Kepler's Witch Read Online Free Page A

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