Kepler's Witch (29 page)
Authors: James A. Connor
Inexorably, Barbara slipped toward death. As she was dying, her maid put a clean white shirt on her, and Barbara asked, “Is this the robe of salvation?”
8
“In melancholy and hopelessness,” Kepler wrote, “in the saddest state of spirit, she took her last breath.”
L
ETTER FROM
K
EPLER TO AN
U
NKNOWN
N
OBLEMAN
O
CTOBER
23, 1613
What would be more reasonable than that I, as a philosopher who has passed and is nearing the end of his prime, who has muted passions, who is soft of body and dried up by nature, should marry a widow long known to myself and to my wife, a woman who was recommended to me not too subtly by the latter. At first she appeared to agree; she certainly contemplated the matter, but finally excused herself most humbly. With their mother I was offered her two daughters, along with an unfavorable prognosis, if violation of honor may be portrayed this way. Moving from widows to virgins, the looks of the current one and her pleasant face caught my attention. Her education was more brilliant than necessary for me. She had been given more than her share of intellectual pleasures, her age not ripe for domestic concerns. Finally, after evaluating all arguments, the mother decided that the daughter was too young. This matter took up a month, and then I left Prague, for I had decided and explained to the mother that I would either get a bride or give up the city. This was the second. Now about the third.
On the way to Linz I made a detour to Mähren by resuming my plan. Here my soul grew warm. I liked the girl, for she was well brought up, the way I prefer it. She cared about my children with extraordinary willingness. I left them with their future mother to collect them at a later time, at my expense: But the good girl had promised to be faithful to another before the year was through. Then came number four, the first of
the Linzer women. She could sufficiently present herself by beauty and her mother's distinction. I fell for her because of her tall build and athletic body, and it would have been settled, had not both love and reason forced a fifth woman on me. This one won me over with love, humble loyalty, economy of household, diligence, and the love she gave the stepchildren. I also liked her loneliness and the fact that she was an orphan. After listening to Helmhard Jörger's wife, I began to decide on the fourth one, angry that the fifth one was put aside. However, I continued: a sixth one came recommended by my stepdaughter and her husband, while friends played matchmaker. She came from nobility and was not without money, which was attractive. On the other hand she lacked the years; her nobility made her suspect to pride, and I was hesitant about the extensive costs of such a wedding. When the fifth woman was already happily alive in my heart and my words, a sudden rival made her company, whom I counted as woman number seven. Friends praised her sophistication and sense of economy. She had a face that made her worthy of love. When courting her family and the girl, I included warnings and negative remarks. What consequence other than a refusal could have come out of this?
To quiet the gossip, I now turned to folks who were common, but aspired to sophistication. Among those I chose, with the advice of a friend, an eighth woman. Beauty was not one of her assets, but the mother was honorable; respectable education, modest habits, and some money made them stand out. Destiny, however, sought revenge with my restlessness and doubtfulness by facing me with a being of the same unsteadiness. At first she and the relatives were willing, but neither I nor she herself knew whether she was willing or not. Finally, I became more careful; the rest, for there will be three more, I kept quiet about it.
Pretending to have a woman (number eight) whom I couldn't let go, I talked to one, which I will call the ninth, and looked for a sign of her affection. In light of my unsure behavior, the girl declined. With number ten the difference in our bodies was too obvious: myself lanky, insipid, thin; she short and fat. A friend brought number eleven onto the scene. I went to meet her, I liked her personality, but everything was arranged rather secretly. Money, sophistication, and economy were present again, and she was quite young. A friend managed the matter; I waited four months, and finally we received word that the girl was too young. While preparing to travel to Regensburg, I returned to the fifth women, declared myself, and was accepted.
Susanna is her name, the parents Johann Reuttinger and Barbara Bürger of the city of Efferding, the father a carpenter, both already deceased. Her education, in lieu of a large dowry, took place in the girls' school in Starhemberg, which receives high praises throughout the area for its discipline. Frame, habits, and body conform with mine. Not a trace of pride, no extravagance, patience at work, an average knowledge of how to keep house, middle-aged and enough sense to learn what is missing. By decree of the honorable Herr von Starhemberg I will marry her this coming October 30 at twelve noon in the presence of the Efferding congregation. The wedding celebration dinner will be held in the House Moritz, whose emblem is the golden lion.
The year 1614. I was bothered by bodily pains brought on by insipid fluids that constricted the folds of the body.
T
HE STORY OF
K
ATHARINA
K
EPLER'S AGONY
begins with a business deal gone badly. There was a time when she and Ursula Reinbold, her accuser, had been friends, a couple of conspirators meeting over the backyard fence or along the road to pass the time of day and to chew over all the little happenings in the village. No doubt they talked about their children, the price of beef and pork, the price of onions and cabbages. No doubt they talked about their neighbors and all the little scandals, real and imagined. No doubt as Kepler's star rose Katharina regaled Ursula with his success and his growing fame. Her son, the
imperial mathematician
. Her son, who just a month ago was consulting with the emperor. Her son Johannes, you remember little Johannes, who is now rubbing elbows with kings and dukes. No doubt Ursula grew weary of hearing it, and no doubt so did just about everyone else in town.
For her part, Ursula was not the kind of woman to be trifled with. She lived inside her resentments, and when someone insulted her, she generally
found a way to make them suffer. Ursula had a troublesome reputation, for she had once been punished as a public prostitute. She had had a series of abortions, boiling up her own potions to induce early laborâall in all, Ursula Reinbold had a bad smell. But strangely enough, the people of Leonberg were willing to forgive her much, because her husband, Jakob, the glazier and glass maker, was a successful man, and because her brother, Urban Kräutlin, was the barber of the duke himself. Moreover, people often forgive true malefactors things that they would never forgive other people who are merely irritating. Katharina Kepler had committed the ultimate sinâshe made everyone nervous. She was a little bit mad, but only a little, which was far more dangerous than being an abortionist and prostitute.
The trouble began with Katharina's son Christoph, a respected tinsmith and pewterer in town. An artisan and a tradesman, he too was a successful businessman, a thing one would not expect from the child of a mother who was a little bit mad. But Katharina was only half madâpart naïve child and part serpent. The details of the business deal between Ursula and Christoph are murky, but one can imagine that it had something to do with a dispute between the glazier and the tinsmith, because both of whom worked in household goods. Someone made promises; someone reneged. Words were said. The fight started. Christoph brought up Ursula's unfortunate past. Then, unwisely, Katharina got into the fight and upbraided Ursula for her bad reputation. Stung by Katharina's insults, Ursula from that time on looked for some way to make Katharina pay for what she had been made to suffer.
Unfortunately for Katharina, Germany was at the pinnacle of its witch mania. More than six women had already been condemned and executed in Leonberg. Witch hunts were popping up all over central Europe, with hundreds of trials and thousands of victimsâ75 percent of whom were women. Within twenty years, however, the tide would turn. Subtly, almost without fanfare, more and more people would start to pick at the flaws in the witch-hunters' arguments. Too many upstanding citizens had died without substantial proof, without justice. But in 1613, the year that Ursula first leveled her accusation against Katharina, the windstorm of
fear had already become a hurricane. Katharina's trial was typical, for it was built mainly on gossip and innuendo.
To understand the witchcraft mania in the seventeenth century, one must first understand village life. This is hard for twenty-first-century people. We cannot understand a world in which people think that twenty-five miles is a great distance, half their world, really, and where they walk everywhere they go, and where they breathe the same air with the same people each day, each year, each decade. Small-town life in our time is almost dead, and where it exists it is unrecognizable.
People in villages have believed in the demonic for millennia. Soon after people settled into towns and villages, after they had created the first controlled environments, they noticed the shadows in their houses, the spooky places under the beds, and the wicked glint in a neighbor's eye.
Stories about witches made sense of the unfathomable misfortunes of lifeâwhy children die, why we sicken, why we grow old. They incorporated the hope that whatever sufferings the evildoer, the witch, had dropped upon the village, she might have the power, and the will, to undo. Farm life was insecure enough in Kepler's day, as it is today. Too much rain or too little, and people starve. A sudden outbreak of plague, a series of bad crops, the threat of famine, an explosion of disease among the herd animals, children suddenly breaking out in unknown rashes or burning with a fever, and then, like candles blowing out, dying. Something evil must be at work, and someone evil must be to blame.
There was plenty of disaster to be had in Germany in the seventeenth century, and not all of it was of human origin. Starting in the twelfth century and lasting on into the Enlightenment, Europe entered what climatologists have called the Little Ice Age, a period in which there were various-length spans of unusually bad weatherâcold winters, strange thunderstorms, and year after year of bad crops. One of the reasons astrologers were so well paid at the time is that they were the meteorologists of the day. By reading the stars, they could predict the weather and perhaps give kings and princes foresight on whatever new catastrophe might be coming. Mostly, however, people in the villages suffered, and suffered without understanding.
Witches were the terrorists of the seventeenth centuryâunseen, moving about society disguised as ordinary citizens, with malevolent wills hidden behind smiling faces. This was not a superstition, as some Enlightenment writers would claimâit was a worldview. All that was good came from God. All that was evil, all that was malevolent, all that caused death and disease and despair bubbled up from the devil. But the devil did not work alone. Like any potentate, he had his minions, which he drew to him by promises of wealth and power. Not that he ever made good on his promises, because after all he was the devil, but those who had turned themselves over to him, for whatever goods they believed that they were going to get, had become his slaves. These were the witches, the practitioners of poison, potions, and other pharmacological horrors. They were, according to the common village fantasy, members of a secret society who traveled through the air to unclean mountaintops or ancient pagan glades, where they copulated with the devil, ate feces, and practiced one unholy blasphemy after another.
Some have claimed that the witchcraft trials of the seventeenth century persecuted an underground minority of secret believers in leftover paganism. The witchcraft trials were therefore a byproduct of Christianity's intolerance, rooting out the last vestiges of a once noble Celtic nature religion. The historical record, however, does not bear this out. Some individuals did practice magical healing rites, either as a part of herbal cures or as charms to protect the crops, and the church universally condemned such practices. Few such people would have considered themselves pagans, however, for most of their beliefs were an amalgam of Christianity and animism. They were accused of witchcraft simply because they were odd, and because they were known to be odd by the members of their own village. Most of the time, they were persecuted not because they were pagans, but because they were at war with their neighbors.
1
Historically, there is no evidence that witches as we have imagined them ever existed at all. The typical image of the witch was that of “a creature with long, straight hair, a very sharp nose, and long slender fingers. She has a big mouth with pointed teeth. She dresses in black and she wears a pointed black felt hat on her head. A witch usually sails through
the air on a long broom and is always accompanied by a fierce-looking cat.”
2
By this account, most of the women of that time might have been witches, for the dress described was common enough. It was essentially the description of an old woman, and little else. Except for the flying part.
Writers of manuals for witch-hunters, such as the
Malleus Malificarum,
published in 1486, were sometimes openly misogynistic, describing women as more vulnerable to the wiles of the devil because of their sensuous sexuality. But most of the fear welled up from the villages. To look at the witchcraft mania from the top down, as the acts of governments or churches, is to see only the reaction, for the fear of unseen evil permeated the entire societyâmen and women, kings and peasants, popes and village idiots. Village life was such that people developed reputations over long periods of time, reputations that stuck to them, and that often had little to do with their actual behavior. The friction between people mounted and, through the power of gossip, became heavy, like water behind a dam; if released, such water could sweep everyone away. Often, the people who were accused of witchcraft had been suspected of being witches for many years, but it was always a dangerous business to accuse a neighbor of witchcraft. Ursula Reinbold could easily have become the next victim of the witch mania that she rode so successfully against Katharina Kepler. Her only protection was her family's friendship with the local magistrate, Luther Einhorn.
Luther Einhorn came to Leonberg in 1613 to take the position of
Vogt,
or magistrate. He was, even said diplomatically, a suck-up. He was the kind of man who scouts out those who are connected to power and befriends them. Although Katharina Kepler had connections with the imperial mathematician, Johannes's influence was far away, with people who lived in Prague or Linz or Bavaria. Ursula Reinbold, however, was well connected closer to home. Several members of her family worked as servants of the duke. Her brother Urban Kräutlin was the duke's barber; another relative was the duke's
Forstermeister,
his forester. Einhorn had befriended the Reinbolds fairly quickly and was closely associated with their camp from the beginning.
For some time before she had met Einhorn, however, Ursula had been declaring publicly that she had become sick, both mentally and physically, after drinking a potion given to her by the Kepler woman. She even went to the hospital, where she lay sick for a time. There, she met Donatus Gültlinger, who testified at Katharina's witch trial that the Reinbold woman had told him that as soon as she drank the Kepler woman's brew, she said “Good Devil! What is this? What did you give me to drink? It is as bitter as gall!” The fact that this was hearsay evidence didn't seem to matter much. After talking to Herr Gültlinger, Ursula went up and down the hospital floor, spreading rumors and complaining to everyone she met about the Kepler woman and what she had done to her. Ursula's health was likely not very good; she may have had gynecological problems stemming from her sexual history, and there are hints that she had recently aborted another child through one of her potions, so her story might have carried some credibility.
At first, Christoph thought all of this was just women's folly and visited Einhorn to ask that he stop Ursula from gossiping all over town, but he didn't get very far. Ursula's accusations would not have been heard at all, had the people of Leonberg not been predisposed to believe that Katharina was a witch in the first place, predisposed to accept whatever fanciful tale anyone might tell about the Kepler woman.
In 1615, Prince Friedrich Achilles, of Württemberg, visited the Leonberg
Forsthaus,
a hunting lodge. Something like a restaurant out in the woods surrounded by thick trees, the
Forsthaus
was often used for public gatherings, for it was a cool refuge from heat of late summer, just after the harvest. The prince was there to hunt, but that almost always meant a big party. Einhorn was there on that occasion, as were the Reinbolds, probably because the
Forstermeister
was her relative, which meant that he was also in charge of the
Forsthaus.
Einhorn and the Reinbolds had been drinking all evening, drinking to brotherly love by entwining their arms and then downing the beer together. This meant that they were either very drunk or they had passed the point of formality and were now bosom companions. Somewhere in there Ursula brought up her complaint about
the Kepler woman. They drank on into the evening, while the Reinbolds worked on the magistrate.
Eventually, Ursula, her husband, Jakob the glazier, and her brother, Urban Kräutlin, the duke's barber, convinced the magistrate of Katharina's wickedness and incited him to take action. Still intoxicated, Einhorn led Kräutlin and the Reinbold couple to the courthouse and summoned Katharina to him. Depending on how early they had started drinking and when they had stopped, this summons might have come in the evening or possibly even at night. The entire meeting was against the law, for Einhorn had summoned Katharina without also summoning her son Christoph, her legal protector, or without summoning the two
Kriegsvögte,
the war magistrates, who, because she was a widow, were assigned to look after her welfare. Now thoroughly enmeshed in the Reinbold camp, Einhorn abandoned legalities and joined in the persecution of the old woman.
When Katharina arrived, Einhorn accused her “most seriously” of being a witch and ruining the health of Ursula Reinbold and demanded that she should use her powers at once to remove the curse. No excuses. Standing and shouting drunkenly, Kräutlin swore that if Katharina refused to remove her curse on the spot, he would draw his sword and stab her through the heart. Then, without waiting for a response from Katharina, he drew his sword from its scabbard and, staggering toward her, shouted curses at her while he held the blade against her breast.
This was a trap. It may not have been an intentional one on the Reinbolds' part, because they were drunk and wanted to terrorize the old woman just for the fun of it. She was there alone, after all, defenseless. If Katharina refused, she might be murdered on the spot, but if she agreed, then they could accuse her of using magic powers and of being a witch. Murder was common enough in witchcraft accusations, when the aggrieved family turned to violence. In some cases, the witch accommodated them, according to the stories, and if the sick person were healed, that might have been the end of it. But if the sick person died, then the cure would be one more example of the witch's malevolence.