In the “First Day” of Galileo’s Dialogue on the
Two Chief World Systems, Galileo provides an
intriguing metaphor for describing the limits of the imagination. He offers
the hypothetical example of a person who lives in a large forest filled with
animals and birds but no aquatic creatures. Galileo suggests that this person
would be unable to imagine anything about a lake or stream given his knowledge
of an apparently body-of-water-less forest: “Even with the liveliest
imagination, such a man could never picture to himself fishes, the ocean,
ships, fleets, and armadas.”1 On initial observation, Galileo’s
example evokes the new worlds being discovered by explorers venturing into
North and South America. The reports of these explorers, as William Shea
reminds us in “Looking At the Moon as Another Earth: Terrestrial Analogies and
Seventeenth-Century Telescopes,” “are full of comparisons with what was already
familiar to them either from personal experience or from reading and
conversation.”2 The parallel between the physical exploration of the
New World and the scientific exploration of astronomers like Galileo and Kepler
comes as no surprise. These complementary revolutions expand the western
concept of world, of what is real and imaginable.
Further, such comparisons of
astronomy and exploration were common. While contemporary criticism tends to
separate astronomy and travel, early modern disciplinary boundaries were not so
fixed. On occasion, Kepler blamed these similarities for impeding sales of his
books. In the 1621 edition of the Mysterium Cosmographicum, for example, “Kepler first complains that ‘Cosmography’ is
sometimes used for ‘Geography’ and his work has on occasion been incorrectly
catalogued by booksellers.”3
Me thinkes my diligent Galileus hath done more in threefold discov-
erie than Magellane in openinge the streights to the South Sea or the dutchmen
that were eaten by the beares in Nova Zembla. I am sure with more ease and
safetie to him selfe & more pleasure to mee. I am so affected with newes as
I wish sommer were past that I mighte observe the phenomenes also. In the moone
I had formerlie observed a strange spottedness al over, but had no conceite
that anie parte thereof mighte be shadowes.4
Or so it seems. Actually,
neither Galileo nor Magellan opened
anything; Galileo applied mathematics to the improved magnifications made
possible by a new device while Magellan sailed around the tip of an inhabited
continent. However, while many have gazed at the moon, none before Magellan
had piloted a ship of European adventurers through these straits.
The shadows of the moon,
necessitating recognition that the moon has depth and shape as well as a
distinct geography, are not themselves self-evident to anyone with the proper
mathematical training. Thomas Harriot, for example, was a mathematician,
cartographer, and astronomer.5 He had the ability to understand the
mathematics underlying new theories to describe the appearance of the moon,
having “solved the problem of reconciling sun and pole star observations for
determining latitude, introduced the idea of using solar amplitude to determine
magnetic variation, improved methods and devices for observation of solar and
stellar altitudes, and derived a full numerical solution for the Mercator
system of map projection.”6 However, he was perhaps more persuaded
by Galileo’s evocation of the moon as a planet, his rhetorical method, than by
mathematical proofs. As Shea argues, the analogy of the moon as planet enabled
a new way of looking at the moon.
In the letters between Thomas Harriot and Sir William Lower, Lower describes his problems with seeing the moon as Galileo suggests it
be seen:
According as you wished I have observed the moone in all his changes
. . . [Near] the brimme of the gibbous part towards the upper corner appeare
luminous parts like starres, much brighter than the rest, and the whole brimme
along lookes like unto the description of coasts, in the dutch bookes of
voyages. In the full she appeares like a tarte that my cooke made me the last
weeke. Here a vaine of bright stuff, and there of darke, and so confusedlie al
over.7
Despite his observations, Lower continued to “grop[e]
for an apt description of what he sees.”8 Until Harriot explains
Galileo’s findings through the analogy of the moon as planet, Lower’s “words
fail him, and his imagination is tossed from the description of a coastline
read in a Dutch travelbook to the memory of last week’s pie. The terrestrial
features of the Moon seem to cry out to be recognised, but Lower’s vision is
both overwhelmed and blurred.”9 This difficulty with seeing the moon
reveals the rhetorical significance of the writing of the new astronomy. While
astronomers like Galileo and Kepler are frequently viewed as discovering new
things, perhaps it is more useful to think of them as arguing in new ways.
Galileo’s command of geometry contributed to the forcefulness of his argument
in Sidereus
Nuncius, and his use of analogy and metaphor
resulted in its persuasiveness. In this sense, Galileo relied on two tools: the
telescope and the Aristotelian telescope, that equally illuminating and not
entirely unrelated device created by Padre Emanuele in Umberto Eco’s The Island of
the Day Before. People did not come to believe
that the surface of the moon was cratered and uneven only because of geometrical
formulas.10 Instead, they were persuaded once they had been taught
by Galileo how to interpret their observations (made through the use of a scientific
instrument that began its life as a toy). Shea’s article, in turn, provides a
clear historical overview of a particular problem. He traces Galileo’s use of
the telescope to the importance of Galileo’s analogical argumentation.
But the quote from Galileo with
which I begin this chapter of the person unable to imagine denizens of the
deep or the deepness of the abyss remains problematic: Galileo himself
describes things that he cannot really “see.” The same is true for Kepler.
However, both were able to build persuasive arguments from what they could
see. This would be akin to a situation where Galileo’s hypothetical forest
dweller fashions a model of a fish out of branches and twigs. Or perhaps he
hollows a tree trunk, fills it with water, and places a mirror at each end of
the vessel so that he can imagine water stretching toward the horizon. In this
sense, the forest dweller uses the materials around him to envision, and
thereby describe, an Other world.
Indeed, like Galileo, Kepler
explores the similarity between making and knowing through the allegorical
conceit provided by the Somnium. The figure of
the Daemon, simultaneously evocative of the scientific and the supernatural,
and lurking at the center of the Somnium,
serves as an example of the degree to which objective knowledge is determined
by the form of its presentation. Likewise, the Daemon’s ability to describe,
dependent on the ability of an audience to process the ramifications of such a
description, forces us to read the Daemon, a body constituted by speech, as a
polysemic allegorical construction. The competing interpretations and
valuations of this character as offered by Kepler hint at the centrality of the
Daemon not just structurally, but also conceptually. The Daemon, then, serves
as a site and embodiment of the competing discourses informing Kepler’s attempt
to reenvision the shape and order of the cosmos.
As the example of Harriot
demonstrates, the verification of the Coper- nican theory relied as much on
rhetorical presentation as on the geometric proof itself. At the same time, as
I discuss in Chapter 7, Galileo and Kepler did not present ideas, or even
conceptualize them, in similar manners. As a complex allegorical sign, the
Daemon of the Somnium embodies and
replaces the possibilities made available by the late medieval mystic tradition
in ways unavailable to Galileo’s Dialogue.
In thinking about the different
modes of presentation involved in justifications of Copernicanism, I kept returning
to the question of agency, of who describes or offers a description or
explanation. We can not merely say that the narrative allows for the geometric
proof offered in the Somnium. For example,
James J. Paxson’s concern with the narrative embedding so clearly evident in
the Somnium suggests that the juxtaposition of embedded narrative layers
coincides with the content (the fiction of the dream, the verifiable content of
the footnotes, and the Daemon’s speech) of those layers. As a former student
of Paxson’s, and admirer of his book on personification, I think that this
argument doesn’t go far enough. I wondered if we shouldn’t instead think of the
Daemon as a personified manifestation of this meeting of narrative levels. For
Bruce Clarke, working from Angus Fletcher’s theorizations of allegory, this
confluence impels all allegorizing: “Mediating discontinuous eras and
disparate realms, interweaving the threads of a textual web that would net the
world in its mesh, the daemonic fictions of allegory weld a composite cosmos
together.”11
The content of the Daemon’s speech and the mode of its
presentation form the body of the Daemon itself. Like Lucifer in the Ciudecca
of the Inferno, the Daemon lies imprisoned at
the center of the narrative. Still, in Kepler’s narrative, this central
position imbues the Daemon, like Kepler and Galileo themselves, with the role
of teacher describing the observations possible from that vantage point. By
this, I mean that Kepler’s conception of the Daemon as a character plays into
the role of the Daemon as a teacher.
Perhaps, in discussing imprisoned daemons, it is
fitting to evoke Paul De Man who, in “‘Conclusions’: Walter Benjamin’s ‘The
Task of the Translator,’“ concedes that he “is not at all certain that language
is in any sense human.”12 This comment suggests the monstrosity
inherent in all language—in the gap between human as natural body and human as
philosophizing and rational mind:
de Man’s rhetoric is marked by tropes conveying the specifically
tera- tological threat that language’s Other poses for the understanding. The
‘monstrous’ here functions as a philosopheme, a conceptual-figural strand
linking quite disparate texts in unexpected ways and revealing a hidden
coherence with regard to the relationship between language and the human.13
After the Daemon makes his didactic speech describing
how humans are transported from the Earth to Levania, he goes on to speak of
the form of Levania’s provinces, commencing “like the geographers.”14
At this point, the Daemon indicates a shift in his mode of discourse. In order
to discuss Levania, another planet, an alternate reality with moon people and
Daemons speaking in blunt, hollow voices, the Daemon names a mode that will
inform his discourse. This modal shift is of key importance to understanding
Kepler’s own creation and extension of the travel narrative and cosmological
narrative in the Somnium. At the same
time, such a modal shift also reflects our understanding of the Daemon itself
as a character closely connected to this mode which it introduces. While the
speech of the Daemon is associated with this narrative mode, the geographic
tilt of the Daemon’s speech is reflected elsewhere in the Som- nium. Thus, as Mary Baine Campbell notes, “Kepler reproduces the new cos-
mographical context everywhere in both the narrative of the Somnium and its voluminous Notes. The latter are full of specific allusion
to voyage literature, data from which are properly cited as if it belonged to
the same technical literature to which Kepler’s text putatively belongs.”15
Campbell’s observation here
helps us to locate the Somnium in a generic
context. At the same time, to return to my earlier point regarding personification
and genre in the Somnium, there is
considerable overlap between
seemingly separate components of the narrative. Thus,
as Campbell observes (and I have discussed in Chapter 8), the dreamed moon as
setting is presented as a new place. This place is, as I argue,
characteristically different from the mythic moon which preceded and influenced
its creation. Kepler’s description of Levania as an island most concretely
expresses this transformative desire. To this extent, “The ‘island’ is the
land form that functioned as a kind of mastertrope of New World topography, and
that characterised the focus of classic voyage literature, especially where it
spoke most directly to private desire: Columbus finds islands, and Thomas More,
and Andre Thevet.”16 The island, however, as a mastertrope, is
itself an allegorization of some set of qualities, and is essentially
rhetorical in nature. The moon is depicted as an island, moreover, within a
speech act, the speech of the Daemon. Through the footnotes, Kepler the
scientist supports the Daemon’s assertion of moon as island.
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The speech of the
Daemon, then, serves as an elocutionary act intended to provide a reexamination
of an object, the moon as island. The speech, embedded within the Somnium, and itself encrusted with footnotes, must be considered in relation
to a variety of narrative levels, including the notes and the surrounding
narrative frame. The rationale behind the composition of the notes attests to
their significance: “The Notes augment the scientific data already foregrounded
in the main body of the narrative and defend various ludic moments against
their ludicrous misreading in the events of his mother’s imprisonment and
trial.”17 At the same time, the Daemon who presents this speech
exists as a character positioned between numerous interpretive possibilities,
which we will turn to in this chapter.
Campbell sees the lunar
voyage as a means of presenting “alternative worlds that offer most saliently
the radical fact of Alternativity itself.”18 This concept of
Alternativity, of Other-seeing and Other-being, expresses the potential available
through the unique point of view provided by the lunar voyage: the moon is the
island par excellence. Like the object of
Roberto della Griva’s constant obsession in Umberto Eco’s The Island of
the Day Before, the moon remains eternally
unattainable. At the same time, the moon can be viewed in its entirety as a
discrete object quite separate from all things earthly.19 Yet, in a
text that features as many narrative levels and narrators as the Somnium, the moon necessitates presentation and representation from varying
perspectives.
These various
perspectives allow Kepler to extend the relevance of the travel narrative and
medieval cosmological text while reconfiguring the sig- nificatory value of
these modes. The cosmological narratives of the twelfth- century school
proposed a theory of proportion between the shape of the
cosmos and the shape of the human soul. For these narratives,
however, both ends of the spectrum are intangible properties. Neither the
cosmos nor the human soul could be sufficiently or entirely mapped or imagined.
Kepler relies on the narrative models provided by writers like Macrobius in
order to do something very different. Here, the shape of the moon, and the
certainty of the movement of the moon and the planets of the solar system,
enables the possibility of a mapping of man as a creature in a material
universe. Thus, the Daemon that speaks of “the earth to us humans” does so
equally through the content of his speech and the various modes he employs in
order to deliver his message.
Kepler’s Daemon is a complex allegorical personage. This character
becomes a representative for a completely different conception of nature. Such
a monstrous character,
is born only at [a] metaphoric crossroads, as an embodiment of a certain
cultural moment—of a time, a feeling, and a place [. . .] A construct and a
projection, the monster exists only to be read: the monstrum is etymologically ‘that which reveals,’ ‘that which warns,’ a glyph
that seeks a hierophant. Like a letter on the page, the monster signifies something
other than itself: it is always a displacement, always inhabits the gap between
the time of upheaval that created it and the moment into which it is received,
to be born again.20
At the same time, the Daemon plays a key role in
determining how readers value the generic modes that Kepler employs. The
“revelation” of this monstrum involves not
just the scientific conception of cosmology, but also the allegorical shift
precipitated by such scientific discovery.
To begin, Kepler is quite aware
of the allegorical connotations of the word daemon. In note 34, he writes that
the spirits “are the sciences in which the causes of phenomena are disclosed.”21
He extends this link between science and magic as he introduces the speech of
the Daemon. The Daemon synthesizes science and magic and also conceals this
synthesis through the allegorical conceit. Thus, Kepler notes that the
allegorical substitution of spirits for sciences “was suggested to me by the
Greek word Daemon, which is derived from daiein, meaning ‘to know’ as though it were daemon.”22
Kepler’s problematic discussion
of etymology, however, has been noted and contested by Rosen, who indicates
that, “in deriving Daemon (“minor
divinity”) from daemon (“expert”), Kepler
followed the etymological speculation of Plato.”23 Rosen refers
specifically to Plato’s Cratylus, and contrasts
this with the etymology accepted by modern philologists, “who connect daimon (‘the divinity’) with the verb daiomai
(‘divide’).”24 In this etymology, the daemon is not a
representative of pure knowledge. Instead, “a daimon was so called because he
allotted their destinies to mortal men, cutting out their future for them.”25
Kepler’s choice of character,
his mouthpiece for Copernicanism, did not simplify the reception of the
message. As Campbell points out, Kepler’s mother’s trial for witchcraft stemmed
from the description of Fiolxhilde’s consultations with supernatural forces.
Hostile political situations necessitate allegory. In discussing the history of
the mode, Joel Fineman notes that “allegory seems regularly to surface in
critical or polemical atmospheres, when for political or metaphysical reasons
there is something that cannot be said.”26 Kepler attributes his
difficulties to the ignorance of an audience whom he never intended: “I mean
that these words fell upon minds which were dark within and suspected
everything of being dark.”27 He scornfully rejects those who have
attributed diabolical devices to his text. We can, as Rosen does, exclude
Kepler’s Daemon, then, from any kind of supernaturally malevolent
implications. Thus, Rosen emphasizes that the term “was understood by many of
Kepler’s uninformed contemporaries to mean an evil spirit.”28
Here, Rosen intentionally
distinguishes between these uninformed contemporaries and Kepler, exemplar of a
science informed by reason. However, it is ultimately impossible, and also
unproductive to try to effectively seclude Kepler from the contemporary culture
in which he was immersed. Instead, we can think of the different levels of
society in which Kepler moved as a series of texts themselves involved in a
complex process of synthesis. This is particularly significant in terms of my
discussion of the Daemon, as I am interested in the Daemon as a textual body.
In Les Technologies de l’intelligence, P. Levy offers a definition of hypertext which accounts for this
cultural and textual synthesis of meanings. Thus, for Levy, the hypertext is an
“ensemble des messages et des representations circulant dans une societe”
[unity of messages and representations circulating in a society]. He considers
these as part of
un grand hypertexte mouvant, labyrinthique, aux cent formats, aux
mille voies [. . .] Le sont justement ces associations indues, ces metamorphoses,
ces torsions operees par des machines locales, singulieres, subjectives,
connectees sur un exterieur, qui reinjectent du mouvement, de la vie, dans le
grand hypertexte social: dans la ‘culture.’ a grand, moving, labyrinthine
hypertext, with a hundred formats, a thousand passages [. . .] It is exactly
these unseasonable associations, these metamorphoses, these torsions operated
by the local, singular, subjective machines, connected to an exterior, that
reinjects the movement of life, into the grand social hypertext: into
‘culture’.29
The Daemon, as mouthpiece and gate keeper between
earth and the moon, is both a text and a body. Still, this body is also
obscured from sight. It speaks only when it cannot be seen. In fact, we do not
know anything about its physical appearance, or even its gender. Lambert makes
the following observation regarding the gender of the Daemon:
It may be worth pointing out that, in his translation of this
passage from the Latin, Edward Rosen refers to the Daemon as female, thus setting
‘her’ parallel to Fiolxhilda rather than Duracotus. The Latin version leaves
the question of the Daemon’s gender open and thus offers a further source of
ambiguity. The Greek word ‘daimon’, after all, can take both the masculine and
the feminine gender.30
I use the pronoun “it” to avoid any confusion in this
matter. The magical covenant accompanying the daemonic summoning necessitates
that the Daemon not be seen. Duracotus and his mother cover their heads as part
of the magical rite and are rewarded by the “rasping of an indistinct and
unclear voice.”31 They cover their own bodies to access the Daemon
in a manner recalling Huguccio of Pisa’s derivation of the word monstrum from mastruca, a word
referring to hairy garments or skins. Huguccio’s warning that “‘Who ever
dresses himself in such garments is transformed into a monstrous being’”32
strengthens the identification between Daemon, Duracotus, and, ultimately,
Kepler.
For Rosen, the reason for this
attribution of daemonic rasping to an imperfect machine is perfectly clear: “In
that case there was no spirit or daemon.”36 The absence of a spirit
or daemon in the narrative would clearly alter the genre of the narrative:
Kepler would no longer be the author of an occult fantasy featuring the fearsome
personages of folk traditions. Instead, he would be the author of a science
fiction narrative perhaps more modern than even Koestler could have
anticipated. Thus, Duracotus’ mother (and, for Kepler’s more critical
contemporary readers, Kepler’s own mother by extension) could not be seen as a
daemon-summoning witch. Instead, she would be heralded as an inventor of the
highest order.
At the same time, such a ruse
allows Kepler to further distinguish himself from Duracotus, who supposes the
machine is the voice of a demon. In this sense, Kepler, like the Wizard of Oz,
is aware of the machinery rumbling beyond the curtain. Thus, Duracotus falls
prey to one of the “built-in traps for the superstitions and gullible,” and
supposes that “demons are talking” when, in fact, “art is copying magical
tricks.”37
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The concept of the speaking
machine is not, however, pursued elsewhere in the text. Even in the footnote
where Kepler proposes the daemon-as-machine, he remarks that the sepulchral
voice of the Daemon reminds him “pleasantly” of his colleague, Matthias
Seiffart. Seiffart had an instrumental role in calculating the ephemerides of
the moon for the year 1603. As a student of Brahe’s and colleague of Kepler’s,
Seiffart was involved in many of the important conversations that resulted in
the verification of the heliocentric theory. Still, besides having the voice of
a daemon, “he was also affected by depression and mental illness, in which
there was no place for relaxation.”38 Thus, by the end of the note,
this voice is again firmly likened to a being and not a machine. Moreover,
Seiffart, on account of his voice and depression, is not unlike a demon, or
someone, at the very least, plagued by demons.
Kepler’s notes on this subject
present the voice as both physical and mechanical. As a physical phenomenon,
the voice delimits the body of the Daemon, qualifying a reader’s imagination of the
voice as the unrestrained bellowing of a creature unbounded by the laws of
nature. To this extent, the qualities of this unnatural voice describe the
unnatural body that houses the voice. At the same time, the voice may be purely
mechanical, an artificial construct that sounds mysterious, but may be produced
by a clever toy. If this is the case, the “daemon” could simply be a scientist
playing a trick on Duracotus and his mother.
Either way, the voice
calls attention to the unseen body that produces this voice, a relationship
Roland Barthes calls the grain of the voice, and defines as “the encounter
between a language and a voice.”39 The Daemon’s essentially textual
but unviewable body embodies “the very precise space (genre) of the encounter
between a language and a voice.”40 As I have been arguing throughout
this study, the encounter between a language and a cultural body finally able
to speak that language results in a reconception of the genres that modulate
and categorize languages, modes, and registers. To this extent, the body of the
Daemon is the genre of the Somnium. The paradoxes of its voice and its body represent the competing
discourses influencing Kepler’s own estimation of the language the Daemon
speaks.
Of course, complete
languages do not hang in the air like dense clouds of miasmatic swamp gas,
infecting the unwary traveler with linguistically- manifested psychoses. Expressions
of culturally-guided embodiment, languages evolve in response to
environmentally-supplied stimuli. However, languages also affect bodies in a
manner similar to that employed by the fungal parasites that infect and control
the nervous system of the ant species Megaloponera foetens41: Barthes’ description of the voice as body, evoking as it does “the
cavities, the muscles, the membranes, the cartilages [. . .] as though a single
skin lined the inner flesh of the performer and the music he sings,”42
suggests that the grain of the voice signifies “the materiality of the body
speaking its mother tongue.”43 From this standpoint, that which can
speak the Daemon’s language inhabits the Daemon’s body.
Kepler continuously
likens the magical summoning of the Daemon to his own practices of astronomical
observation. Still, Kepler’s note on this voice suggests that even the Daemon
is not to be viewed as an unimpeachably supernatural manifestation. The
scientific experiment, like the magical ritual, is only effective if it is
repeated, unchanged, time after time. Thus, like the ceremony performed by
Duracotus’ mother, “the corresponding feature in the teaching of astronomy is
that the method is not in the least voluble or spontaneous.”44
Kepler does not draw this parallel between magic and science without providing
an example that further clarifies his selection of the form of the magical
ritual that appears here in the Somnium.
Instead, he provides an example of the standard procedure he used with visitors
when he worked in Prague:
Whenever men or women came together to watch me, first, while they
were engaged in conversation, I used to hide myself from them in a nearby
corner of the house, which had been chosen for this demonstration. I cut out
the daylight, constructed a tiny window out of a very small opening and hung a
white sheet on the wall.45
The final part of Kepler’s
description of his magical rites further emphasizes the textual quality of this
magico-scientific demonstration. The camera obscura produces a dark enclosure
with an aperture through which light enters to form an image of outside objects
on the opposite surface. Light filters through the opening and produces an
image on the inside of the dark enclosure. In further describing his
demonstration, Kepler asks the reader “Do you want characters too?” By this, he
refers to the magical symbols accompanying the sorcerer’s ceremonies. Because
the camera obscura produces a reflection of the image, he was forced to write
his message backwards so that it would be legible to his audience. Still,
drawing on the daemonic lore of black masses, based on a rhetorical inversio identical to the inversion of earth and moon animating this text,
Kepler comments “behold the magical rite” as he mentions that “the shape of the
letters was backwards [. . .] as Hebrew is written.”48 Kepler’s
invocation of Hebrew is deliberate.
He also uses the name “Levania” for the
moon because “Moon” in Hebrew is “Lebana or Levana.”49 While he
notes that he could also have used the word “Selenitis,” he chose the Hebrew
because “Hebrew words, being less familiar to our ears, inspire greater awe and
are recommended in the occult arts.”50 Furthermore, Kepler’s
evocation of magical symbols appearing mysteriously on the wall recalls
another text concerned with dream interpretation and the occult arts: the Book
of Daniel, which, as we have seen, is also linked to the genre of the
allegorical dream narrative.51 Kepler, however, does not merely liken
these reversed messages to the right-to-left movement of the Hebrew alphabet;
medieval European culture frequently linked the Jews to black magic,
cannibalism, and other inversions and perversions of the Christian faith.
The structure of the camera obscura also emphasizes
the connection between the magical and the scientific. The spectators are
enclosed in a room which functions as the camera. While the image is projected
into the room, those inside the room may have difficulty seeing outside through
the small opening. Kepler positions himself, like the Daemon, on the outside of
the camera. This is not to call into question whether or not Kepler was
actually in the room as he demonstrated the visual illusions of the camera
obscura to his houseguests. Instead, I mean to point out that, in this
description, Kepler emphasizes his position as the creator of the illusion.
While he was most likely in the box, his intellectual mastery of physical forms
assumes a mystical presence outside of the room temporarily transformed into a
camera obscura. Indeed, the mechanism of the camera obscura works in such a way
as to maximize the supernatural atmosphere it invokes. Thus, “If a breeze
disturbed the board outside, the letters inside wiggled to and fro on the wall
in an irregular motion.”52 A scientific tool like the camera obscura
suggested to Kepler the theological questions underlying the science of
astronomy. The mysterious sensations produced by a scientific tool hint,
further, at the promise of understanding the supernatural through empirical
means.
In Allegory: The Dynamics of an Ancient and
Medieval Technique, Jon Whitman adds a further
dimension to our conception of the supernatural qualities of the daemon. He
notes, most significantly for our consideration of the Somnium, the complexity of the relationship between psychic causes and cosmic
forces as articulated in texts from late antiquity. The Somnium, building from traditional mythographic sources, also echoes this
disparity. Whitman notes that “already in Plato and Xenocrates, there are
intriguing associations between the opposing forces of the soul and the
various daemones of the world, who mediate between the realms of spirit and matter.”53
Prior to this, the individual soul was not so closely identified with the
processes of the universe. In philosophical texts of the first centuries AD, “a
correlation increasingly develops between the elements of the soul and the
‘powers’ of the spiritual world as a whole.”54
This disjunction corresponds
with the increasing allegorization of the various features of the human
personality. From a purely narrative standpoint, this correlation between the
elements of the soul and the denizens of the spiritual world is most evident in
terms of character and setting. The personification of these elements changes
the possibilities of philosophical speculation. The Psychomachia of Prudentius, for instance, emphasizes the dramatic possibilities
of texts speculating on the reconciliation of the individual soul and
Divinity. The early Christian desire to “bring the soul to heaven”55
achieves a literal solution through the personification allegory. Following
the interpretive process necessitated by allegory, such narrativization “places
the drama of the soul simultaneously on two planes.”56
Whitman’s analysis of this
component of allegory is significant for this discussion because of the
conclusions he draws about this ‘turn inward’ that characterizes early Christian
allegory. For Whitman, “this turn inward has its inverse compositional
counterpart, as the articulation of the soul expands outward into the world at
large.”57 The turn inward, which results in a narrativization of
internal mental processes, necessitates the creation of a landscape on which
these psychological battles and journeys are enacted. This imaginary landscape,
as it represents more and more the imagined workings of the soul, overlaps more
and more with that most abstract, but still “real,” landscape, the cosmos.
Thus, “by the time of the Cosmographia, this
process will become panoramic in scope.”58 The two-part structure of
the Cosmographia explicitly emphasizes the correspondence between microcosmos and
macrocosmos that appeared early on in Plato and Xenocrates. At the same time,
this correspondence, expressed as philosophical concept in Plato and
Xenocrates, becomes a generic model of textual organization in the Cosmographia, so that these concepts also become ways of dividing the text.
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Whitman also draws the
intriguing connection between the daemons of the world and the dynameis, or
governing powers, of the world. Thus, “the dualistic tendencies of such
discussions intensify in Plutarch, who at times speaks both of two guardian
daemons for the soul and of two governing powers (dynameis) in the world.”59 These quotes point toward an
identification of daemons with dynameis. Thus, according to Whitman, the term
daemon becomes closely associated with the concept of natural or spiritual
powers. This differs markedly from the previous definitions of daemon offered by Kepler (and Rosen). The daemon as power is neither the
daemon as expert (Kepler) nor the daemon as divider (Rosen). Whitman traces
this development of the meaning of the word in relation to the development of
Judeo- Christian conceptions of the supernatural. Thus, “Perhaps the most
telling development of this period is the tendency among writers from various
tradi- tions—Jewish, Hermetic, and Christian—to conflate different senses of
the term ‘powers’ itself (dynameis): psychic
forces, angelic influences, and divine attributes.”60 By this,
Whitman means to point out that the two separate realms where daemons may exert
their power—the individual consciousness, the natural world—are themselves
conflated. He notes Origen as the writer in whose works these diverse
possibilities emerge as a single phenomenon. Thus, Origen “divides both the
soul and the world (and individual nations) between good and evil
daemons—mediating powers (the evil ones associated with particular beasts and
vices) who inhabit the air and help or hinder the soul’s ascent to heaven.”61
Kepler’s Daemon is certainly emblematic of this
conception of the daemon. Kepler’s literary sources attest to this. But in the
Somnium, the idea of the daemon as a force or power also has repercussions
for the idea of the natural and for the newly developing language for
describing the natural that we would identify as the voice of modern science.
The distinction between the daemon as expert or the daemon as power is of
central importance here. The expert always exists at some distance from the
subject of expertise. The ability to describe how something functions
necessitates objectification: if something is described, it is described from
some exterior vantage point. The voice of the Daemon alone certainly justifies
such a conception of the range of the daemon.64 The switch in mode
from Duracotus’ narration to the Daemon’s learned discourse merits our
conception of the daemon as an expert articulating his views.
But is this final discursive mode—the language of the
geographers—truly encapsulated by the narrative? I contend that its use, on the
contrary, opens up the many narrative levels of the Somnium. To this extent, the innermost layer of the Somnium then points beyond itself, effectively leading to a new language
that discards the encapsulating levels of the narrative as a snake sheds its
skin. From the standpoint of traditional allegory, “the knowledge of things, as
well as language, is essential to proper interpretation.”65 For
Christian allegorists, as Augustine emphasizes in On Christian
Doctrine, “the thing a text signifies should in
turn signify another thing, until all signs eventually disappear in God.”66
In this way, Kepler reconciles a mathematically verified model of the cosmos
that contradicts the Neoplatonist model through recourse to the discursive
modes employed by Kepler’s predecessors. Thus, for Kepler the theologian, a
science based on mathematics can, like “the allegorical interpretation of
scripture [,] expand beyond the text into the world at large, diverging
radically from the initial correspondence between text and meaning.”67
The Book of Nature, a metaphor “itself derive[d] from the Latin Middle Ages,”68
animates Kepler’s discussion in a slightly different manner than current
understanding of this metaphor would suggest. Instead, the Daemon’s textual
body parallel’s Alain de Lille’s formulation that
Omnis mundi creatura Quasi liber et pictura Nobis est et speculum.69
As a rule, or in accord with what might be identified
as an implicit narrative code, the innermost framed discourse or endodiegesis
of the
Somnium seems to grow ever more abstract and dense. In this final narrative
voice, the voice of the professional geographers, the Somnium speaks the language of contemporary science, one given to empirical
observations, much measurement, and geometrical or trigonometrical rendering.70
Of course, this discursive mode, the language of
contemporary science, was, in Kepler’s time, not itself encapsulated or
codified. Indeed, this language was very much in a process of becoming.
Science, as a discursive mode, was not entirely freed from the spiritual
dimensions of previous attempts at mac- rocosmological knowledge.
The metaphysical description of
the motion of the sun is further based on rhetorical ingenuity. The Somnium begins, conceptually, from a fundamental dislocation of point of
view: “For Levania seems to its inhabitants to remain just as motionless among
the moving stars as does our earth to us humans.”71 A moon-based
perspective replaces the earth-based perspective which has yielded the
geocentric concept. While the logic remains the same, the moon-based
perspective transcends the boundaries of possibility, belonging neither to the
geocentric, heliocentric, or Tychonian universes.
Hitherto, the point of view had been from the earth
to Mars; now Kepler wanted to follow the earth on its course from a point on
the orbit of Mars ‘as from a watchtower.’ He, so to speak, transposed his eyes
to a particular position of Mars’ orbit and from there found out directly the
relative values of the distances from sun to earth.73
The
Daemon who, like the Earth Spirit of Faust, speaks of the earth to humans does so as
an embodiment of the knowledge that it speaks. But this body of knowledge is
still fragmentary, and still reliant on the pre- or proto- scientific
discourses of “the geographers.”
However,
as Paxson indicates, this final narrative voice:
most closely echoes
the ‘voice’ of the outermost narrative frame in the text—the more than two
hundred ‘discontinuous’ though authoritative endnotes sporadically furnished by
Kepler through 1630. By certain standards, in fact, the innermost endodiegesis
replicates the outermost notational frame en abyme, as Dallenbach would
assert [. . .] But, just as well, we might follow Derrida by saying that
epistemological authority transposes itself with parasitological marginality.74
The footnote is not a benign textual feature. The
footnote itself has its own history. Thus, while Derrida contends that
footnotes belong in academic discourse, this genre as it appears in academic discourse
is relatively recent. In The Footnote, Anthony Grafton
traces the extent to which “the footnote is bound up, in modern life, with the
ideology and the technical practices of [the] profession of scholarly
endeavor.”76 To this extent, “Even a brief exercise in comparison
[of the uses of the footnote] reveals a staggering range of divergent
practices under history’s apparently stable surface.”77 Derrida
identifies,
by
extension, “The nonbelonging or rigorous, determinable exteriority of the
annotation in relation to the principal, primitive text”78 as a
necessary condition for the annotation. However, the qualities that determine
this exteriority are themselves contingent on the preconditions governing the
discourse.
When I had reached
this point in my dream, a wind arose with the rattle of rain, disturbing my
sleep and at the same time wiping out the end of the book acquired at
Frankfurt. Therefore, leaving behind the Daemon narrator and her auditors,
Duracotus the son with his mother, Fiolx- hilde, as they were with their heads
covered up, I returned to myself and found my head really covered with the
pillow and my body with the blankets.81
The
end of the narrative serves to reinforce the symmetry of the various levels of
the narrative. Each diegetic frame is both opened and closed. The external
frame, consisting of Kepler’s dream, begins and ends the narrative. This
symmetry in terms of narrative levels is not, for Paxson, corroborated by its
duree. The duration of each frame should, in order to merit the symmetry of a
narrative, be equal when it is opened and closed. However, the Somnium ends abruptly. The
end of the book from Frankfurt remains unread. The elements sweep the dream
away.
The wind and rain that dissolve the dream are not,
however, without significance. At the onset of the narrative, there is no
mention of rain. Indeed, Kepler, the astronomer, “went to bed and fell into a
very deep sleep” after a night of “watching the stars and the moon.”82
Of course, Kepler couldn’t have watched the stars on a stormy night. A storm
strong enough to rouse one from sleep, however, let alone from “a very deep
sleep” seems quite remarkable, particularly one which arises from nowhere on
the Bavarian countryside. But, for Kepler, a dream always heralds a mystical
experience, the interpretation of which, and the conditions surrounding it,
suggest the language of the
divine. The intrusion of the storm marks the dream as a revelation; its power
extends beyond unconsciousness.
The
narrative framing of the Somnium suggests a view of the natural world that
closely parallels the preoccupation with the natural world so evident in the
cosmological narratives of the school of Chartres. These narratives reveal a
dual interest in conveying philosophical truth and accurate depictions of the
natural world. However, while the authors of these narratives might have been
interested in depicting the natural world in a more recognizably “accurate”
mode than that assumed by their predecessors, they still “raised philosophical
issues without providing tools to explore these issues.”83
While authors such as Alain de Lille and Bernardus
Silvestris were concerned with the natural world, “the ‘discovery of nature’
so crucial to the Burckhardtian view of the twelfth-century Renaissance [. . .]
was first and last a rediscovery of texts about nature.”84 Kepler’s
representation of the natural suggests the influence of these concepts of the
natural. For Kepler as well as his predecessors, “the phenomenal world, the ornatus
elementorum (articulation of the elements), as William and
Bernardus Silvestris refer to it, is a tissue of figures and images that must
be read like a literary test. From such a standpoint, the philosophy of nature
‘involves and embodies a transcendent form of rhetoric.’”85
This approach was potentially liberating, but it
“proved, in the practice of William and his fellow cosmologists, fatally
circumscriptive, for it is here that the limitations of their resources become
most plain.”86 Here, Wetherbee distinguishes between the twelfth
century cosmologists and their precursors, the grammarians and encyclopedists
of late antiquity. In this latter category are included Servius, Macrobius,
Calcidius, and Fulgentius. For these writers, “it was axiomatic that the great
auctores were repositories of profound philosophical wisdom.”87
However, the twelfth century cosmologists attempted to “ground religious
thought in a philosophical understanding of nature and the Liberal Arts.”88
Critics like R.W Southern view this as a major reason
to discount the significance of these cosmologists. In “Humanism and the School
of Chartres,” he stipulates that their work was hindered by the limitations of
their scientific knowledge.89 As such, Southern argues that these
writers do not differ in any significant manner from earlier writers who
interpreted texts to infer facts regarding the natural world. Further, in
Christianizing the philosophical concepts of antiquity, allegorists such as
William of Conches90, Abelard91, and Thierry of
Chartres92
simply aligned the platonic World Soul with the Christian Holy Spirit, thereby
obviating the need for empirical observation.
Such positioning coincides exactly with the placement
of celestial beings in the Neoplatonist cosmic model. By including itself
within the perspective of earth dwellers, the Daemon ultimately elides a
conclusive determination of its origin. Likewise, Kepler refers to the Daemon
as Earth Spirit. The parallel to the object of Faust’s incantation is uncanny.
However, unlike Goethe’s Earth Spirit, which merely reveals its own
incomprehensibility to Faust, Kepler’s Earth Spirit is surprisingly eloquent.
Both of these earth spirits have parallels in the allegorical tradition of a
conceptual figure representative of the forces linking the natural with the
divine.
Kepler’s method, of course, differs significantly from
that employed by the Neoplatonists. Thus, while Kepler, like the Neoplatonists,
was interested in concepts such as celestial harmony that could be represented
in the figure of the World Soul or Earth Spirit, Gerald Holton observes that
“Kepler’s harmonies reside in the very fact that the relations are
quantitative, not in some specific simple form of the quantitative
relations.”99 He goes on to affirm the distinction between Kepler
and his predecessors as follows: “It is exactly by this shift which we can now
recognize as one point of breakthrough toward the later, modern conception of
mathematical law in science.”100 Thus, while Kepler begins from the
same philosophical presuppositions informing Neoplatonist cosmographical
allegory, he seeks quantitative justification for philosophical and theological
concepts.
Mathematics
provides Kepler with the necessary tool to explore this theological tangle:
The
investigation of nature becomes an investigation into the thought of God, Whom
we can apprehend through the language of mathematics. Mundus est imago
Dei corporea, just as, on the other hand, animus
est imago Dei
incorporea. In the end, Kepler’s unifying principle for the world
of phenomena is not merely the concept of mechanical forces, but God,
expressing Himself in mathematical laws.103
The problem with such an argument is that this is
manifestly not the case with the Somnium. The exegetical
method which Kepler pursues in this text does not correspond to Holton’s image
of the serious astronomer/ theologian who “does not play” with God’s order as
it is manifested in scripture or the book of nature. As I have already pointed
out, the narrative works on the basis of a fundamental inversio of point of view.
Kepler exposes the logical inconsistencies of the geocentric model of the solar
system through a misrepresentation of a model that truly is geocentric: that
is, the orbit of the moon around the earth.
Such inversio is a
fictionalization, or falsification, of the order of the universe. But we cannot
isolate rhetorical methods, regardless of their power and efficacy, from the
subjects they are used to represent. Representations of the universe are tied
to conceptions of divinity. Copernicanism was so controversial because, if
true, it allowed a revised book of nature to rewrite scripture. Inversio, however, is the
trope of devils; the invocation of a universe where lunar creatures see
themselves as the center of the universe implies an overturning of doctrines
like salvation through Christ made human, and a belief of humanity created in
the image of God. My position here might seem a bit extreme, but similar
concerns were raised by Kepler’s contemporaries in regards to the people of
the New World. On the one hand, writers like Thomas Harriot were content to
characterize natives of the New World as examples of prelapsarian innocence.
But the question that immediately followed such characterizations involved the
status of the souls of the natives. If truly innocent, then why convert them?
If they do not know Christ, how can they be considered innocent? Are their
barbaric customs and heathen beliefs truly a reflection of man’s origins as
presented in Genesis, or has the spiritual and material progress of these
peoples been stunted through their slavish devotion to deities that are
actually demons, actively committed to keeping the natives from accepting the
Word of God? The perspective on the natives reflects the perspective on the
natural. Likewise, attempts by geometers to disseminate a model of the
universe informed by the logic of observation and not the musings found in
authoritative sources necessitate a form of argumentation wherein the natural
informs the theological.
Kepler’s
argumentative methods are perhaps best explained as a result of his academic
training. The inversion of meanings evident in the use of the Daemon suggests
a sophisticated recourse to the dialectical method. Andreas Planer offers a
definition of dialectics as a single method which provides access to all
knowledge. Thus, in his Scientia demonstrandi (1586), Planer
“likens all of knowledge to a building which is approached by only one road,
the way or method of demonstration.”106 For Planer, the training of
the mind to accomplish the aims of the dialectic is best embodied by
Aristotle’s Organon. Planer seeks to “rid [. . .] all sciences
of the errors, opinions, and ignorance shown by so many authors, and he believes
that the way to do this is through the proper use of demonstrative method.107
However, the disparity between the logical aims of a project like Planer’s and
the actual application of dialectical method became increasingly evident to
scholars and educators through the sixteenth century.
Thus, Planer, writing in the late sixteenth century,
continues to echo the viewpoint of Philip Melanchthon, who had a direct
influence on the curriculum of the University at Tübingen.108 Planer’s
description of the aims of the dialectic maintains the credibility of
Aristotle’s authority because Aristotle’s methods emphasize proofs. Still, as
Metheun points out, the discrepancy between Aristotle’s aims and actual
observations became increasingly difficult to ignore. Thus, Melanchthon’s
“acceptance of Aristotle’s authority presumably lies behind [his]
unquestioning recourse to Aristotelian cosmology and his rejection of
observational evidence which conflicts with that cosmology.”109
The messages provided through observation of the
natural world, however, also hint at a need to readdress Aristotle’s favored
methods as well. Dialectics, which “makes it possible to go beyond ‘common
appearances’ to what is hidden, allowing the essence of natural things to be
ascertained by contemplation”110 still connotes a divinely guided
pursuit of knowledge, rather than a system of proofs rigorously aligned with
observation, and not interpretation.
The contrast between methods here becomes clearly
evident when Aristotle’s philosophical aims clearly contradict Aristotle’s
recorded observations. Michael Maestlin’s observations of the 1572 nova and
two comets highlight this problem. In his then-controversial findings, based on
his measurements of the parallax of such phenomena, “Maestlin concludes that
they are all supralunar, rather than sublunar, and thus he contradicts the
teachings of Aristotle that comets are sublunar and that no change can occur in
the supralunar region.”111 While “Maestlin is convinced that an
accurate understanding of God’s creation will lead to a more precise knowledge
of God and of God’s intentions for the world,”112 he places
observation above appeal to traditional authorities. The precision of his
observations, derived through geometrical proofs, allows him “to draw
conclusions, the truth and certainty of which are to be rated higher than the
authority of the opinions of Aristotle, Pliny, and other ancient
philosophers.”113
I highlight this conflict with various approaches to
knowledge as an example of the various possibilities available to Kepler as a
scientist. At the same time, I think that these problems surrounding the
presentation of knowledge become manifested in the form of the Daemon. The
University of Tübingen was the source of heated discussion on method and
presentation. Such views were, likewise, reflected in the curriculum of the
school and the publications of its instructors. For example, Maestlin’s
conclusions regarding the nova of 1572 do more than discredit the authority of
Aristotle’s conception of the natural world. Instead, a text such as Maestlin’s
Demonstratio astronomica loci stellae novae argues that the
existence of a new star “represents a change in the heavens, not simply above
the moon, but in the sphere of the stars, previously assumed to be perfect and
immutable.”114 This does not only damage a particular model of the
universe: the force of observation does more than discredit the Neoplatonist
model of the universe which had, by the sixteenth century, fused classical
philosophy and Christian theology into a set of tools used for describing the
natural world. Instead, it casts doubt on the pairing of perfection and
immutability so central to what is essentially a geometrical model of the
universe.
The scholars of the University of Tübingen and their
students were committed to expressions of divinity in the natural world.
Indeed, Kepler’s early Mysterium Cosmographicum builds from the
notion of the geometric perfection of the solar system. Unlike the Neoplatonist
model, the nova astronomia relies principally on geometrical proofs
and mathematical calculations in order to support observation. However, these
proofs and calculations are still used in order to verify the perfection of
divine design. Thus, as Kepler notes in the dedicatory epistle to the Mysterium Cosmographicum, “For the more
rightly we understand the nature and scope of what our God has founded, the
more devout our spirit will become.”115
The goals of the Mysterium Cosmographicum are not, of course,
the same as those of Kepler’s later works. Still, Kepler’s debt to his training
at Tübingen is evident throughout his career, leading him to “a theological
mathematics, that is, to the precise observation and interpretation of the
heavens in God’s name.”116 At the same time, this conflict between
perfectibility and immutability and the connection of these factors to method
suggests some things about the character of the Daemon in the Somnium. Regardless of the
etymological roots of the word daemon, the name still carries a connotation of
diabolism, of a reversal or overturning of holiness. Furthermore, while Kepler
playfully likens representations of astronomical observation to the conventions
of demonic summoning, his own views on the essentially theological aim of
astronomy beg the question why he uses a daemon as a mouthpiece for
Copernicanism. The language of the Daemon is most certainly a recognizably
scientific language. Unlike the burbling curses and shrieking hisses of the
demons populating Bosch’s paintings, Kepler’s Daemon makes learned statements,
noting, for instance, that “The intersections of the equatorial and zodiacal
circles create four cardinal points, like our equinoxes and solstices” and “For
they indicate the longitude of places with reference to their motionless Volva,
and the latitude with reference both to Volva and to the poles, whereas for
longitudes we have nothing but that most lowly and barely perceptible
declination of the magnet.”117
But we cannot merely equate diabolism with barbarism,
and thereby conclude that Kepler’s Daemon has nothing in common with Christian
representations of the Enemy and His minions. Indeed, while some demons are
represented as sinful urges personified in monstrous forms, others can also be
depicted as highly educated figures who use their learning in order to tempt
and torment. While Goethe’s Mephistopheles is surely the most recognizable
prototype of such a demon, the Biblical representation of Jesus’ temptation in
the forest, or even of Satan as diabolical advocate in Job, hint at the complexities
of the persona of absolute evil.
Indeed, the Daemon,
though undescribed, and undescribable by Dura- cotus, who lies huddled under a
sheet, perhaps resembles the foreboding Devil of the Brixen altarpiece. The
demon of Christian imagination, it is adorned with leathery wings, fangs, and
horns. But also, it appears as a teacher, proffering a book to its unwitting
students. Still, the invocation of the Daemon implies a complex dialogue. As
Michel Serres notes in Angels: A Modern Myth:
By a juridicial
logic, we choose to depict as devils those who cause us suffering, and who
enjoy such a power that they would win a trial against us from the very moment
that we publicly brought a plea against them. [. . .] But has anyone ever
really been scared of this skinny beast, this poor horned devil with eyes in
his bottom, this victim of our cruel weakness?119
At the
same time, perhaps it is wrong to use such an image to evoke the Daemon.
Kepler, in eliding description, and aligning the voice of the Daemon with the
rolling thunder of a storm, connects the Daemon to the forces of nature that it
represents. In doing so, Kepler presents us with a personage that is angelic in
Serres’ sense of the angel as a manifestation of “the beauty of the world.”120
This is not, however, an irresolvable contradiction. The representation of the
Daemon is, moreover, closely paired with Kepler’s attempt to resolve the
competing means of representing nature that were most readily available. The
angel in one of these modes of discourse becomes a demon in the next.
While the Daemon is a force of nature, there are, for
Kepler, three different levels or ways of viewing nature. The first views the auctoritas as the ultimate
repository for information about the natural world. The second such approach
attempts to synthesize Neoplatonist philosophies and observations of the
natural world. This attempt at synthesis, as Wetherbee argues, is the ultimate
limitation of this approach. Thus, while the twelfth century cosmographers
attempt to discard this approach, they are still indebted to the auctoritas to the extent that
they can never get to a science based primarily on calculations. While they
might affirm Aristotle’s view that we must use observation in order to examine
the natural world, they are still too likely to see Aristotle’s own
observations, many of which are very inaccurate, as admissible because of
their origin. This approach would also reflect the degree to which the writings
of classical authorities were Christianized: even if they were pagan, much of
their work was interpreted in such a way as to highlight the Christian leanings
or potential.
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Kepler,
though, is faced with observations and data that clearly defy the laws of tradition.
The third approach follows from this contradiction: nature is that which is
verified through empirical observation and mathematics. Kepler, however, does
not entirely embrace this approach, though he senses its validity. He still
employs data as a way to justify the theological concepts underlying
Neoplatonism. For a scientist so heavily influenced by the mysticism of Neoplatonism,
Kepler employs the Daemon as a way of questioning the validity of his findings.
While Kepler is clearly convinced of Copernicanism, he sets out to justify this
position in relation to previous conceptions of astronomy. He sees this as
necessary for the continuation of astronomy as a viable and productive science
and explanation of the theological question of the universe. The Daemon is,
then, a figure that provides Kepler with a composite of references and
polymorphically potential interpretations of meaning. This range of interpretations
prevents us from reading the Daemon as a closed figure. The multiple meanings
of the Daemon signify, like the universe it describes, the limitations of
signification itself. Thus, the form of the dream allegory, previously a form
with a claim to truth derived from mystical inspiration, becomes, like the
universe itself, a place of uncertainty, a form made formless.
Franz
Kafka remarked once that writing is the reward for service to the devil. I’ve
thought about this quote frequently while writing this book. While Kafka is
speaking in a very different cultural context, I wonder if his statement
somehow reflects Kepler’s quandary. In fact, Kepler’s dream is very much a written artifact; for much
of his life, Kepler’s fingers were stained with ink from this text. But
Kepler’s continuous writing of the Somnium never absolved him
from the sin of discovery, from the creation of a new universe made through
observation, conjecture, and imagination. Instead, Kepler, writing in an age of
religious turmoil, his fortunes shaped by this turmoil, finds himself attracted
to an even more dangerous form of turmoil: the polysemous book of the universe.
1. Stillman
Drake, Telescopes, Tides, and Tactics: A Galilean Dialogue
About the Starry Messenger and Systems of the World (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1983), 61.
2. William Shea,
“Looking at the Moon as Another Earth. Terrestrial Analogies and
Seventeenth-Century Telescopes,” in Metaphor and Analogy in the Sciences, ed. Fernand Hallyn
(Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2000), 96.
3. Field, 35.
4. Qtd. in Shea, 98-99.
5. Harriot was directly
involved in attempts to gain a greater understanding of the New World. His A Briefe and
True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia, first published in
1588, provides an account of the Algonkian tribe of Virginia. His descriptions,
besides encouraging British settlement, seek to position the natives within a
Christian historical context. As Andrew Had- field notes in “Thomas Harriot and
John White: Ethnography and Ideology in the New World,” “No identity [for these
previously unknown peoples] could be established without recourse to a
theological explanation” (Had- field 201).
6. Roos, 93-94.
7. Qtd. in Ewen A.
Whitaker, “Selenography in the Seventeenth Century,” in Planetary
Astronomy from the Renaissance to the Rise of Astrophysics. Part A: Tycho Brahe
to Newton, eds. R. Taton and C. Wilson (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1989), 120.
8. Shea, 98.
9. Ibid.
10. We cannot, however,
undermine the significance of mathematical achievement. As Stephen Jay Gould
reminds us in “Happy Thoughts on a Sunny Day in New York City,” “Galileo
described the universe in his most famous line: ‘This grand book is written in
the language of mathematics, and its characters are triangles, circles, and
other geometrical figures’” (Gould 3).
Still,
as Gould admonishes a scientific establishment “oversold on the mathematical
precision of nature,” he contends that “much of nature is messy and
multifarious, markedly resistant to simple mathematical expression” (Gould
4,3).
11. Clarke, Energy, 28.
12. Paul De Man,
“’Conclusions’: Walter Benjamin’s ‘The Task of the Translator,’” in The Resistance
to Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 87.
13. David L. Clark,
“Monstrosity, Illegibility, Denegation: De Man, bp Nichol, and the Resistance
to Postmodernism,” in Monster Theory, ed. Jeffrey Jerome
Cohen (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 41.
14. Kepler, Somnium, 17.
15. Mary Baine Campbell,
“Alternative Planet: Kepler’s Somnium (1634) and the New World,” in The Arts of 17th
Century Science: Representations of the Natural World in European and North
American Culture, eds. Claire Jowitt and Diane Watt (Aldershot:
Ashgate, 2002), 236.
16. Ibid.
17. Ibid., 237.
18. Campbell, 237.
19. Though, as Kepler
postulated, the moon was capable of influencing the tides.
20. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen,
“Monster Culture (Seven Theses),” in Monster Theory, ed. Jeffrey Jerome
Cohen (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 4.
21. Kepler, Somnium, 50.
22. Ibid.
23. Ibid.
24. Ibid.
25. Ibid.
26. Joel Fineman, “The
Structure of Allegorical Desire,” in Allegory and Representation, ed. Stephen J.
Greenblatt (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981), 8.
27. Kepler, Somnium, 39.
28. Ibid., 50.
29. P. Levy, Les Technologies
de l’intelligence (Paris: La Decouverte,
1990), 209. Translations mine.
30. Lambert, 91.
31. Kepler, Somnium, 14.
32. John Block Friedman, The Monstrous
Races in Medieval Art and Thought (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
1981), 32.
33. Kepler, Somnium, 60.
34. Ibid.
35. Ibid.
36. Ibid.
37. Ibid.
38. Ibid., 62.
39. Roland Barthes, Image Music Text, trans. Stephen Heath (New York: Hill
and Wang, 1977), 181.
40. Ibid.
41. Christian Bok, ‘Pataphysics:
The Poetics of an Imaginary Science (Evanston: Northwestern University Press,
2002), 3.
42. Barthes, 181-82.
43. Barthes, 182.
44. Kepler, Somnium, 57.
45. Ibid.
46. Giovanni Battista
della Porta popularized the camera obscura with his Magiae Naturalis (1558). The initial
demonstration to his invention indicates that Kepler refers to the
supernatural just by referring to the camera obscura. After perfecting his
invention, “della Porta summoned his friends and important members of Naples
society to his home for a demonstration. Instead of sharing his excitement,
the group was appalled when they saw real human images displayed on the wall,
believing it to be the work of witchcraft. The Catholic Church got wind of
della Porta’s demonstration and promptly charged him with sorcery. His work
was banned for six years.” For a clear and concise overview of the camera
obscura, see Stephanie Watson, “Camera Obscura: Ancestor of Modern
Photography,” in Science and its Times: Understanding the Social
Significance of Scientific Discovery. Vol. 3: 1450-1699, ed. Neil Schlager
(Detroit: Gale Group, 2000), 423-426.
47. Kepler, Somnium, 57.
48. Ibid.
49. Ibid., 53.
50. Ibid.
51. In this section of
the Book of Daniel, Daniel derives his authority, given by God and affirmed by
man, from his textual interpretation skills. After he decodes the inscription,
we read in Daniel 6:29 that “Daniel was clothed in purple, a gold chain was
placed around his neck, and he was proclaimed the third highest ruler in the
kingdom.”
52. Kepler, Somnium, 57.
53. Whitman, Allegory, 72.
54. Ibid.
55. Ibid., 71.
56. Ibid., 72.
57. Ibid.
58. Ibid.
59. Ibid.
60. Ibid.
61. Ibid., 73.
62. Apulius’ viewpoint on
this matter closely parallels that of Origen. Thus, “When Apuleius speaks of
the demons in general terms, he does so by contrasting their nature both with
higher principles: the gods and with lower ones: human souls. Thus, he
repeatedly stresses the notion that they are ‘intermediate powers’ (mediae
potestates, medioximi)” (Gersh
309).
63. Whitman, Allegory, 73.
64. Gersh notes that, for
a Platonist such as Apuleius, there is a group of demons “which are never
incarnate in human bodies. As in the case of the gods, we find these spiritual
beings described from both a subjective and an objective viewpoint, the former
finding expression in Apuleius’ assertion that they are ‘visible to nobody’
(nemini conspicui)—an account negative in character— or that they can reveal
themselves as ‘a kind of voice, although not the usual or human kind’ (vox quaepiam . . . non usitata vox
nec humand)” (Gersh 312). These characteristics found in Apuleius’
writings “can be extracted from Plato’s dialogues” (Gersh 312).
65. Whitman, Allegory, 79.
66. Ibid.
67. Ibid., 80.
68. Curtius, 319.
69. Qtd. in Curtius, 319.
70. James J. Paxson,
“Revisiting the Deconstruction of Narratology: Master Tropes of Narrative
Embedding and Symmetry,” Style 35, no.1 (2001): 141.
71. Kepler, Somnium, 117.
72. Qtd. in Caspar, 127.
73. Caspar, 130.
74. Paxson,
“Deconstruction,” 142.
75. Bal, 141.
76. Anthony Grafton, The Footnote: A
Curious History (London: Faber and Faber, 1997), 5.
77. Ibid., 7.
78. Jacques Derrida,
“This is Not An Oral Footnote,” in Annotation and its Texts, trans. and ed.
Stephen A. Barney (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 196.
79.
Lambert draws a different conclusion that does not
take this asymmetry into account. Instead, she argues that:
The complex
correspondences of characters and settings that echo through the entire
narrative of the Dream cause the differentiation of both narrative levels and
places to collapse: the parallel arrangement of literally all the characters
that figure in the narrative (be it with regard to their function in the plot,
their character traits or what they experience) combined with the similarities
between the various settings (Iceland, Hven, the Moon) seem to imply that the
separate parts of the narrative are somehow the same, that they are mere
variants of each other. (Lambert 87)
80. Paxson,
“Deconstruction,” 142.
81. Kepler, Somnium, 28-29.
82. Ibid., 11.
83. Wetherbee, 220.
84. Ibid., 221.
85. Ibid.
86. Ibid.
87. Ibid.
88. Ibid.
89. See Southern, 61-85.
90. William of Conches’
view on the world soul transformed through his career: “Scholars have been
fascinated by William’s changing attitude towards the world-soul described by
Plato in the Timaeus. His works reveal an early confidence in
identifying it with the Holy Spirit, followed by greater caution, until by the
time of the Dragmaticon the world-soul receives not so much as a
mention” (Elford 326).
91. Indeed, D.E. Luscombe
notes that, for Abelard, “when properly interpreted, Plato—maximus
philosophorum—and his followers may be seen to have expressed the
mystery of the Trinity (totius Trinitatis summam postprophetas
patenter ediderunt)” (Luscombe 302).
92. Thierry “finds the
moving power inherent in the universe understood as spirit by the pagan
philosophers, Hermes (whose testament, Asclepius, was deemed to be a
work of immense antiquity), Plato, and Virgil (the inspired vates who speaks of ‘the
spirit within’), just as it is by the biblical prophets, Moses, David, and
Solomon. And it is this same power, Thierry concludes triumphantly, that
Christians call ‘the Holy Spirit’” (Dronke, “Thierry” 379). Still, in some
senses, Thierry anticipates the work of scientists like Kepler. He affirms that
“the cosmos is no mere mirror-image of divinity” and instead “works ‘in
accordance with physics (secundum physicam)’”(383).
93. Hallyn, Structure, 278.
94. Kepler, Somnium, 15.
95. Ibid., 17.
96. Whitman, Allegory, 203.
97. See my discussion of
the world soul in “Language and Its Limits as a Celestial Vehicle” for a more
detailed exploration of language and the divine.
98. Whitman, Allegory, 203.
99. Holton, 67.
100. Ibid.
101. Kepler, Somnium, 53.
102. While Levania exists
in opposition to the sun, it is, above all, “an inverted image of Earth, but an
Earth conceived according to the obsolescent Ptolemaic model of geocentrism”
(Paxson, “Deconstruction” 139).
103. Holton, 69.
104. Ibid., 70.
105. Ibid.
106. Charlotte
Methuen, Kepler’s Tübingen: Stimulus to a
Theological Mathematics (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1998), 162.
107. Ibid., 165.
108. Kepler studied here
from 1589 until 1594. For exact dates, see Hermelink, Heinrich
(ed.), Die Matrikeon der Universität Tübingen, vol. 1:
1477-1600. Kohlhammer, Stuttgart, 1906.
109. Methuen, 165.
110. Ibid., 164.
111. Ibid., 171.
112. Ibid.
113. Ibid., 172.
114. Ibid., 173.
115. Qtd. in Metheun, 206.
116. Metheun, 224.
117. Kepler, Somnium, 19,22.
118. Job 1:7.
119. Serres, 201.
Ibid., 223.
In: Through the Daemon's Gate: Kepler's Somnium, Medieval Dream Narratives, and the Polysemy of Allegorical Motifs (Studies in Medieval History and Culture). London, 2010.
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