For all his oddities, however, Dee was a serious scholar. It was simply his bad luck to run into Edward Talbot, alias Edward Kelley. Kelley had a hooked nose and beady, rat’s eyes. Born in Worchester, he had been an apothecary’s apprentice, had studied at Oxford for a time, and, while working as a scribe in Lancashire, had falsified official documents. The court sentenced him to have his ears cut off, and for the rest of his life he wore long hair and a black cap with long side flaps to hide his disfigurement. It was also designed to make him look wise and scholarly. Still afraid of the hangman, he changed his name to Kelley and then roamed about England until, while staying at an inn in Wales, he happened across a manuscript supposedly unearthed from the grave of a bishop who was also a magus. The manuscript came equipped with two ivory vials, one with red powder and the other with white. Immediately, he set out for Mortlake, appearing there on March 10, 1582. Within a short time, he had become Dee’s assistant, and in one séance after another, he convinced Queen Elizabeth’s astrologer that he was indeed speaking to angels and bringing to earth a wealth of arcane knowledge.4
Likely it was Kelley’s idea that they both travel to eastern Europe, ostensibly to study occult knowledge at the court of the emperor, but also to make a pound or two. They traveled to eastern Europe at the invitation of a Polish nobleman, the palatine of Sieradz, Olbrecht Laski, who traveled through England in June 1583, where he visited them at Mortlake. During one séance, a spirit spoke through Dee’s mirror predicting that Laski would succeed Stephan Báthory on the throne of Poland. Of course, this had to be true, because the angels had said it, and besides, it was what Laski wanted to hear. Dee and Kelley traveled to Cracow on Laski’s invitation. Dee brought his young wife, Jane Fromond, who people said was more than pretty, and his son, Arthur. While Dee and Kelly were in Poland, the spirits continued their predictions of Laski’s ascendancy, right up to the time that Dee and Kelley decided to move on to Prague. The Spanish ambassador Guillén de San Clemente arranged for them to meet with the emperor. The audience did not go well, however, because Dee, in a fit of enthusiasm, prophesied that a glorious new age would fall upon the empire, starting with the conquest of the Turks, if only the emperor would repent and change his sinful life. Rudolf was dubious. Later they wrote a letter to him, intimating that they had achieved a prior success in transmuting metals, which they would be willing to do for him as well. It didn’t help.5
Rudolf ordered one of his secretaries to investigate the pair. The papal nuncio, supported by the Spanish faction at court, eventually convinced Rudolf to banish Dee and Kelley from his lands. They never made it out of Bohemia, however, because Vilém of Rozmberk offered them asylum at his estate in Třeboň, where Rozmberk spent an astonishing amount of money on them as they continued their experiments in secret knowledge.
Somewhere in there, Kelley decided that he no longer wanted to interpret angelic scripts, with all their numerical codes, and told Dee that he wanted to leave. Dee was convinced by that time that he would be lost without Kelley, and so, after some fighting and much blackmail, he signed an agreement with Kelley that they should hold all their assets in common, which ostensibly included their wives. Jane Fromond put a stop to that, and then Queen Elizabeth recalled Dee to England, where he died penniless, having been rejected by James I, Elizabeth’s successor. In the years before he died, he sold off what remained of his library, book by book, just to pay the bills.
Kelley’s end was more tragic. For a time his star seemed to rise, and he took Bohemian citizenship, gathered powerful protectors about him, and was even knighted by the emperor, which included a title, “de Imany,” referring to his supposed Irish heritage. He married a rich, well-educated Czech woman who gave him a son and a daughter as well as a sizable dowry. In 1590, Rožmberk aided him in acquiring the town of Libeřice, an estate in Nová Libeň, and several villages, including the peasants who lived there. Then from his dowry he purchased a brewery, and then a mill, and then a dozen more houses in a gold-mining region. He bought two more houses in Prague, in the New Town, one near the Emmaus monastery. This house is known today as “Faust’s house.”
Then he did it. He got himself into a duel on the hospital field outside the Poříč Gate, and killed a Bohemian officer. Rudolf had forbidden all dueling and ordered Kelley thrown into prison at Křivoklát Castle. Agents stood by to question him, by torture if necessary, and to drag out of him the truth about his tinctures and his séances. They wanted to know especially about the aurum potabile, the liquid gold that bestowed eternal youth, and about the hidden meaning of strings of numbers they found written down among his papers, supposedly taken down during angelic séances. During his incarceration, Kelley attempted an escape by jumping out of a high window, but he crushed his leg on the rocky ground where he fell. Eventually, they released him so that he could get medical treatment, which didn’t help much, because they amputated his leg.
But then Rudolf, goaded on by the Spanish faction, ordered Kelley’s imprisonment once more and had him sent to Castle Most, in the northern part of Bohemia. Kelley tried to escape again and leapt once more from a high window, this time into a carriage driven by his son, breaking his other leg. Knowing that he would certainly be caught and, if caught, would spend the rest of his life in prison, Kelley mixed up a poisonous potion for himself and committed suicide.
This was the world that Kepler came to—civilized, urbane, Byzantine, dangerous. Four years after Kelley’s death, Kepler arrived in Prague and began his work on the orbit of Mars, struggled on with the problem, nearly despairing of it in 1604, and falling into another depression. A year later, during the Easter season, he suddenly came upon the insight he needed and formulated his area law.
That same year, he wrote a short book on the new star that had appeared in the constellation of Ophiuchus, near the conjunction of the three upper planets, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. What more auspicious event could have occurred? On the night of October 17 the weather cleared, and Kepler saw it, the new star, nearly as bright as Jupiter, shimmering with color. Everyone, from the emperor on down, waited for Kepler to speak. His little book was funny, intelligent, and thoughtful, full of astronomical and theological reflection on the ways of God. God teaches mere humans by such signs. The new star was no accident, but a way in which God made his will known. While many others predicted Armageddon, the defeat of the Turks, revolution, and the coming of a new king, Kepler wrote about the conversion of America and of vast migrations of peoples out of Europe, as people had once migrated westward into Europe. Still, this kind of speculation was painful for him, and his arguments disputed with themselves. Kepler finally did not know the significance of the new star. He was no prophet; that wasn’t his job, and he told people that they should just go on with their lives and examine their consciences.6
Reflections on the new star did not immediately raise Kepler’s spirits, however. As they had done so many times in the past, his thoughts turned toward death and fixed there. What if he could not finish his manuscript? What if he died beforehand? He even planned to have his unfinished work sent to Tübingen for deposition in the archives. Eventually his depression lifted, and he pushed on toward publication, dropping his plans for Tübingen. Finally, the manuscript was complete. He titled it, rather forwardly, Astronomia Nova seu Physica Coelestis, Tradita Commentariis de Motibus Stellae Martis (“New Astronomy Based on Causes or Celestial Physics Treated by Means of Commentaries on the Motion of the Star Mars”). Indeed, it was a new astronomy, for it was the first truly modern work in that field.
In his dedicatory letter to the emperor, Kepler joked that his book was the result of his long war with Mars and that he had brought that most noble captive to the court of His Majesty. “He has been constrained by bonds of computation,” Kepler wrote. Mars was a captive because up until that time, its orbit was so unpredictable that it could not easily be caught. Kepler quotes Pliny, saying that “Mars is the elusive star.” In the middle of his self-deprecating humor, Kepler
could not resist the temptation to complain a bit about his suffering. “Meanwhile, in my encampment, has there been any sort of rout, any kind of catastrophe that has not taken place? The overthrow of my most distinguished master [Tycho Brahe], revolution, epidemics, plague, pestilence, household matters both good and bad, destined in all cases to use up time…”
Then Kepler set forth two schools of thought that existed among astronomers. The first was led by Ptolemy and the second by Copernicus and Tycho, and though this second school was more recent, it had its roots in the work of the ancients. Ptolemy’s theory treated the planets individually and hunted the causes of each planet’s heavenly movement separately, while the second school treated the planets as a system. The second school was then divided again. Copernicus, who led the first division, tried to treat the earth, sun, moon, and all the planets as a single system, with the sun at the center and all the planets, including the earth, moving around it, thus showing that the motion of each planet was in relation to all the others. The retrograde motion of Mars and the other upper planets—Jupiter and Saturn—was therefore the result of the relative motion of earth in relation to those planets. The other division was led by Tycho Brahe, who created a two-tiered system that kept the earth at the center, following Ptolemy, and sent the sun spinning around the earth, with the planets spinning around the sun.
Kepler spent a good deal of his time in the New Astronomy both praising and criticizing his old master’s theory, for he recognized Tycho as a great leader and innovator and as the man who had made the most perfect observations up until that time. On the other hand, he criticized Tycho’s planetary system as too complicated. In his search for a celestial mechanics, he assumed, with Ockham’s razor, that the order of the cosmos had to be simple, for the mind of God was not compatible with wasteful and irrational motions. He found that by formulating a preliminary notion of gravitation based on magnetism, where all objects naturally attract all other objects, and emanating primarily from the sun, he could explain the planetary system in a much more simple way. What’s more, this vis motoria, this vital force, diminished with the inverse of the distance. He had therefore come terribly close to Newton’s later formulation of the law of gravity, which described the force diminishing inversely with the square of the distance, which made the force fall off at a much faster rate. His instincts were dead on; it was his mathematics that was undeveloped.
Tycho’s system required that the sun and all the other planets orbit the earth, which would mean that the earth would have had to exert some powerful gravitational forces to keep it all in line. The earth simply wasn’t big enough for that, but the sun was. Here Kepler took a huge step, probably larger than even he knew. He decided that he no longer needed to explain the movement of the planets through some kind of animate faculties, souls or living beings. Rather, he could explain it all through the action of physical forces, forces that he had identified with magnetism. If the earth was merely one of the planets, as Copernicus had said, and as opposed to Tycho, the power of planetary motions had to reside in the sun, and not in the earth. Certainly, the earth had the power to attract, as all matter did, but only the sun was large enough and great enough to hold the entire system of planets in check.
Kepler set forth several axioms to support a new theory of gravitation: every body, to the extent that it is bodily, is naturally suited to rest where it is when it is outside the influence of a like body. This axiom, therefore, showed that he had no modern idea of inertia, first formulated by Galileo, which said that a body in motion tends to stay in motion. Gravity, therefore, for Kepler, was a mutual corporeal quality existing among the various bodies, uniting them, with the more massive bodies exerting the greater force. The earth, therefore, attracts a stone more than the stone attracts the earth. This force, Kepler argued, is also the cause of the tides. Galileo believed that the tides occurred because, as the earth spun on its axis, the water in the oceans sloshed around like water in a bathtub. Kepler argued that it was because of the attractive pull of the moon, which causes water to leave some places and pile up in others, creating the ebb and flow of the sea.
LETTER FROM KEPLER TO TOBIAS SCULTETUS
APRIL 13, 1612
I had a partner, I don’t want to call her the most loved, for that is always true, or at least it should be. She was a woman whom public opinion presented with the crown of honor, righteousness, and purity. She combined these attributes, in undisputedly rare fashion, with beauty and with a happy disposition. Not to mention the qualities that are less obvious—her belief in God and her charity for the poor. She had given me children who flourished, particularly a six-year-old boy, very much like his mother. Whether you looked at the blossom of his body or the sweetness of his behavior or listened to the promising prophecies of friends, in every sense one could call him a morning hyacinth in the first days of spring, who with tender fragrance filled the house with the smell of ambrosia. The boy was so close to his mother, people would not simply see their relationship as merely love, but as a deeper, more lavish bond. Now I had to watch how my wife, in the prime of her life, having been subjected to three years of repeated attacks, slowly shattering her nerves, became often confused and was rarely herself. Just when she started to recover, however, the repeated illnesses of her children brought her down again. Her soul was deeply wounded by the death of the little boy who had been half her heart. Numbed by the terrorism of the soldiers and by the bloody war in the city of Prague, despairing of a better future and consumed with grief for her dearest children, she finally contracted the Hungarian spotted fever, and died. She was a victim of her compassion, for she could not be convinced to stop visiting the sick. In melancholy and hopelessness, in the saddest state of spirit, she took her last breath.
X
Who with Tender Fragrance
Where Kepler’s marriage is troubled, Rudolf II dies, and the Counter-Reformation comes to Prague in force.
IN THE TIME OF Libuše, old customs were dying, as old customs do, even the good ones. According to the legends, the balance between men and women had tipped, and the old prerogatives of women were fading away. At one time women had the right to choose their husbands, and the husband was expected to move in with the woman’s family, not the other way around. For one reason or another, perhaps foreign influence or perhaps just because of a weakness of memory, these old customs gave way to new, where the rights of men were seen everywhere and the rights of women, nowhere. Libuše defended the rights of women, and her husband, Přmysl, defended the rights of men, and while they both lived, the balance lived as well. Then Libuše died, and Přemysl, in his grief, nearly went mad. When he returned and sat on his throne, however, he had lost half his wisdom with the death of his wife, and he sided with the men from that day on without care for the women. The women had lost their defender, and they seethed with resentment. There was no one to prophesy for the people anymore, and in their fury the wisdom of women gave way to witchery.
One woman, a handmaid to Libuše named Vlasta, stood up and mocked the men, saying that they had mead dribbling from their beards and had all fallen into a drunken stupor. She walked out of the great hall into the night and gathered young girls and women to her. She would not submit to foolish, drunken men, she told them, and she would fight anyone who tried to make her submit. The women liked what she said, each one vowing to do the same. They would set up their own land, with their own castle, which they would call Devin, the Women’s Castle, and it would be a nation of women who would not submit.
They built this castle on the opposite bank of the Vltava, in plain sight of Vyšehrad, where Prince Přemysl could see it and worry. He knew what his lack of wisdom had brought about, and he knew that the power of women, once unleashed, was fearsome, so he called his warriors about him, and said: “There is a new castle across the river. You can all see it. The girls are building it even now, and they call it Devin. I have had a terrible dream, in which I saw a young woman drenched in blood charging thro
ugh the countryside, her face mad with rage, her hair flying. As she passed, blood flowed into the streams, and she climbed down from her horse to drink the blood. Then she came to me with a bowl of blood taken from the river and offered it to me to drink. I awoke in a terrible sweat.”
But the men would not listen. “They’re just girls,” they said. “What can they do?” And the prince knew that they were fools.
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