But this feeling of republican independence flowered at a time when the world itself was changing, a time when people in Germany had begun to ask for a deeper understanding of the world, a deeper understanding of the Word of God, the book of Scripture, as well as a deeper understanding of creation and the natural world in general, the Book of Nature. Printers had set up shop in various towns around Swabia, so books in German were becoming more available. Soon after the Reformation began, Luther's Bible was everywhere. A new consciousness had begun to emerge in the towns, a consciousness that called for independent thought, a consciousness that would eventually lead from the Reformation to the first glimmers of the scientific revolution. The citizens of Weil der Stadt were more a part of this than they knew.