Kepler's Witch Read online

  Katharina owned a house in Kirchgasse and some fields that she rented out to local farmers, which together provided for a modest living. She was always clever in the making of money, always finding new ways to increase her “little estate.”3 At seventy-four, what she missed was a purpose to her life. Her children had grown up and moved away. Her husband, Heinrich, had deserted her years before, rushing off to fight one war after another until he died out there somewhere. She knew something of herbs, knowledge she had gained from an aunt who had raised her and who had later been burned as a witch. Understandably, Katharina wanted to make herself useful and so offered medicines, salves, and healing potions for the sick as well as herbal tonics for the healthy. She walked from farm to farm, speaking benedictions and offering medicines for both livestock and people:

  Bid Welcome to God

  Sun and Sunny Day.

  You come riding along—

  Here is a person,

  Let us pray to you O God—

  Father, Son and Holy Spirit,

  And the Holy Trinity.

  Give this person blood and flesh

  And also good health.4

  Her son Johannes lived with his wife and children in far-off Linz, in Upper Austria, where he lived in what everyone in her circle must have thought was imperial elegance. They had just had a new baby, and so there was joy in the house, even though one of the other babies had already died, the other was sick, and Kepler worried constantly about money. Little did anyone in Leonberg, Kepler’s old neighborhood, understand, that for all his high position, Kepler had to scramble for money just like they did. The emperor owed him over 10,000 gulden—a fortune—in back pay, but like all the other court advisers, Kepler had to stand in line to get a few scraps of what was owed him. Only the emperor and his top lieutenants, it seemed, actually lived in imperial splendor.

  As difficult a woman as Katharina could be, her neighbors often came to her with their medical problems—when the medicine worked, she was a hero; when it didn’t, she was a villain. They assumed that she had intended it to fail, which meant that she was malevolent, a witch, like her aunt before her. But as suspect as Katharina was, to some her son Johannes was far worse. He must have been crazy, and a witch himself, a follower of Copernicus and a heretic. The small local court in Württemberg couldn’t understand Kepler’s science, so they supplemented their prejudices with church dogmas, both Lutheran and Catholic, to argue against his mother.

  Kepler knew that the town of Leonberg had already executed six other women for witchcraft by that year—what had once been a vague anxiety over the spirits of darkness had boiled up into a national mania. Not that he would have disagreed with the idea that there were witches. No one would have. It was just that he was certain his mother was not one of them. Admittedly, the times were uncertain, the forces of darkness on the move. Germany was at the crumbling edge of the Thirty Years’ War—Catholics, Lutherans, and Calvinists rampaged through the countryside on one wave or another of Reformation or Counter-Reformation. Jesuits were everywhere, whispering into the ears of kings. And, admittedly, Johannes Kepler had tried to bring the warring factions together, and for his pains was excommunicated by his own Lutheran church. Is it surprising then that, caught in these tidal forces and shackled by her neighbors’ petty fears, Katharina Kepler ended up in prison for over a year, sometimes in chains, sometimes tortured, and almost lost her life on the gallows or at the stake?

  Katharina’s fate had finally been decided, not in Leonberg or Güglingen, but in Tübingen, at the famous university there, decided by the law faculty, who reviewed the court case and determined the sentence. This was Kepler’s old university, where he had studied, but that had not made him their favorite. In fact, quite the opposite.

  The year of Katharina Kepler’s trial, the summer heat had not yet completely dissipated; the fall colors were appearing as the professors at Tübingen, meeting in solemn conclave, decided that the evidence against the Kepler woman was mostly circumstantial, and that they could not in good conscience condemn her to death or even actually torture her, though the law permitted them to do so. However, since she had been convicted and sentenced to the territio by the Duke of Württemberg himself, they could not in good conscience set a convicted witch free without punishment, even after the duke had, in his own uncertainty, asked them to review the case. Meanwhile, Kepler was writing letters and sending petitions to nearly everyone, trying to head off that dreadful day. Still, he failed.

  But Katharina would not bend. Even after the executioner had done his worst, after he had shouted and commanded and adjured himself hoarse, after he had shown her all his tools and explained each one’s purpose and had described how she would suffer most horribly under them if she did not confess her evil and renounce her lord, the devil, Katharina, unbowed, said: “Do what you want to me. Even if you were to pull one vein after another out of my body, I would have nothing to admit.” Then she dropped to her knees and prayed a fervent Pater Noster. God, she said, would bring the truth to light, and after her death he would reveal the terrible violence that had been done to her. She knew that God would not call his Holy Ghost from her nor would he abandon her in her suffering.

  TESTIMONY OF DONATUS GÜLTLINGER, CITIZEN OF LEONBERG, GIVEN TO LUTHER EINHORN, MAGISTRATE OF LEONBERG 1620

  Article 6:

  The witness heard the same story (about the potion) from the accuser herself, because he had once been sick and stayed in the same hospital as she did. There, the accuser, Ursula Reinbold, asked him how he got well.

  The witness did not respond to any of the interrogational questions, except to say that after the glazier’s wife had told him how she had received a potion from the Kepler woman and had tasted it, she said immediately, “Good Devil, what is this? 1 What did you give me to drink? It is as bitter as gall!” The witness did not respond to what Ursula said about this drink the Kepler woman had given her, because she should have known what kind of a woman Katharina was. The Kepler woman later found out what the witness was saying about her and sent Michel to him to ask why he had bad-mouthed her, which the witness, however, did not admit. Instead, he asked Michel not to bother him with those sorts of things any more. Soon after, the Kepler woman stopped the witness on the market square and asked him personally if the good Michel had said anything to him. If so, what was his answer? He told her that she understood the good Michel correctly, that he had indeed said those things. Then the accused admitted that, yes, she had given a drink to the glazier’s wife, but that she had mixed up the jugs. She had two little jugs sitting on the sill, and in one of them she had prepared a potion out of herbs. Witness admitted to the interrogator that he should have made this information known to the magistrate earlier. Even so, he wanted it noted that, because of the length of time, he might have forgotten several details.

  Article 9:

  Witness said that even if Mt. Engelberg were made of gold and was given to him, he would not speak a falsehood.

  TESTIMONY OF BENEDICT BEUTELSBACHER, GERMAN SCHOOLMASTER OF LEONBERG 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 h
er. He does not remember 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 ago—the witness cannot remember the specific date—he 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.

  II

  Appeired a Terrible Comet

  Where Kepler is born in Weil der Stadt, near Leonberg, including a description of the town, the Kepler family, and Johannes’s early childhood.

  KATHARINA KEPLER 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 Baptist—a 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 Lutheran—completely, utterly, and without reservation—the 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 grandfather—quarrelsome, 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 lon
g-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, intent 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.