137 - Arthur I. Miller [46]
Thus the Pythagorean tetraktys emerged out of Fludd’s version of how God created the cosmos. First comes the unity (one) culminating in darkness, followed by the duality of light and dark (two), then by the Trinity (three), culminating in the four elements and the four seasons, and all the other sets of fours that make up the world as we know it, Fludd argued. Pauli wrote appropriately, “His goal is the coniunctio of light and darkness: not the spiritualization of matter…. This is alchemy in the best sense.”
Kepler versus Fludd
Kepler scoffed at Fludd’s attempt to seek harmonies “from the interpenetration of his Pyramids which he privately carries around in his mind as a world drawn in pictures.” Kepler conversely claimed to have found harmonies in the motions of the planets within a scheme based on mathematics, and that fit astronomical observations and measurements. Without mathematics, he wrote, “I am like a blind man.” While Fludd claimed to take his lead from the “Ancients,” Kepler followed “Nature herself.”
All the same, Kepler’s Harmonices was full of astrological, alchemical, Pythagorean, and mystical concepts. Even though Kepler had fulfilled Pythagoras’s dream of explaining the universe through geometry and number, he was not satisfied. He was torn between the irresistible pull of his three laws, which postulated that the sun was not at the center of the universe, and the archetypal Trinitarian view of a spherical cosmos with the sun at its center. They did not mirror each other.
He fretted over the division between inert and live matter. Mathematics seemed to apply only to the former; but surely matter had a soul? He could not derive his laws with the mathematics available to him and they did not make much sense without the concept of there being something that tied the planets to the sun.
Fludd published the full text of the Macrocosm two years after Kepler’s Harmonices. “Spurred on by the insolence of” Kepler, Fludd gave the usual Pythagorean reasons as to why the key number of the universe was four: its importance for geometry and music, its role in the “mystery of the seven days of creation: the sun was created on the fourth day.” Four plus three, he pointed out (the quaternary plus the Trinity) adds up to the magic number seven.
He then referred to the four letters that made up the name of Yahweh——the tetragrammaton. The double “He,” he wrote, signified the progression from the Father to the Son.
To this he added the “hieroglyphic monad”—the four symbols representing the sun, the moon, the four elements, and fire. These are depicted as the crescent moon on the round sun, connected by the “quaternary of the cross, four lines being arranged so as to meet in the common point” to the symbol for fire. All of these, according to ancient beliefs and also the beliefs held at the time—such as Hermeticism, alchemy, the Kabbalah, and the Rosicrucians—are responsible for the cycle of transformations that produce our world.
Kepler looked at all this and realized he was wasting his time. He decided to cease communicating with Fludd, “I have moved mountains; it is astonishing how much smoke they expel,” he wrote.
All coherence gone
Among Kepler’s last projects was the completion of Somnium, Sive Astronomia Lunaris—Dream or Astronomy of the Moon, a science fiction story about a journey to the moon. In it he imagined what the universe would look like to someone standing on the moon. It was a bold notion that had been important to his discovery of his three laws.
The Somnium in its fragmented form sparked the curiosity of many readers, including the poet John Donne. Donne visited Kepler in 1619 as part of an English