Kepler's Witch: An Astronomer's Discovery of Cosmic Order Amid Religious War, Political Intrigue, and the Heresy Trial of His Mother

I

With Unspeakable Sadness

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.

ON SEPTEMBER 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:

Bid Welcome to God

Sun and Sunny Day.

You come riding along—

Here is a person,

Let us pray to you O God—

Father, Son and Holy Spirit,

And the Holy Trinity.

Give this person blood and flesh

And also good health.⁴

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.

TESTIMONY OF DONATUS GÜLTLINGER, CITIZEN OF LEONBERG, GIVEN TO LUTHER EINHORN, MAGISTRATE OF LEONBERG 1620

Article 6:

The witness heard the same story (about the potion) from the accuser herself, because he had once been sick and stayed in the same hospital as she did. There, the accuser, Ursula Reinbold, asked him how he got well.

The witness did not respond to any of the interrogational questions, except to say that after the glazier’s wife had told him how she had received a potion from the Kepler woman and had tasted it, she said immediately, "Good Devil, what is this? ¹ What did you give me to drink? It is as bitter as gall!" The witness did not respond to what Ursula said about this drink the Kepler woman had given her, because she should have known what kind of a woman Katharina was. The Kepler woman later found out what the witness was saying about her and sent Michel to him to ask why he had bad-mouthed her, which the witness, however, did not admit. Instead, he asked Michel not to bother him with those sorts of things any more. Soon after, the Kepler woman stopped the witness on the market square and asked him personally if the good Michel had said anything to him. If so, what was his answer? He told her that she understood the good Michel correctly, that he had indeed said those things. Then the accused admitted that, yes, she had given a drink to the glazier’s wife, but that she had mixed up the jugs. She had two little jugs sitting on the sill, and in one of them she had prepared a potion out of herbs. Witness admitted to the interrogator that he should have made this information known to the magistrate earlier. Even so, he wanted it noted that, because of the length of time, he might have forgotten several details.

Article 9:

Witness said that even if Mt. Engelberg were made of gold and was given to him, he would not speak a falsehood.

TESTIMONY OF BENEDICT BEUTELSBACHER, GERMAN SCHOOLMASTER OF LEONBERG 1620

Article 6:

The witness (Beutelsbacher) said that the accuser, Ursula Reinbold, suffered great agony, especially when the moon changed. What the cause of this pain was, he did not know.

Article 21:

Several years ago, the Kepler woman often visited the witness, either to relay regards from her son, who lived in Linz and was once a schoolmate, or to ask him to read a letter for her and other things of that nature. But more important, once at the end of a long summer day, the witness came home after working in the field and locked the two doors of his house himself and therefore felt all was safe. Suddenly, as the witness was eating his supper, the Kepler woman came into the room to visit him and his wife, right through the locked doors! The two of them were startled and frightened. The Kepler woman asked him to write a letter for her to her son in Linz. The witness refused to do this with a variety of excuses, but finally, against his will, wrote the letter for her. He does not remember the content of the letter, which surprises him a great deal. After all, the accused had come into his house with both doors locked! Last, on a Sunday about ten years ago—the witness cannot remember the specific date—he was called to her house to read and write several letters. After finishing the task, between two and three o’clock in the afternoon, the witness asked to leave to have a light meal. She told him no, that he had gone to so much trouble for her, she wanted to offer him something to drink. She had a rather good wine in her cellar, and he had to try it. The witness refused repeatedly, because, to tell the truth, he was not thirsty. Finally, against his will he had to wait while she fetched the wine and then gave him some in a pewter cup. He only tried a little bit. At this, the accused asked him why he drank so little. Then she handed another cup to Margretta, Bastian Meyer’s housewife, who was also there at the time. The Kepler woman encouraged her to drink up. She said that she knew quite well that often enough not one drink of wine turns out good in an entire week, and that a good drink of wine happens rarely, therefore they should drink up, because this bottle of wine turned out well. After that, the Kepler woman persuaded the witness into drinking a little more and convinced the other woman, Bastian Meyer’s housewife, to empty the cup entirely. Very soon after, Margretta began to feel ill. She never recovered and ultimately died. The witness, however, experienced a slight pain in his thigh, a pain that increased as time went on, so that eventually he had to use a single cane at first, and afterwards, two canes. These days the witness has pains in his thighs all the time, so that he cannot move at all. The pain he experienced lingered so long and grew so intense that his manhood was taken from him entirely. If it turned out that his injury was not the result of the potion the Kepler woman brewed up and gave him, the witness would die from shock.

II

Appeired a Terrible Comet

Where Kepler is born in Weil der Stadt, near Leonberg, including a description of the town, the Kepler family, and Johannes’s early childhood.

KATHARINA KEPLER GAVE BIRTH to Johannes, her first child, on December 27, 1571. It was the middle of the afternoon, two-thirty precisely, on a Thursday, the feast of St. John the Baptist—a comfortable omen, for he was born as the sun was still high in the sky. At the time, Katharina and her husband lived with his parents in Weil der Stadt, one of the smaller freie Reichsstädte, the free imperial cities, which owed their allegiance to the emperor himself, rather than to a local duke or prince. Weil was a small town even by sixteenth-century standards, located ten miles to the south of Leonberg and about twenty miles southwest of Stuttgart.

Germany was not a separate nation then, but part of the Holy Roman Empire, which included modern-day Germany, Austria, Hungary, Slovakia, and the Republic of Czechoslovakia with bits and pieces of other countries thrown in. At the time, it consisted of a series of little principalities, duchies, counties, and baronies, ruled by princes, dukes, counts, and barons, all of whom had the right to rule autonomously in their own territories, to determine the religion of their people, and to determine the form of governance. The emperor, traditionally with no fixed land of his own, traveled about the empire, taking his court with him and staying in the imperial cities as he traveled. The many dukes and counts and princes were loyal to him after a fashion. They supplied his taxes and his armies and supported him in other ways when they saw fit. For this, they received rewards, and some even possessed the coveted right to vote on the next emperor, which made them electors.

As an imperial free city, Weil der Stadt had certain advantages in terms of trade and taxes. Citizens of a free city were usually much better off than subjects of a duke or baron. The local ruler usually lived close by and tightly managed his people’s lives, while the emperor was far away and most often left the free cities to their own devices. Imperial Weil der Stadt was loyal to the Catholic Habsburgs, the imperial family, and was therefore Catholic. All around Weil der Stadt, including nearby Leonberg, the town that Kepler grew up in and considered his home, was the Protestant duchy of Württemberg, the most contentedly Lutheran territory in the empire and a central place from which Lutheranism had spread. After the Peace of Augsburg, signed in 1555, only sixteen years before Kepler’s birth, the religion of the ruler determined the religion of the people according to the formula cuius regio, eius religio (whose the land, his the religion); therefore because the emperor was a Catholic, so was Weil der Stadt. As the Reformation heated up, partly out of religious zeal and partly out of pique, the Duke of Württemberg put increasing economic pressure on Weil. But then, as the Counter-Reformation gathered strength in return, anyone who didn’t want to be Catholic had to leave the city, and no one was excluded. Soon the town became a tiny island of Catholicism in Lutheran Württemberg, which caused no end of trouble.

Johannes’s family was Lutheran—completely, utterly, and without reservation—the most prominent Protestants in Weil der Stadt. They were a pious family, but troubled, and sometimes their piety got in the way of their Christianity. The Kepler family had lived in Weil der Stadt for about fifty years, in a narrow house tucked into one corner of the market square, next to the city hall. His family had been the first to become Lutherans in the town, but they were respected enough that even becoming Protestants did not affect their standing. Catty-corner to Kepler’s grandfather’s house, now the Kepler Museum, was the Gasthaus zum Engel, the Inn of the Angel, also owned by Johannes’s grandfather Sebald. He was an overbearing old patriarch with a red face that ran to fat, a quick temper, and a dignified beard that made him look important. He controlled just about everything in the lives of the people around him, starting with his family. Johannes’s grandmother, another Katharina, was much the same as his grandfather—quarrelsome, intensely pious, restless. She rarely forgot old wounds. Kepler describes her as fidgety, clever, given to telling lies, but pious in all matters of religion. She was slender, fiery, lively, always moving, jealous, vengeful, and full of resentments.²

Kepler’s horoscope and his memoir are the only traces left of his youth and family life, and the dark picture he painted there is accurate enough in the details, though the melancholy tone of it can be partially understood as the sadness of youth and a bright young man’s jaundiced view of his family. No one knows what his mother thought of his success or fame, for her thoughts were never written down, and time has washed them away. She was not a particularly good mother, and more than likely she never understood his life and his love of the heavens, though in many ways she was responsible for both. In 1577, a great comet haunted the sky, one of the most brilliant ever seen, which was observed and described by astronomers from England to Japan. Tycho Brahe first noticed it while fishing. In Scotland, James Melvill described it this way:

This yeir, in the winter, appeired a terrible Comet, the stern [star, i.e., nucleus] wharof was verie grait, and proceiding from it toward the est a lang teall. In appeirance, of an ell and a halff, like unto a bissom or scurge maid of wands all fyrie. It rease nightlie in the south weast, nocht above a degree and a halff ascending above the horizon, and continowed about a sax oukes [weeks], or two moneth, and piece and piece weir away. The graittest effects wharof that out of our contrey we hard was a grait and mightie battell in Barbaria in Afric, wharin thrie kings war slean, with a hudge multitud of peiple. And within the contrey, the chasing away of the Hamiltones.³

Of all the great minds to see this comet, Johannes Kepler, then six years old, was one. His mother took him by the hand and led him up a hill outside of town where the two of them watched through the long evening. Tycho Brahe, whose life would cross so importantly with Kepler’s, watched the same scene from beside his personal fish pond five hundred miles away. For Kepler, it was one of the few pleasant memories he had of his mother.

Johannes describes his father, Heinrich, as a rough and beastly man, a vicious man, with an inflexible nature, a quarrelsome man, who was doomed to a bad end, a soldier to his bones, perhaps the resurrected image of the long-dead family knights. The urge to go to war was strong in him, and he spent his adult life sniffing for battle. Kepler blames this on the planets, saying that Saturn was in trigon to Mars in the seventh house, which of course explained everything.

Nevertheless, Heinrich almost certainly abused his wife and perhaps his children as well, and once tried to sell his sickly young son Heinrich, his own namesake and one of Johannes’s younger brothers, into servitude. An adventurer, he had no skills to speak of except gunnery, which he had picked up on one of his soldiering forays. Once he got into a fistfight in Weil der Stadt and had to pay a fine. Another time he lost an inn he owned because he got into a brawl. He fought in several wars, once in Belgium, in the pay of the emperor fighting against Protestant rebels, which did not endear him to his family. When the urge came on him he would disappear off to some war; he went twice to the Netherlands to fight as a mercenary, the first time in the pay of the emperor and the second time in the pay of the Duke of Alba.

On one such occasion, he was gone so long that when Johannes was merely three years old and baby Heinrich was merely an infant, Katharina left them with their grandparents and set off after him. Just as she was leaving, Johannes took sick with smallpox and nearly died. Katharina, intent on finding her husband, left anyway, handing care of Johannes over to her in-laws, who wanted nothing to do with him. Angry with their son Heinrich for running away and with Katharina for dropping their sick son on them, they tended the boy without much enthusiasm. Surprisingly, the boy recovered, but his health was shattered. The pox had weakened his eyesight, and for years he suffered from sores, scabs, and putrid wounds, possibly because his immune system had been damaged. His hands were also deformed and he moved in a clumsy, jerky way, as if the virus had also affected his nervous system. Like his younger brother Heinrich, he was accident-prone.

Nevertheless, Katharina found her husband. One can imagine the meeting: Heinrich the runaway, in his cups or at camp staring dully at a plate of stew, looking up and seeing Katharina, his partner in a loveless marriage, marching at him down the row of tents, so furious that electricity sparked around her head. If he could have run, he would have, but there was nothing else to do but follow her home. Finally, after moving his family to Leonberg and after trying his hand at innkeeping in Ellmendingen, he forced his family back to Leonberg and then disappeared altogether. Some said he died in Augsburg after fighting for the Neapolitan navy.

Johannes’s mother, Katharina, née Guldenmann, was as restless as her husband. There were problems in her marriage right from the beginning. Because Katharina gave birth to Johannes only seven months after her wedding to Heinrich, all the old women in town were busy counting the months on their fingers. Certainly it is possible Johannes was born prematurely, for he was small and sickly most of his life. Kepler no doubt believed this himself. Still, one has doubts, because while Katharina was pregnant, she was regularly beaten by her parents, as if they were trying to make her lose the baby, though both mother and son survived.⁴ The image of a hurried, forced marriage between an angry Heinrich, a military straight who was cold and distant, and a pregnant Katharina explains a great deal about the family’s history.

Only a mother whose eccentricities hid a vast intelligence could imagine turning her own father’s skull into a drinking cup just because she had heard it was an ancient pagan custom. She possessed the kind of intelligence that could either blossom into genius, as with Johannes, or fester into madness. All her life she struggled against her illiteracy. In that time, few women could read, and through the years Katharina felt humiliated that she could not even read her son’s letters and was forced to rely on Beutelsbacher, the schoolteacher, who would later turn against her in her witch trial. To make up for it, she collected herbs and mixed potions from them, and it is possible that she did in fact poison Beutelsbacher and the wife of Bastian Meyer, but almost certainly without meaning to. Her little tin jug often sat in the corner for days, unwashed and untended. Who knows what kinds of bacteria were growing in there?

Her children were a mixed lot, however. And although Johannes’s youngest brother, Christoph, who became a pewterer, and his sister, Margaretha, who married a clergyman, turned out relatively well, the middle brother, Heinrich, teetered on the edge of insanity. Possibly a borderline schizophrenic, he was accident-prone, was constantly being beaten by other children and bitten by animals, nearly drowned, and was almost burned alive. Eventually he wandered off when his father tried to sell him, only to show up in Prague as a palace guard when Johannes was there as imperial mathematician, and then to return to live with his mother years later, much abused by life.

The Keplers, all boxed into that little house, argued eternally. They were not poor, however, and they could even claim some echoes of nobility. The angel in the name of the inn referred to the Kepler coat of arms, which may or may not have been a last remnant of some long-lost nobility. Grandfather Sebald acted as if there were no question of his knightly roots, since he could trace them back to Sebald Kepner, a nobleman who became a bookbinder after a sudden descent into poverty and then moved to Weil der Stadt. Four generations later, the Sebald who was the grandfather of Johannes Kepler the astronomer, no longer obviously noble, ended up as the mayor of Weil der Stadt. He served for ten years before Johannes came into the world and remained a prominent burgher in town throughout the boy’s youth.

Towns like Weil could easily maintain their independence simply by paying their taxes and helping the emperor out when he needed them. The emperor asked little more than this, because the freie Reichsstädte were not his property, but were individual republics, each with its own representative in the Imperial Diet. Weil had its own magistrate, either the mayor of that year or the one of the previous year; its own police force; its own laws; and its own justice system.

The mayor, in his day old Sebald, reported directly to the emperor, wherever he happened to be, and thus had direct contact with the imperial court. The republics all had trading rights and privileges and enjoyed economic benefits stemming from the fact that the town paid no tithes to the local prince or duke, but only the standard imperial tax. For Americans, this would be like paying federal, but no state income tax. The mayor of Weil was elected by a select group of the people. Only burghers (citizens, men with land), merchants, and craftsmen—goldsmiths and tinsmiths—could vote. The men who sat on the town council were those with enough money and leisure time to concern themselves with government. These were the people who produced Johannes Kepler, and this was the town that fashioned the character of his family and, through them, his own character as well. What feistiness he showed in his later years derived at least partly from that soil. What genius he showed derived, at least partly, from there as well.

Because of its position in the empire, there was a great sense of independence in Weil der Stadt. But this feeling of republican independence flowered at a time when the world itself was changing, a time when people in Germany had begun to ask for a deeper understanding of the world, a deeper understanding of the Word of God, the book of Scripture, as well as a deeper understanding of creation and the natural world in general, the Book of Nature. Printers had set up shop in various towns around Swabia, so books in German were becoming more available. Soon after the Reformation began, Luther’s Bible was everywhere. A new consciousness had begun to emerge in the towns, a consciousness that called for independent thought, a consciousness that would eventually lead from the Reformation to the first glimmers of the scientific revolution. The citizens of Weil der Stadt were more a part of this than they knew.

KEPLER’S HOROSCOPE FOR HIMSELF

NOVEMBER 1597

This person was born with the destiny to spend most of his time working on the difficult things others shirk from. As a boy, before his time, he already studied prosody and poetic meter. He attempted to write comedies and chose the lengthiest psalms to commit to memory. He tried to learn by heart all the examples in Crusius’s grammar book. In his poems, he initially troubled himself with acrostics, griphens, and anagrams.

Later, however, when his growing judgment let him disdainfully see the true meaning of such things, he tried even more difficult forms of lyric. He once wrote a Pindaric melos, a Greek chorus. Another time, he became interested in unusual subjects, like the immobility of the sun, the creation of rivers, and watching the fog from Mt. Atlas. He enjoyed riddles and searched for the most acrid jokes. He played with allegory by following the strands through to the smallest detail and then pulling them out by the hairs. When imitating, he sought to stick with the exact text and then to apply it to his own material.

When writing down his work, he liked paradoxical statements; for example, that one should learn French rather than Greek. As an opponent [in a debate], he never said anything he did not mean. When he wrote down his ideas, the final version always contained something other than the draft. But more than all other studies, he loved mathematics.

In every type of learning he immersed himself by challenging each idea, and he critically interpreted everything he read. So he held on to insignificant notes that he wrote himself and stubbornly kept borrowed books, as if they could be of use to him at a later time.

It was unbearable for him to let even a short period of time pass unproductively; despite his strong desire for human company, he stayed away from it. In monetary matters stubborn, when budgeting tough, critically pursuing petty details, all things with which he wasted time. At the same time he is not opposed to work, so much so, that solely the desire for knowledge keeps him at it. And still there are all the beautiful things he aspired to, and in most cases he grasped the truth.

Mercury in the seventh house means haste and an aversion to work, because he is also swift; the sun in Saturn’s sixth means conscientiousness and perseverance. These two things are in conflict: to continuously feel regret about lost time while still willingly losing it again and again. Because Mercury affects a tendency for play and fun, this person enjoys the spirit of lighter things. As a child, he was devoted to play; as he grew older he found enjoyment in other things, and he therefore turned to other things; to find out what brings a person joy, therefore, remains subject to opinion. Since being stingy with money deters one from play, he often plays by himself. One has to note the following here: holding on to money does not have the goal of wealth, but rather the alleviation of the fear of poverty. Of course, most greediness grows out of unfounded worry. Or perhaps not; rather, the love of money possesses many. His eyes are fixed upon gain and reputation. Perhaps it is the fear of poverty that can be blamed for much. Because he is presumptuous and contemptuous of mass opinion, he tends to be hard.

By nature he is very well suited for pretense of all kinds. There is also a tendency toward disguise, deceit, and lies. It has its root in common with the jokes and jest. Mercury does this, instigated by Mars. But one thing prevented these disguises: The fear for his reputation. Because foremost he yearns for true recognition, and every type of defamation is unbearable to him. He would pay very good money to buy himself free of even harmless, but wicked gossip, and poverty frightens him only because of the shame.

III

Born with a Destiny

Where Kepler receives his education as a scholarship student under the care of the Duke of Württemberg.

IN KEPLER’S OWN WORDS:

From the beginning of his life, this person [the subject of this horoscope, Kepler himself] had enemies.¹ The first I can remember was Holp. The rest, indeed, were all my fellow pupils, especially Molitor and Wieland. In Maulbronn and in Tübingen it was Köllin; in Bebenhausen it was Braunbaum; and in Maulbronn it was Ziegel-heuser. I am listing only the long-term enemies, of course. In Tübingen, it was Huldenreich, Seiffer, and Ortolph, while in Adelberg it was Lendlin; in Maulbronn it was Spannenberg, while in Tübingen it was Kleber; in Maulbronn it was Rebstock and Husel, while in Tübingen it was Dauber, Lorhard, Jaeger, a relative of mine, Joh, Regius, Murr, Speidel, Zeiler, another Joh, and Molitor, the brother, and An. Krell, the father-in-law [presumably of Molitor]. Mostly, these were people his own age. Some of the others not his own age were merely casual acquaintances.

This person harbors dark thoughts about his enemies. And why would he do this? Could it be because his enemies compete with him for industry, success, distinction, and fortune? Or could it be because the Sun and Mercury are in the seventh house?²

The fact that Kepler listed his enemies but not his friends is telling. In his self-study, which is often brutal, he confesses to a difficult personality. Like a monk cruciform on the chapel floor, he lists his faults. He says that he is deceitful, overanxious to please, yet quick-tempered. This person has the nature of a dog. He is just like a spoiled little pet…. He likes to gnaw on bones and chew on hard crusts of bread. He is voracious, without discipline. When something is put before him, he snatches it up.

Kepler was an odd boy, intense yet withdrawn. He perceived with the clarity of a child that he was not wanted in his family—his grandparents, saddled with a sickly grandchild by their own irresponsible son, had treated him roughly; his mother had been cold all his life; his father was distant and brutal. He defended himself when he could and tried to appease the great adult powers when he could not. His only comfort was in his own mind and in his thoughts of the Lutheran religion, which he had picked up from his grandmother. He was an intensely pious boy, and at times his piety twisted him about.

Perhaps it was the discomfort he felt in his own life or the sense of responsibility he felt for his intelligence, but he spent much of his youth searching his soul for forgotten sins. When he found one—a vengeful thought, a moment of uncharity, an error in his thinking—he assigned himself a penance. Once while at school he fell asleep and missed the evening prayer, and the next morning he assigned himself the task of repeating a number of sermons he had heard over and over, as if that would somehow placate God. Nevertheless, as hard as he tried, he was certain that he would have otherwise received the gift of prophecy, had it not been for his wicked life, his worldliness, and his unremembered sins. If only he could be a better person. If only he could be a saint.

By the age of ten, Johannes had learned to read Bible stories. One of his favorites was the story of Jacob and Rebecca, for he saw in them an example of perfect love, and with the fervor that only a child could maintain for long he resolved that one day, should he ever find his own Rebecca, the two of them would practice the perfect life together by strictly following the Mosaic law. Never mind that he wasn’t Jewish, and never mind that the only girls he was likely to meet weren’t Jewish either.

He was, from his earliest days, at war both with the world and with himself. Sometimes, in order to fit in, he allowed himself to be seduced to evil. He once joined in the general hatred of a boy named Seiffer because everyone else hated him too. At the urging of his teachers, he turned informer. In return, the boys insulted him because of his father’s reputation. He had a wicked sense of humor, one that was often misunderstood and often kindled smoldering hatred among his acquaintances, hatred that lasted for years. Worst of all, many of his classmates envied his industry and his success.

He was a small boy—sallow-faced with a dark glance. On top of that, he was often sick, sometimes with real illnesses, sometimes with imagined ones. Nevertheless, he threw himself into playing games. He would fight when called upon, though he was often beaten for it, and if he believed that