The Fault Is Not in Our Stars 55the world wealth and status could be achieved, and once the subject
had overcome his faults through maturity his exceptional character
would fit him to undertake momentous enterprises. Kepler no doubt
anticipated that the recipient would be sufficiently attracted by these
prospects to overlook the fact that no details or even approximate
timings were provided.
The key question about this horoscope is not what a modern sceptic
makes of it but what Wallenstein as the subject might have made of it.
The archives provide no answer, as the next substantive reference does
not occur until 1624, sixteen years later. We may presume that since
he was prepared to commission a horoscope in the first place he was
also prepared – like most people of the time – to grant it some cre-
dence, but as attitudes to astrology were ambiguous among the more
educated classes in the seventeenth century this does not necessarily
imply credulity. Wallenstein may have been impressed by the few refer-
ences to past possibilities which could be approximately correlated with
actual events, together with the marriage opportunity which tied in so
surprisingly well with what actually transpired – albeit seven years too
soon – within a year of his receiving the horoscope. On the other hand
he must have had difficulty in recognising himself in Kepler’s character
sketch, as few people are so self-critical as to imagine faults on this scale.
Whatever he made of it, however, it was of little practical help with
the business of life, as there were no indications as to how the better
prospects were to be achieved or the worse ones avoided. Kepler himself
warned in his preamble that it would not be enough to rely on things
which were ‘simply and solely predicted from the heavens’, as ‘of all that
a man may hope for from the heavens, the heavens are only the father
while his own soul is the mother’.^6 In other words if he aspired to the
vaguely forecast wealth, status and momentous enterprises he would
have to make appropriate efforts on his own account. But he did not,
as after his marriage he made no noteworthy progress or impact on the
outside world, apart from the brief episode at Gradisca, for almost ten
years.
When the horoscope resurfaced in 1624 it was in an entirely differ-
ent context. Wallenstein’s career up to 1618 was unremarkable, but the
action-packed six years following the revolution in Bohemia took him
from obscurity to the forefront of affairs, bringing him power, fame and
fortune, and making him the new man whose name was on everyone’s
lips, certainly in Bohemia. We do not know what attention Wallenstein
had paid to the horoscope in the intervening years, and although biog-
raphers have tended to assume, imply or even state outright that he had