Kepler's Witch (36 page)

The next day Einhorn made it clear that he wanted to examine the accused once again, since he had made this a part of this complaint
ad torturam,
which he had sent along with Katharina to Güglingen. The term
ad torturam
turned the complaint into what we might call a capital crime. It carried with it not only the possibility of torture, but also of execution. Five days later, on September 4, the Güglingen magistrate, Johann Ulrich Aulber, presented the capital charge to the judges of the capital court, asked permission to hold the Kepler woman, and also asked to be given the power to force a reply from her.

On September 26, 1620, Kepler arrived in Güglingen to find his mother sitting alone in a cold, wet, drafty, dark, and nearly unheated prison cell of the Güglingen Tower. The wardens had pressed as much money as they could out of her and heated their own station excessively at her expense. He was furious as well as terrified for her and wrote to the duke at once, appealing for his mercy in the name of God and asking to have her transferred to the house of the city magistrate, where she could at least be warm. She was an old woman after all, in a “dilapidated condition.” A broken, dispirited old woman like Katharina was not much of a threat and did not need a guard. The magistrate could keep her at his house “at her own, as minimal as possible, expense.” Because of her gender and her old age, guards would not be unnecessary. “To keep the prisoner warm, especially since she has not been convicted and continues to unshakably plead her innocence, but that you mercifully suggest to our adversary, since our mother is kept in such a cold shelter, and was sent to Güglingen in the first place, or perhaps
priori casu,
and not insured with my security (bond), that the guard look out for himself, and that in the interim he should pay [for heat] out of his own pocket.”

Kepler also made contact with two of his old friends and advocates on the Tübingen law faculty and asked them to help in her defense. The defense moved into high gear, mounting argument upon argument against the prosecution's case. Johannes was prominent enough in this process that the scribe of Güglingen wrote in the court transcripts that “unfortunately, the prisoner appears with the support of her son Johannes Kepler, the mathematician.” Johannes wanted to make sure that his mother got the best defense possible, so he and Katharina's advocate, Johannes Rüff, presented the defense's case in written form. This was expensive and slow going, but it was more certain than courtroom oratory, which could not be referred to later in any exact way.

Suddenly feeling outclassed, the magistrate of Güglingen, Johann Ulrich Aulber, told the court that he could not lead the prosecution without a legal adviser of his own and without additional information. On November 4, the court assigned the duke's own chancery advocate, Hieronymous
Gabelkover, to take over the prosecution of the case and sent the files to him from Güglingen.

Christoph Kepler then accused Johannes of spending too much money on their mother's defense, saying that he was unnecessarily extending the trial through his involvement and opposition. Despairing, Christoph had decided to let the Reinbolds have their way with his mother, perhaps as a way of protecting his own reputation and perhaps, if looked at a little less charitably, as a way to protect his own portion of the inheritance. The Kepler children argued fiercely about the financial situation, about how much money was being paid out for the trial, for the advocate, and for their mother's upkeep. Johannes and Margaretha were willing to protect their mother at all costs, while Christoph had decided that the best thing he could do was to protect the family fortune. Meanwhile, putting his own paddle into the water, Jakob Reinbold requested 1,000 gulden to pay for his dear wife's pain and suffering and asked that this be paid out independently of the outcome of the capital trial, so that Katharina would have to pay even if she were declared innocent.

Suddenly, noting how the wardens continued to consume Katharina's estate, Jakob Reinbold, too worried about her financial condition. In the name of Christian charity, of course. The two guards were eating their way through Katharina's money so fast that by the time the trial ended, there might not be anything left to comfort Reinbold for his trouble. Without any shame at all, he wrote a letter to the duke's chancery, asking the duke that “in the name of God's mercy” he protect Katharina Kepler's funds, saying that she had already spent several hundred gulden since her arrest for food, shelter, heat, and her defense, and hinting that her money was disappearing rather too fast for his comfort. Suddenly, on November 23, out of the blue the Güglingen magistrate, working with the prosecution, included thirty-five new articles in his complaint. It would be a long trial indeed.

On November 24, the high court, after being pressured by Johannes Kepler, denied Reinbold's motion. No doubt even though Einhorn might have enjoyed a special line of communication with the duke's government and had a close relationship with some of the duke's servants, the council
was doing its best to follow the law under the circumstances. In witchcraft trials, there was always fear, so that even though the law might be plain, the results of such cases were never that simple. There was always a subterranean assumption of guilt by the very existence of an accusation. After another letter from Johannes Kepler, on December 4, the duke's chancery in Stuttgart decided that the mayor and the court of Güglingen should bear half or at least a third of the cost of heating Katharina's cell. After all, if they were going to insist on wardens, then the wardens would have to be kept warm, and Katharina Kepler should not have to pay for that. Suddenly the wardens decided that they did not need that much heat anyway. One more letter from Johannes, and they reduced her guard by half. But they still expected Katharina to pay for her own upkeep. The jail provided about thirty-five cents a day for a single meal, but that only included a hunk of bread and a bowl of watery broth.
⁹
Anything beyond that—milk, eggs, meat, beer, or wine—the deputy charged dearly for, especially for any kind of meat, which Katharina “because of her missing teeth could enjoy little of.” On top of that, Johannes Kepler had to pay a few coins under the table to keep the magistrate in good humor.

Finally, ten weeks after Katharina's arrest, on December 11, 1620, Katharina Kepler went to trial. On January 8, 1621, the court took more witness examinations in Leonberg under the direction of Luther Einhorn. Even more witness examinations took place in Güglingen on January 13, and on February 23 they published the court protocol. At this point, on April 2, 1621, the court permitted Katharina's advocate to present their defense. Finally, in May, the defense presented its last arguments to the court, written as a legal brief of 126 pages. Kepler had written much of this himself, in his own handwriting, using his own arguments to counter the prosecution's arguments one by one. Gradually the tide began to turn.

On August 22, 1621, the defense presented the final version of their written arguments. The court then sent the trial documents to the Tübingen law faculty, as was normally done in important cases, for the final word. Christian Besold worked behind the scenes. With all that, however, with all Kepler's finely honed arguments, and all of Besold's authority and influence, Katharina Kepler was still convicted. The prosecution had
asked for a sentence of “Cognition of Torture,” or showing her the instruments and explaining their function. This was not a university lecture, but an exercise in terror.

On September 10, 1621, the judicial faculty of Tübingen ruled as follows: “Learning the detailed facts of torture, but only in the first degree, i.e., in the form of the so-called
territio verbalis,
where the accused is taken to the usual place where one faces the torturer and the latter, under dire warnings, shows his
instrumenta.
” Although the law faculty had accepted most of Kepler's arguments and agreed that there was not enough real evidence to warrant Katharina's death, there was still enough doubt in their minds that they could not acquit her. In the final analysis, the learned doctors too were afraid. At this point, Johannes wanted to get the sentence over with, so he pressured Aulber, who was inclined to hold on to Katharina as long as possible, to set the day of her ordeal. Aulber announced that the sentence would be carried out on September 27 at seven o'clock in the morning. According to the rules, the
Cleemeister,
the Swabian term for the
Wasenmeister,
the one who executes sick animals and buries criminals, needed to be present, but he did not show at the appointed time, so Katharina had to wait one more day.

Tormenting witches and sorcerers was a fine old tradition dating back to the Babylonians. The usual outcome was death by fire, generally by tying the convicted witch (or heretic, since the punishment was the same for both and sometimes the distinction between the two crimes was blurry) to a stake, piling faggots of wood all around, and setting it all on fire. Generally, out of Christian charity, the executioner strangled the witch before the flames could take her, but sometimes that did not work. All too often, the flames burned the executioner's hands, and he was not able to finish the strangling. This happened in the case of Catherine Hayes in London in 1726, where the poor woman screamed for half an hour before she died. In the case of Kathleen Cawches and her two young daughters, also in England, all three women were burned at the same time on the same pyre. Right in the middle of the burning, the younger daughter gave birth to a baby. Someone in the crowd pulled the baby from the fire and gave the child to the priests. After some deliberation among them—
the dean and the bailiffs, the jurists and the provost—the provost commanded that the child be thrown back on the fire, since the infant too was tainted with heresy.
¹⁰
Similar stories occurred all too often on the continent as well. Certainly, on the day of her ordeal, they told Katharina quite a few such stories in gruesome detail.

One of the favorite ways of determining the guilt of a witch was through a trial by water, in which they took the accused to the river, tied her hands and feet together so that she was bent over in a squat, and then threw her in the water. This was an old Babylonian idea, noted in the Code of Hammurabi. The idea was that the holy river would decide a person's fate, drowning the guilty and floating the innocent. Thus justice was something even the waters of the river would attest to. However, the Assyrians turned this on its head. According to their rules, if those thrown in floated, then the waters rejected them, and they were guilty of witchcraft. If they sank, then the waters received them, and they were innocent. The Assyrians had an odd sense of humor. Of course, the onlookers had to be quick, or the innocents would drown before they could celebrate their acquittal. This Assyrian tradition was the one that traveled into Europe long before Christianity appeared, and Christian Europe, as it did with so many other pagan traditions, merely clothed it in Christian robes. Often when a witch was tried by water, the priest prayed over the water, recalled details of the Christian tradition, and thanked God just before they dunked the accused. One example from Germany:

Of course, all the other usual methods of torture applied to witches as well—branding with hot irons, the rack, the wheel, and so on, but one method seemed peculiar to witchcraft trials, the ordeal by pricking. The
belief was that witches had numb spots on their bodies from the devilish growth of extra nipples used to suckle imps and demons of all sorts. These places on the witches body were said to be without feeling, insensible to pain or torment, and so one way to determine whether a woman was a witch was to tie her to a wall and, with sharp needles or sharpened metal rods, “prick” he accused witch over and over in every place imaginable, all in the hope of finding a place where she would not cry out in pain. Apparently, there was a class of witch-hunters called “prickers” who specialized in this form of torment, which had developed it into quite a science. Sometimes the pricking sessions would go on for days and, exhausted from screaming, the accused witches just stopped, too tired to cry out any longer. Which, of course, would be proof that they were indeed witches.

All of these things would have been shown to Katharina Kepler. All the brands, the hot pokers, the rack, the wheel. The executioner would have explained their use in detail and what would happen when someone was burned alive, which, he would have said, was only the beginning of her eternal damnation in hell. He would have explained trial by water and the waters of baptism. He would have explained pricking and showed her the prickers, showed her how they hooked the skin and tore the flesh in little bits. He would have explained everything, but not quietly, not rationally. After each demonstration, he and the magistrate, perhaps even the guards, would demand that she confess her sins, so that even if she could not escape punishment in this life, she would at least escape the wrath of God. Then they would start again and tell her more stories and make more threats, until the old woman was kneeling on the floor, gibbering with fear. Nine times out of ten, by that point the accused would say anything.

At seven o'clock the next morning, September 28, 1621, the executioner carried out the sentence and published the result. According to the Güglingen magistrate, the Kepler woman continued her denial, even after they showed her the
instrumenta,
even after they hounded her to confess. “They may do whatever they wish to me,” she said after they read the court protocol and showed her the instruments. “Even if they wanted to pull one vein after the other out of my body, I would have nothing to con
fess.” Then Katharina fell on her knees and prayed an “Our Father” to God, asking God to give a sign to show if she was indeed a witch or a demon or if she ever had her hand in witchcraft. “I know that God will bring the truth to light and will not take his holy ghost from me. The Reinbold woman had brought her illness with her from Ansback to Leonberg, and the schoolmaster's lameness happened because he jumped over a ditch. I know that God will punish the witnesses who brought this upon me, for I am experiencing violence and injustice every day.”