Kepler's Witch (39 page)

Kepler couldn't find a publisher for his new work, so he took a lesson from Tycho Brahe, invited the printer Johannes Planck to come to Linz, and sent the manuscript to him. The book finally came out two years later, in July 1615. Even though the
Stereometria
was the first book ever published in Linz, Kepler's bosses at the school and among the representatives of the Estates were not overly thrilled by it. A book on measuring wine casks was not quite the work they had in mind for him to do. It didn't seem as noble as the
Rudolphine Tables,
which were based on the great work of Tycho Brahe and dedicated to the emperor. And well, they just didn't understand what Kepler was doing. Measuring wine casks was mundane, to be sure, but finding newer and simpler ways to measure curved surfaces was not.

In the process, however, Kepler learned something about publishing. He was not as rich as Tycho Brahe, who could afford to run his own press and could therefore produce a small print run of his esoteric works simply to publicize his ideas. But Kepler could still do something of the same sort, if on a lesser scale. He purchased his own set of printer's type and even ordered some mathematical symbols to be cast to round it out. This type set was the most precious thing he owned, and since he was sliding sideways into the publishing business, he had to try to make some money along the way. Kepler had already learned, as far back as the
Astronomia Nova,
that his books were not best-sellers, because few people could understand his complex mathematics or appreciate his methods. He was not the satirist that Galileo was; he just did not have the flair for controversy. But he had learned that he could make money by printing presentation copies to be given as gifts to important members of the nobility, for which they always returned a comfortable stipend. Kepler found that he could make more money on the presentation copies than on the regular sales.

With his
Stereometry,
he had ordered both a Latin and a German version printed, so that he could cover a wider circle of the nobility and thereby collect more stipends. When all was done, after he had given
away all his gift books, he had made enough money to pay for the printing costs and even pocketed an extra 40 florins. After listening to the three emperors' empty promises for so many years, Kepler had finally decided to go commercial, and in the case of small-print-run books, that meant getting them into the hands of the people with the money.

Holding his intellectual nose, he also began to publish his yearly astrological calendars once more, after a hiatus of eleven years. The first of these new prognostications came out in 1616, and though Kepler looked down on his own astrological work, saying that it was “only a little more honest than begging,” he had learned that if he wanted to do great works, he had to support them with his astrological penny stinkers, which were much more lucrative.

Kepler had also discovered, as far back as 1611, that terrible year, that if he ever wanted his ideas to reach a larger audience, then he would have to write his own textbook, his own
Epitome
. In this book, he would not only explain Copernicus's theories to the educated masses, but his own as well. His old teacher Michael Mästlin had been the rock star of astronomical textbook authors in Germany with his
Epitome Astronomiae
and had made some decent money in his time. Though Mästlin had introduced Kepler to the Copernican universe, his own textbook had done one of the best jobs of explaining the Ptolemaic universe. Kepler's own textbook, the
Epitome Astronomiae Copernicanae,
or
Epitome of Copernican Astronomy,
took off from Mästlin's book and did for Copernican astronomy what Mästlin had done for the Ptolemaic system. He gave Planck the manuscript for the first volume of the
Epitome
in May 1616.

Then at the end of 1617 he wrote another prognostication for the year 1618, and then another for 1619. His calendar for 1619 took a shot at the Württemberg church. “I know a gelding animal that sits among the roses, covered in majesty, and stares out at its enemy, that other animal, without fear at all, though its enemy will soon cause its death. Be careful, therefore, get ready for the stroke, stop shoving and remember that you are here for the sake of the milk, not for your own benefit.”
⁸
Suddenly Kepler was a prophet. Everyone wondered who the gelding animal was; some wrote to Kepler, some stopped him on the streets, begging him to let them
in, to tell them the secret. Many of them thought he was talking about the pope; others about the House of Habsburg; others about the Jesuits or even the Rosicrucians. Kepler never explained himself, however, for he knew that those he addressed his message to, the consistory in Württemberg, already understood him well enough.

That year of 1617, however, was another terrible year. His daughter Margareta Regina, the little one, had already died on September 8, of consumption and epilepsy, before Kepler arrived home. And his stepdaughter, Regina, the little girl that Barbara had brought into the marriage, a girl whom Kepler had raised as if she were his own flesh, a woman now fully grown with a husband and children of her own, died in Walderbach, near Regensburg. She and her husband, Philip Ehem, a son of a prominent Augsburg family, had just moved there with their children. Ehem had a good job too, as Friedrich V's representative from the Palatinate to the imperial court. Suddenly, Regina took sick, and then all too quickly died. Ehem was lost in his grief for his wife and fear for his children. He begged Kepler to send his eldest daughter, fifteen-year-old Susanna, to help care for the children. Kepler agreed, but new worries had piled on top of the old.

He was still suffering from the news of Regina's death when he received the terrible letter from his sister, Margaretha, the wife of Pastor Binder, about the strange and terrifying accusations of witchcraft against their mother. So Kepler began his journey from Linz, up the Danube to Regensburg, passing through Walderbach, on the way to Leonberg, to see Philip and to leave his daughter Susanna with him. Along the way, he read a little book on harmony in music by Vincenzo Galilei, the father of Galileo Galilei, called
Dialogo della musica antica e moderne, A Dialogue on Ancient and Modern Music.
Kepler's Latin was strong enough that he could pick his way through Galilei's Italian. In this book, Vincenzo had returned to the original theory of harmony based on Pythagorean mathematics, an idea that piqued Kepler's interest because it appealed to his own astronomical, mathematical, and theological ideas. He had long been convinced that the best way to synthesize all three, to get that peek into God's
cosmographic mind, was through the idea of harmony as it applied to the motion of the planets.

Ultimately the trip to Leonberg was a disaster. He was never able to silence the accusations against his mother, nor was he able to reconcile himself with the Lutheran church, no matter how hard he tried. His visit to Hafenreffer in Tübingen had ended in his final excommunication. After a short stop in Walderbach on the way back to Linz, when he returned home, his children started dying. One after another, the world dropped stones on him. Weighed down by all the troubles of his life, he could not return to the grinding calculations of the
Rudolphine Tables,
and so he started his work on the
Harmony.
Like Mozart, who would follow him two hundred years later and who would write his sweetest music during the blackest times, Kepler was at his best when things were worst.

So what was this “harmony”? It is a complex word for us, meaning just about anything good depending on the predilections of the hearer. For Kepler, however, the word had a precise mathematical meaning. Each instance of harmony was a regular mathematical pattern that Kepler found in the world, a comparison between two or more things the coming together of which created something beautiful. Harmony was a geometric as well as an arithmetic idea and turned on everything from the complex shapes of snowflakes to the motions of the planets in the heavens. It was not a single abstract experience, like “humankind,” but a complex array of individual harmonies, something more like “people.” The harmonies were arranged in phalanxes of ever more complicated patterns coalescing into a great cosmic symphony, a music so profound that it harrowed the heart and set fire to the soul.

At the core, harmony corralled all that Kepler believed about science as well as all he believed about God, for the two could not be easily separated. Divine harmony was his answer to the troubles of the world, troubles that he was all too well aware of. Over the years, he collected tidbits about the multitude of harmonies from writings in philosophy, theology, astronomy, and mathematics, until he gradually formed a new synthesis. Geometry was at the heart of it, for the secret structure of the universe
was geometric, and therefore geometry was the blood of harmony, the marrow of God's thought. Kepler's researches led him back to the roots of mathematics.

For some time, he had tried to get his hands on a copy of Claudius Ptolemy's
Harmony
in the original Greek, for Ptolemy had tried to identify the qualities found in certain things that made them beautiful. But the book was hard to find, and Kepler failed at every attempt until Herwart von Hohenberg loaned him a copy to read. It amazed Kepler that even with several thousand years of difference between them, he and Ptolemy had contemplated the same ideas. This was reassuring to Kepler, because it intimated that he was onto something divine that lurked in the human mind. “The same idea about the construction of harmony has emerged from the minds of two very different men (and separated by so many centuries), simply because they were two men who had dedicated themselves to the contemplation of nature.”
⁹

As his little girl lay dying of pneumonia, Kepler stood at her bedside, watching as her tiny chest rose and fell with every ragged breath, and prayed almost without hope, while the ideas of harmony he had collected over the years almost imperceptibly jelled in his mind. When little Katharina died, Kepler locked himself away in his library, choked with grief, and as a refuge plodded on with his last great work. The
Harmony
was his fortress. He could enclose himself there, inside the perfection of mathematics, inside the transcendental beauty of geometry, and bolt the door of his mind to keep the screaming world outside. In those few stolen hours, he transported himself to that place of perfection and beauty, that place where God's will alone ruled the world.

In the process, while he wrangled with Luther Einhorn over the accusations against his mother, he remembered a sudden time when, in a momentary contemplation of harmony, he had discovered the third of his planet laws:

This third law, his “harmonic law,” set the relationship between the mean distance of a planet from the sun and the period of its orbit. This meant that one could calculate the time each planet would take to travel around the sun by knowing its distance, something that carried Kepler's first two laws and his application of physics to astronomy one step further. It was a cosmic regularity, one that had deep implications for Newton's law of gravity, for it showed the relationship between the distance from the sun of a body in orbit and the time it took that body to complete its cycle.

This was, for Kepler, another peek into God's mind. Kepler's mysticism orbits around this single idea, for he was no plodding empiricist, no earthbound pragmatist. His joy was in the perfect beauty of mathematics, especially geometry, which he always expressed in mystical terms. He was a mystical rationalist, a man who found transcendence by embracing reason rather than by abandoning it. In this, he was the inverse of Blaise Pascal, the French mathematician from Rouen who was born just a few years after Kepler had died and who experienced mystical insight by breaking through the veil of rationalism to find there a God of the burning bush, of the sacred fire, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the God of revelation. Although Kepler believed in the Bible and accepted its teachings, he saw within the Book of Nature a mysticism equally grand, equally vital, and equally important.

In this simple statement, Kepler also identified himself as a thoroughgoing Platonist, with earthbound harmonies rising and converging into the perfect harmonies of the mind. In doing so, he distinguished between
sensual harmonies and perfect harmonies, or the harmonies of mathematics. Music, of course, was the living heart of sensual harmony, for it not only had the power to enrapture the soul, but also to engorge the mind with perfect order. Harmony in music, as in all things, is a matter of comparison. Two things are brought into contact—two tones, two colors, two objects, two ideas, and they either blend together to conjure a greater, higher experience or they do not. In other words, they are harmonious or they are not. This is not first a matter of calculation, but of immediate experience. The eye does not need to calculate to see the harmony of color, nor does the ear need to do sums to hear the harmony of music. The harmony is there in the experience, in the first astonishing encounter, emerging like the sun from the ocean out of the byplay of individual things.