Kepler's Witch (3 page)

Where Kepler's mother, Katharina, is accused of witchcraft by a former friend, which the gossip of the townspeople whips into a fury against her.

O
N
S
EPTEMBER
28, 1620, the Feast of St. Wenceslas, the executioner showed Katharina Kepler the instruments of torture, the pricking needles, the rack, the branding irons.
¹
Her son Johannes Kepler was nearby, fuming, praying for it to be
over.
He was forty-nine and, with Galileo Galilei, one of the greatest astronomers of the age—the emperor's mathematician, the genius who had calculated the true orbits of the planets and revealed the laws of optics to the world. Dukes listened to him. Barons asked his advice. And yet when the town gossips of Leonberg set their will against him, determined to take the life of his mother on trumped-up charges of witchcraft, he could not stop them. Still, he never gave up trying, and in that he was a good deal like his mother.

It was five years into the trial, and the difficult old woman would not bend—she admitted nothing. Not surprising, for if truth be told, Katharina Kepler was a stubborn, cranky, hickory stick of a woman who suffered from insomnia, had an excess of curiosity, and simply couldn't keep her
nose out of other people's business. She was known to be
zänkisch
—quarrelsome—and nearly everyone said she had a wicked tongue. Perhaps that was why her old friends and neighbors were so willing to accuse her of witchcraft, why five years before they had forced her at sword point to perform an illegal magical ritual just to gather evidence that she was indeed a witch, and why they eventually handed her over to the magistrate for trial.

The ordeal consisted of two years of accusations and five years of court action, from 1613, when the accusations of handing out poison potions were first made, to 1620, when they convicted Katharina and sentenced her to the
territio verbalis,
the terrorization by word,
²
despite all Johannes could do. There were tidal forces at work in this little town. The events around the duchy of Württemberg would gather into themselves all the violent changes of the day, for by their conviction of Katharina, the consistory (the duke's council), the magistrates, and the Lutheran church authorities had bundled together their fear of Copernicus and their anger against Johannes, a man they had already convicted of heresy. The Reformation, like an earthquake, had cracked Western Christianity, stable since the fifth century, into Catholics and Protestants, and the Protestants into Lutherans, Zwinglians, Calvinists, Anglicans, and Anabaptists, with the many camps drifting apart like tectonic plates. Even the heavens had begun changing, and Kepler had been a part of that change. Copernicus, an obscure Polish priest, had published his
On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres,
which had dethroned the earth from its place at the universe center and sent it spinning through the heavens like a top revolving around the sun. Fear ruled Europe—fear of difference, fear of change. And there, in one corner of Swabia in southern Germany, the mother of a famous man, a mathematician and scientist, a respected, pious Lutheran, nearly paid with her life.

Like his mother, Johannes was willing to fight. He had taken a hand in her defense, writing much of the brief himself. He was not present at the sentencing, though, for he would not have been permitted to accompany her to the
territio.
But only a few days before, Kepler had petitioned the
Vogt,
the magistrate, of Güglingen, the town where the trial had taken
place, to get on with it, so when it was over old Katharina could finally have some peace.

Early that morning, she was led to the torturer by Aulber, the bailiff of Güglingen, who was accompanied by a scribe for recording her confession, and three court representatives. The torturer, with the bailiff standing to one side, then shouted at her for a long time, commanding her to repent and tell the truth and threatening her if she didn't. He showed her each instrument and described in detail all that it would do to her body—the prickers, the long needles for picking at the flesh; the hot irons for branding; the pincers for pulling and tearing at the body; the rack; the garrote; and the gallows for hanging, drawing, and quartering. He adjured her to repent, to confess her crimes, so that even if she would not survive in this world, she could at least go to God with a clear conscience.

Meanwhile Johannes, almost insane with rage and fear, waited in town for the ordeal to be over. Kepler was a slight man with a jaunty goatee and a dark suit with a starched ruff collar; he was slightly stooped from bending over his calculations and he squinted from bad eyesight, a parting shot from a childhood bout with smallpox. His hands were gnarled and ugly, again a result of the pox. Perhaps he paced as he waited for news, shook his fists at the empty room. Essentially a peaceful man, he was given to rages when he knew an injustice was being done. After all, these were his neighbors, his childhood friends, not strangers, who had forced this trial. The accusation, the trial, the conviction, and the sentence were all the work of hateful people, people who had wanted some petty vengeance, people who had seen their chance to get their hands on his mother's small estate. It was the work of a fraudulent magistrate, a good friend of the accusers, and of a judicial system gone mad.

Being imperial mathematician meant that the courts in Leonberg couldn't touch him, but they could do as they liked with his mother. Imperial protections went only so far. In the end, no mere scientist could expect that much security. Thirteen years later, the other great astronomer, Galileo, would face charges of heresy before the Inquisition in Rome. The executioners at that time would perform the same
territio
on him.

Such things happened all too often at that time, because people were afraid. In the seventeenth century, mystery tolled like a bell in people's lives, disturbing their dreams. They lived in fear of unseen forces and anything beyond their understanding terrorized them. Like her son Johannes, Katharina was more intelligent than most people, and so the way her mind ran in oblique ways set people's teeth on edge. Unlike her son, however, who had the best education Germany offered at the time, she was illiterate. Her mind, forever restless, had no proper expression. Her formidable intelligence had been stuffed back inside her, always moving, always seeking something, but with no way out. It is likely that she had been born the child of a rape. Unlike everyone else around her, she was short, thin, and dark, just like her son Johannes. Less than a year before she was born, the Spanish had invaded the region, and typical of armies, their soldiers had raped every woman they could find. Katharina's mother may have been one of them.

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:

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.

T
ESTIMONY OF
D
ONATUS
G
ÜLTLINGER
, C
ITIZEN OF
L
EONBERG
, G
IVEN TO
L
UTHER
E
INHORN
, M
AGISTRATE OF
L
EONBERG
1620