kepler’s mother -- 5/1/4

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Today's selection -- from Our Moon by Rebecca Boyle. Johannes Kepler’s epochal astronomical revolution came at personal cost, including the arrest and death of his mother:

“Though he remained pious, Kepler's well-known support of Copernicus and Galileo made it harder for him to get a good job when he graduated from university. Instead of procuring a faculty position in astronomy like he wanted, Kepler was sent to practice astrology in faraway Graz, Styria, which is now part of Austria. He did not like it, scoffing that astrology is ‘a sortilegious monkey-play.’ (Shakespeare is not the only proof that the early seventeenth century was the golden age of insults.)

“‘A mind accustomed to mathematical deduction, when confronted with the faulty foundations [of astrology], resists a long, long time, like an obstinate mule, until compelled by beating and curses to put its foot into that dirty puddle,’ Kepler complained in one exemplary letter.

“Though he was writing Somnium around this time, Kepler put it aside and instead published The Cosmographic Mystery, another weird amalgam of mystical and evidence-based meanderings that compare Copernican and Ptolemaic cosmology. The great Tycho Brahe read it and appointed Kepler his assistant, rescuing Kepler from astrology. When Brahe died in 1601, Kepler took over Brahe's role as imperial mathematician to Holy Roman Emperor Rudolph II.

“While Kepler worked on the orbit of Mars and his new laws of planetary motion, parts of Somnium were making their way across mainland Europe in manuscript form, before he ever formally published it. Kepler himself believed John Donne read a copy, which inspired that famous poet's satire of the Catholic Church called Ignatius His Conclave. Donne writes that since the Moon might be a world, all the Jesuits presently infesting this one should leave and head on up there. Though Kepler had set it aside, Somnium was making its way into the public consciousness.

“Unfortunately, because parts of the story were autobiographical, it was easy for people to conclude that Kepler's mother, Katharina, like Duracotuss' mother, Fiolxhilde, was a witch. Kepler wrote that a first draft was carried from Prague to Leipzig, and then to Tiibingen in 1611, where a local barber overheard a discussion of it and came to this conclusion. Ultimately, twenty-four witnesses argued various charges against Katharina, including that she magically entered rooms through closed doors. She was formally accused of witchcraft and jailed.

Portrait of Kepler in 1627

“The Imperial Mathematician devoted six years to her defense. ‘I have no idea if this ridiculous situation, which has been blown all out of proportion, will also blow away my fifteen years of imperial service,' he wrote to the Leonberg Senate on January 1, 1616.  ‘This would break my mother's heart entirely (which is, of course, my chief concern, far more important to me than any of my personal sorrows).’

“Though her son finally prevailed in 1622, Katharina died shortly after her release. Her death compounded a lifetime of tragedy for the famed scientist, who had already lost his first wife and two of his children in their youth.

“Somnium may have led to his mother's imprisonment, but her death only strengthened Kepler's resolve to use it to defend Copernicanism. In later footnotes to his lunar allegory, he says there are nine spirits on Levania because there are nine Greek Muses. The Levanian tutelary daemon has twenty-one characters in his name because, as Kepler explains, that is the number of letters required to spell out Astronomia Copernicana. The point was to demonstrate reality through a story, Kepler explains. On December 4, 1623, about a year and a half after Katharina died, he wrote to a friend named Matthias Bernegger about his goals for Somnium. ‘Would it be a great crime to paint the cyclopian morals of this period in livid colors,’ he said, ‘but for the sake of caution, to depart from the Earth with such writing and secede to the Moon?’ Maybe the Inquisitors wouldn't notice if his anti-Ptolemaic polemic was set on the Moon. Maybe people wouldn't be so mad if he passed it off as a wild and fantastical dream.

“As further armor against criticism, Kepler even translated Plutarch's De Facie and Lucian's Moon satire A True Story on his own, and wanted to publish them alongside Somnium as a sort of trilogy. But he never saw a word of Somnium published. It only saw the light of day as a complete work—such as it was—when his son, Ludwig, published it four years after Kepler's death in 1630. Kepler had left his family penniless upon his sudden death, and Ludwig, who was in medical school, hoped the manuscript would sell enough copies to support his family.”

author:	Rebecca Boyle
title:	Our Moon: How Earth's Celestial Companion Transformed the Planet, Guided Evolution, and Made Us Who We Are
publisher:	Random House
pages:	203-205