Kepler's Witch (24 page)

Kepler spent a good deal of his time in the
New Astronomy
both praising and criticizing his old master's theory, for he recognized Tycho as a great leader and innovator and as the man who had made the most perfect observations up until that time. On the other hand, he criticized Tycho's planetary system as too complicated. In his search for a celestial mechanics, he assumed, with Ockham's razor, that the order of the cosmos had to be simple, for the mind of God was not compatible with wasteful and irrational motions. He found that by formulating a preliminary notion of gravitation based on magnetism, where all objects naturally attract all other objects, and emanating primarily from the sun, he could explain the
planetary system in a much more simple way. What's more, this
vis motoria,
this vital force, diminished with the inverse of the distance. He had therefore come terribly close to Newton's later formulation of the law of gravity, which described the force diminishing inversely with the square of the distance, which made the force fall off at a much faster rate. His instincts were dead on; it was his mathematics that was undeveloped.

Tycho's system required that the sun and all the other planets orbit the earth, which would mean that the earth would have had to exert some powerful gravitational forces to keep it all in line. The earth simply wasn't big enough for that, but the sun was. Here Kepler took a huge step, probably larger than even he knew. He decided that he no longer needed to explain the movement of the planets through some kind of animate faculties, souls or living beings. Rather, he could explain it all through the action of physical forces, forces that he had identified with magnetism. If the earth was merely one of the planets, as Copernicus had said, and as opposed to Tycho, the power of planetary motions had to reside in the sun, and not in the earth. Certainly, the earth had the power to attract, as all matter did, but only the sun was large enough and great enough to hold the entire system of planets in check.

Kepler set forth several axioms to support a new theory of gravitation: every body, to the extent that it is bodily, is naturally suited to rest where it is when it is outside the influence of a like body. This axiom, therefore, showed that he had no modern idea of inertia, first formulated by Galileo, which said that a body in motion tends to stay in motion. Gravity, therefore, for Kepler, was a mutual corporeal quality existing among the various bodies, uniting them, with the more massive bodies exerting the greater force. The earth, therefore, attracts a stone more than the stone attracts the earth. This force, Kepler argued, is also the cause of the tides. Galileo believed that the tides occurred because, as the earth spun on its axis, the water in the oceans sloshed around like water in a bathtub. Kepler argued that it was because of the attractive pull of the moon, which causes water to leave some places and pile up in others, creating the ebb and flow of the sea.

L
ETTER FROM
K
EPLER TO
T
OBIAS
S
CULTETUS
A
PRIL
13, 1612

Where Kepler's marriage is troubled, Rudolf II dies, and the Counter-Reformation comes to Prague in force.

I
N THE TIME OF
Libuše, old customs were dying, as old customs do, even the good ones. According to the legends, the balance between men and women had tipped, and the old prerogatives of women were fading away. At one time women had the right to choose their husbands, and the husband was expected to move in with the woman's family, not the other way around. For one reason or another, perhaps foreign influence or perhaps just because of a weakness of memory, these old customs gave way to new, where the rights of men were seen everywhere and the rights of women, nowhere. Libuše defended the rights of women, and her husband, Přmysl, defended the rights of men, and while they both lived, the balance lived as well. Then Libuše died, and Přemysl, in his grief, nearly went mad. When he returned and sat on his throne, however, he had lost half his wisdom with the death of his wife, and he sided with the men from that day on without care for the women. The women had lost their defender, and they seethed with resentment. There was no one to prophesy
for the people anymore, and in their fury the wisdom of women gave way to witchery.

One woman, a handmaid to Libuše named Vlasta, stood up and mocked the men, saying that they had mead dribbling from their beards and had all fallen into a drunken stupor. She walked out of the great hall into the night and gathered young girls and women to her. She would not submit to foolish, drunken men, she told them, and she would fight anyone who tried to make her submit. The women liked what she said, each one vowing to do the same. They would set up their own land, with their own castle, which they would call Devin, the Women's Castle, and it would be a nation of women who would not submit.

They built this castle on the opposite bank of the Vltava, in plain sight of VyÅ¡ehrad, where Prince Přemysl could see it and worry. He knew what his lack of wisdom had brought about, and he knew that the power of women, once unleashed, was fearsome, so he called his warriors about him, and said: “There is a new castle across the river. You can all see it. The girls are building it even now, and they call it Devin. I have had a terrible dream, in which I saw a young woman drenched in blood charging through the countryside, her face mad with rage, her hair flying. As she passed, blood flowed into the streams, and she climbed down from her horse to drink the blood. Then she came to me with a bowl of blood taken from the river and offered it to me to drink. I awoke in a terrible sweat.”

But the men would not listen. “They're just girls,” they said. “What can they do?” And the prince knew that they were fools.

Meanwhile, Vlasta and her women fortified Devin and trained an army of Amazons. They lured men into the forest and then slaughtered them. There were no men living in Devin, though women lived in Vyšehrad and all the villages around. Many of these women became spies for Vlasta, stealing weapons and horses. The women of Devin knew everything the men were doing, but the men knew nothing of the women. Finally, the men gathered themselves together, thinking that if they marched out to confront the women, the sight of all those warriors gathered together would terrify them, and they would run away. Přemysl begged them not
to do this, but they would not listen. They approached the women's castle, but it was silent, apparently empty. Congratulating themselves, they approached the silent gates, little aware of the number of archers that lined the battlements. Suddenly, the gates opened and the women's cavalry poured out. Arrows fell upon the men, and the cavalry, led by Vlasta, chased them back across the river.

After that, a new pride grew among the women. Some loved their husbands and would not leave them. Some disappeared in the night, only to appear among the women in Devin. Other women changed suddenly, and their men left their homes, fearful of being murdered in their sleep. For some time, the women's army swept through the land, breaking up happy marriages with cunning where they could and murdering where they could not. With time, the men began to gather once again, this time in earnest, arming themselves for the fight.

Using cunning, the women captured and killed one of Přemysl's men, Ctirad, who had been sent out to settle a dispute among the clans. A woman named Sárka was tied to a tree to make her look helpless, and when the men stopped to help her, she plied them with drugged mead until they passed out. Then the women came out of the forest and slaughtered them in their stupor, all except Ctirad, whom they took back to Devin and tortured on a wheel in front of the castle. At that point, seeing what the women did to their fellow, the men lost all doubt about attacking them, gnashed their teeth, and swore revenge. The men rode into the forest, looking for Vlasta's gangs of warriors and cut their throats when they found them.

This infuriated Vlasta, and she gathered her army for an assault on Vyšehrad itself. The men saw them coming and, full of hatred, rode out to meet them. The two sides crashed into one another before the gates of the castle. Blood ran into the Vltava in torrents, and death was the only victor. Vlasta was the most daring of all the women, and in her battle fury she rode out ahead of her army, so far out that she was soon cut off and surrounded by seven young men, warriors who hated her most of all. She was soon cast to the ground and pierced with swords. Then the women retreated in confusion inside the gates of Devin. The men set fire to the
castle with the women still inside and shouted curses at them from the fields beyond the walls. The castle burned through the night and into the day, and the light of it could be seen for miles. The wound between the men and the women, brought about by the loss of women's wisdom, half of the whole, would take centuries to heal. And perhaps it never would.

 

K
EPLER LIVED IN
P
RAGUE
for eleven years, and during that time he heard stories. He most likely heard this one, for it was an old fairy tale, a Czech story going back a thousand years, to pre-Christian times. His marriage to Barbara Müller in those years was troubled, with little peace and little companionship, and somewhere in there, when he heard this story, he must have wondered if men and women were always destined to hurt one another.

Johannes and Barbara Kepler were not well matched. They lived in two different universes with two different sets of physical laws. It is not easy to be married, even for the most compatible couples, but when a simple girl marries a genius it is nearly impossible. Johannes's mind was always elsewhere. He was the kind of man who would rather burrow in his study and work out his calculations than do anything else in the world. Even as he walked across the Charles Bridge and up the Steep Stairs to the imperial court, his thoughts swam through a sea of numbers, reeling in the movements of the heavens. Even while he was standing and waiting in the Bohemian chancellery, in the high-vaulted Vladislav Hall of Prague Castle, where they held banquets as well as jousts, making light talk with barons and imperial secretaries, or while attending the emperor himself in some alcove of his
Kunstkammer,
his mind was never far from his study, his papers, his computations. And yet the work was hard and taxed him greatly. He struggled through the rough emotional seas that creative minds must navigate—first up, then down, first elation, then depression. And yet he loved it so. He was, after all, a man who rummaged for God in the balances of his own mind. For him, the geometry of the heavens, the dances
of the planets, the secrets of the universe were more real than the twists of human politics, for the first was complete with mystical joy, while the second was full of fear.

Barbara knew nothing of his work and cared nothing about it. His fame and his position as imperial mathematician gave her honor, but she would have preferred a more normal man. Her father, Jobst, had spent his life tending to his wealth and his position, and his daughter was much the same. She was in a sense an uncomplicated woman—uneducated, a small-town girl who saw little real value in book learning. She was, like her father, a practical woman. To outward appearances, Johannes and Barbara had, if not a perfect marriage, at least a good one. They were, to all those around them, comfortable German citizens, though some noticed how Barbara's melancholy seemed to grow worse with each year. They had sufficient money to live on, though never quite enough for Barbara. Unlike the lives of many of their friends in the nobility, their life was simple, yet was adequate to the position Johannes held as imperial mathematician. Kepler joked about it, comparing himself to Diogenes, who sent his works to the king from a tub. He often referred to his home as his comfortable “tub,” though they had not rejected wealth, nor were they poor by any means. They were good middle-class people with good middle-class values and a good middle-class lifestyle. And with good middle-class uncertainty. When they first moved to Prague, Kepler spent between 400 and 500 gulden annually, but with newborn children adding to the family every few years, and with Barbara's health in constant decline, his expenses jumped to between 600 and 1,000 gulden a year. Barbara's own inheritance was sacrosanct, however; fearful of poverty, she would not let him sell or pawn so much as a pewter drinking cup to pay for firewood.

There were money problems, of course. The emperor kept making promises about Kepler's salary, but because of his collection fetish and imperial shopping sprees, he almost never had enough money in the exchequer to cover his imperial debts. Depending upon whether Rudolf was flush or not, the Keplers' lifestyle, like those of so many others at the imperial court, fluctuated from nearly comfortable to nearly impoverished. Barbara was constantly terrified of running out of money and saw her
inheritance, which was mostly in land, as her hedge against an uncertain future. And uncertain it was. Who knew what the emperor would do next, because he was growing more unstable by the day? And who knew what disease would come burning through the city next, costing money for physicians and medicine? The children, some of whom actually survived into adulthood, came down with strange coughing sicknesses or burned with summer fevers, and everyone prayed that it was not plague or smallpox.

The Keplers had numerous friends as well, many from wealthy families with important positions, people who had plenty of money. These people had to be entertained. This was a sore spot for Barbara, who yearned for a taste of that noble life. Kepler's house seems to have been a gathering place for men, along with their wives, who were interested in the stars—imperial secretaries and representatives of the Estates, the local Czech nobility; some were barons, some even dukes. There was Johannes Jessenius, the great anatomist, who was later executed by the Counter-Reformation; Johann Georg Gödelmann, the ambassador from Saxony, who was also a part-time expert on witchcraft law; Jost Bürgi, the imperial watchmaker and the man who first used logarithms in his computations; and Johannes Mathäus Wackher von Wackenfels, an imperial adviser and a relative of Kepler's. Most of Kepler's patrons and intellectual friends had solid positions at court or were nobility from the Estates and had independent sources of cash. Kepler even counted a few Jesuits among them, a fact that his fellow Lutherans did not overlook. Such men surrounded Kepler and sought his advice on astronomical and astrological matters. Many of them visited him in his home, showing off their wealth with the unconscious flourish that only the very privileged can manage.

One of Kepler's friends was Johannes Pistorius, a former Protestant who later became a Catholic priest and the emperor's confessor, and later bishop of Freiburg. Imagine the relationship between these two! They both loved to argue religion and did so every time they met. Imagine the effect this had on Barbara, who had no theological background and spent her life in simple piety. Later, when Pistorius became ill, he wrote a sweet letter to his friend Kepler, saying that soon he would shrug off the vanities of this world and find peace in the arms of his Savior. Kepler, however, re
sponded in a most un-Keplerlike way, taking Pistorius's letter as an opportunity to attack the Catholic church as an enemy to religious freedom because it staged an assault on free conscience and tried to rule salvation itself, making itself the single doorway through which to find Christ. Pistorius responded kindly, saying he didn't really want a theological conversation, and that he had nothing but fondness for Kepler and wished him God's blessing. This is the kind of argumentation that Kepler opened his doors to during his years in Prague. The bishop was undoubtedly sickly during that last exchange of letters; when he was healthy, he must have given as well as he received.

This was the house that Barbara lived in then, filled with Kepler's intellectual circle of like-minded men and their wives, all of whom admired him and his work and wanted to be close to the flame. It must have seemed to Barbara that these people appeared out of nowhere, showing off their finery. On the other hand, Barbara herself spent a good deal of her own time and money keeping up appearances. She was, to all those who knew her, a woman of charity and generosity. People from many parts of the city admired her as a model of Christian virtue.

In private, however, Barbara was not so pleasant or so generous. She had survived much in her life. Her father yielded control of his children to no one, and all of them, especially his daughter, he wrapped inside his schemes for higher social standing. He was a demanding, unforgiving, towering presence in her young life. At his behest, she had married two older men, because of their standing and reputation, but also because Jobst wanted to add their fortunes to his family's. Her one chance of marrying a man closer to her own age, that is, Kepler, her father disputed and resisted for years.

Barbara was prone to depression and therefore prone to a wealth of diseases that the tides of melancholy carry with it. She was an unhappy woman, made unhappy partly by her husband's short temper and his obsessive work habits. Likely, however, she would not have been happy had she been married to a king. She was embarrassed by her husband's work and often wished that he had a regular job. In response, Kepler, who had little patience, called her simpleminded, naïve, and silly. He hated the fact
that she would disturb him at his work, bringing trivial household matters to him while his concentration was focused on the mathematics at hand. Kepler was often short with her or ignored her altogether. The two of them would then fly into rages or sulk, sometimes for days. She envied the wives of Kepler's many associates, not realizing how much regard they had for her husband, that though they enjoyed a higher position at the imperial court, they valued Kepler's brilliance even more. She could not help noticing, though, the difference between her station and theirs: her financial struggles, her one elderly, bandy-legged maid, her ordinary middle-class house compared with their grand coaches with four horses, their footmen, and their battalions of servants. When one of them had left the house, she must have watched him leave in grand style and compared him to her husband, who retreated to his study to calculate angles and scratch on pieces of paper.