National Geographic Traveler Interactive - 10.11 2019

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halls of today’s Prague with its radical beginnings. My

guide, Lenka, who leads custom city tours through a

company called JayWay, explained: “Prague is in the

center of Europe, and there is an extreme amount of

energy here. People who are sensitive, they feel it.”

In other words, the same force that inspired all those

philosophers back then is what lures travelers today,

even if they don’t know it.

Take Charles Bridge, Prague’s most visited site:

Back in 1357, Charles IV (another metaphysical

monarch) commanded the first stone to be laid at

precisely 5:31 a.m. on July 9, thus creating the auspi-

cious palindrome 135797531.

Clues to Prague’s cosmic side are scattered through-

out the city. Some are hiding in plain sight, such as Old

Town Square’s giant astronomical clock, which draws

a crowd of photo-snapping tourists every hour when

to a bright twinkle fixed between two pine trees in the

distance. We look up in excitement, until we realize

it’s not fixed after all.

“No, it’s an airplane,” she admits. “But Jupiter looks

very similar.”

Fifteen minutes later, in the facility’s western

and even larger dome, we finally catch Jupiter, rising

between the same two trees. Climbing to the top of

the ladder, I peer through the lens, and witness, to my

shock, the sharpest rendering of the planet I’ve ever

seen. It looks like a pastel orange gumball floating in

the pure black of space. The image is so crisp that I can

even discern two bands of cloud on its smooth surface.

Three moons—Callisto, Io, and Europa—punctuate

the scene.

Looking around me at the four or five other figures

gathered in the dark, I am perplexed: How are there not

more people up here, seeing this? Then I remember:

It’s Saturday night, and pilsner, not planets, is what’s

on most visitors’ minds.

Prague isn’t necessarily known for stargazing, but

its history with astronomy and astrology goes back to

the 17th century, a time when the two disciplines often

blurred together. Under Emperor Rudolf II, a patron

of the arts and sciences, Prague became a beacon for

astronomers, alchemists, and philosophers.

One of them, Johannes Kepler, was a talented math

teacher who was banished in 1600 from Austria for

his non-Catholic beliefs. Kepler came to Prague as an

apprentice to fellow stargazer Tycho Brahe (the two

are immortalized in a bronze sculpture less than a

mile from the observatory), and lived in a small apart-

ment at 4 Karlova Street, just off Charles Bridge. As a

side gig, Kepler wrote horoscopes for the mystically

inclined emperor.

Kepler’s seminal text, Harmonices Mundi, was

published exactly 400 years ago. It’s an expansion

of Kepler’s studies on planetary motion, in which he

proved the planets move in an ellipse—not a circle—

around the sun.

For me, the text holds a deeper meaning: It devel-

ops the idea of the “music of the spheres,” or the

harmonic theory of planetary motion. (“The Earth

sings mi, fa, mi,” Kepler wrote.) It is the basis of my

work as a sound therapist, where I apply a tool known

as a planetary tuning fork to acupuncture points on

the body. When I learned that Kepler spent the bulk

of his time in Prague refining the theories that went

into Harmonices Mundi, I knew I had to go.

At first, I had a hard time squaring the raucous beer

The treasures at the

National Library of the

Czech Republic, opened

in 1722, include collec-

tions of ancient Greek

texts, rare Bohemian

manuscripts, and

mechanical globes.

Opposite: The Astronom-

ical Clock in Old Town

Square is set in motion on

the hour.