137 - Arthur I. Miller [44]
All this took place at a time of great personal difficulty. Kepler’s mother, Katharina, had been put on trial for witchcraft. Her sister had been burned at the stake as a witch, and this, together with her husband’s disappearance, rendered her very suspicious to the gullible populace. In old age she was far from lovely and had a nasty temperament that made her an easy target in the witch-hunting mania in Germany of the early seventeenth century, so much so that she came close to sharing her sister’s fate. In 1615, she was in the middle of a feud with another old woman. This neighbor persuaded an influential relative to accuse Katharina of making her extremely ill by feeding her a witch’s potion. Others soon began to remember becoming seriously ill after having accepted drinks from Katharina.
Not only was his mother in danger, but so was the family name. Kepler had to take time off from pondering the universe to defend his mother for whom he felt affection and pity, despite his horrendous childhood. The proceedings took over six years. At one point jailers flourished instruments of torture and execution in front of Katharina’s face, as was customary. Unusually for the time, the story has a happy ending. Kepler finally succeeded in obtaining her release.
Robert Fludd.
Robert Fludd—a universe made up of fours
Two years before he finished Harmonices, in 1617, Kepler happened to see a highly illustrated book at the Frankfurt book fair: A Metaphysical, Physical and Technical History of the Macro-and the Micro-Cosm, by the English physician and Rosicrucian, Robert Fludd.
While Kepler’s family was low class, Fludd’s was noble. His father, Thomas Fludd, had been knighted by Queen Elizabeth I for his services as war treasurer in the Netherlands and paymaster to English troops in Provence. In portraits Fludd looks rather plump and well fed, with a pointed goatee. He holds his two middle fingers pressed together, perhaps in some sort of secret sign. In one portrait he has fingernails as long as a mandarin’s.
Fludd studied at Oxford and became intrigued by Greek philosophy. As was the custom for wealthy young gentlemen, he toured France and Germany, meeting and sometimes tutoring nobility. In Germany he became acquainted with a secret society who called themselves Brothers of the Rosy Cross—Rosicrucians. They called for a reform of knowledge in preparation for Armageddon and claimed access to deep secrets and truths in medicine, philosophy, and science. Governments deemed their mysticism and apocalyptic message dangerous and they were often charged with heresy and religious innovation, serious offenses in those days.
When Fludd’s enemies at the court of King James I accused him of collaborating with them, he argued persuasively that the Rosicrucians were innocent of heresy. James was so impressed that he became Fludd’s patron.
In his book Fludd asserted that “the true philosophy…will sufficiently explore, examine and depict Man, who is unique, by means of pictures.” In other words, he intended the sumptuous illustrations in his books not merely as decoration but as saying something very definite about the world. Kepler, too, used diagrams, but of a scientific character—optical constructions made up of rays of light, a sphere with light emanating from its center as straight lines, or an image of planets moving in ellipses around a sun displaced from the center of the universe.
Both agreed that there was an invisible realm of qualities and powers, as well as a harmonics of nature. But while Fludd’s world was one of astral powers and invisible spiritual illumination, Kepler’s was of invisible magnetic forces, archetypal images, and hidden astrological meanings.
In his Harmonices, Kepler included a devastating critique of Fludd’s book. Fludd immediately sprang to the defense. To start with, Kepler derided Fludd’s extensive reliance on pictures; for what interested Kepler