Lovers of Sophia
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Mecca – which was long known by the pagan Arabs as “the Ancient
Woman” and which was original y attended by priestesses – is an
example of just such a stone.171 The word Ka’aba is descended from Kybala or Cybele – the Amazon mother goddess analogized with
Artemis at Ephesus.172 This may also be the root of the word Kabbalah
– the black art or Craft. Inside the Islamic enclosure and beneath
the shroud that veils it, the actual Black Stone at Mecca bears an
engraved symbol of the Moon Goddess’ vulva.173 Classical Anatolia
was the center of the Hecate cult, and Byzantine coins symbolized
Hecate by means of a crescent and a star. This lunar goddess symbol
was later adopted by the invading Ottoman Turks and has ironical y
come to be emblematic of Islam.174
The three men in black on the road to K.’s execution stand in
contrast to the trinities of women, such as Fraulein Burstner, the Usher’s Wife, and Leni, or the three “prematurely debauched” girls
of the Court at Titorelli’s studio, who might grow into the roles
played by the older Trinity of witches. K. is willing to be led off
to the execution site; he even helps the men lead him to the site,
which is one both of his and of their choosing. He then lies down
voluntarily, waiting to be killed. It is noteworthy that he initial y
makes the decision not to resist when a lady who appears to be
Fraulein Burstner enters the square, which is a crossroads, while
he is preparing to resist his two escorts. He leads the two men to
follow her for a time so that “he might not forget the lesson she had
brought into his mind.”175 K. then elaborates: “I always wanted to
snatch at the world with twenty hands, and not for a very laudable
motive, either. That was wrong, and am I to show now that not even
170 Wilde,
The Amazons in Myth and History, 100-102.
171 Ibid., 100.
172 Ibid., 99.
173 Ibid.
174 D’Este,
Hekate, 112-113.
175 Kafka,
The Trial, 225.
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a year’s trial has taught me anything?”176 He maintains this resolve
until the very last moment, when it is too late, and he raises his
hands in protest against his decision not to resist. This is Kafka’s
way of saying that the lack of mastery Joseph K. has over the two
conflicting forces in him has allowed them to conspire to execute
him with a dagger – which is one of Hecate’s sacred implements.177
It’s being turned twice in his heart as he stares up at the two “cheek to cheek” faces of the executioners, is a symbol for his having
perished of his unacknowledged duality. He is murdered by the light
of the Moon, aura of Artemis and Hecate: “The moon shone down
on everything with that simplicity and serenity which no other light
possess.”178 Kafka repeatedly tel s us that the moon shines on K. and
his two escorts all along the way, especial y as they cross the bridge to the outskirts of town.179 Hecate was not only the goddess of the
crossroads, but also the divinity “of the wayside” and of the gateways at the outskirts that mark a city’s limits.180 This is the domain of stray dogs.
Virtual y all of the animals sacrificed in the Classical world at
large came from the four species of bovines, goats, sheep, and swine.181
It is quite striking then, that dogs – a household pet and “man’s best friend” – were the animals sacrificed to Hecate.182 Hecate was
accompanied by a black dog or “black bitch” and sometimes took the
form of one herself.183 Black dogs were sacrificed to Hecate, especial y at the crossroads.184 Dogs barking or trembling were considered a
sign of Hecate’s presence.185 Dogs were her companions, her heralds,
176 Ibid., 226.
177 D’Este,
Hekate, 70.
178 Kafka,
The Trial, 227.
179 Ibid., 226.
180 D’Este,
Hekate, 21, 29, 60.
181 Ibid., 24.
182 Ibid.
183 Ibid., 74, 91.
184 Ibid., 114, 124, 154.
185 Ibid., 130, 154.
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and her offerings.186 This means that like the tradesman Block who
became “the Lawyer’s dog” (real y, Leni’s dog), even amidst (literal y) mortifying shame Joseph K. also remains a servant of the Goddess
– one who is killed “Like a Dog!”187 The “shame” is that, unlike the
“miserable creature” Block, he could have been more than a servant
or sacrificial dog. Joseph K. was offered intimate companionship
so long as he did not demand advantage or possession. Though
he failed to do so in this life, his final thoughts betray that he has learned his lesson and might do so in the next. The novel’s enigmatic
concluding line “it was as if the shame of it must outlive him” has to be viewed in the context of Kafka’s al usions to reincarnation, not
only in The Trial, but also his clearer pronouncements on the matter in his Blue Octavo Notebooks.
6. Three Paths at the Crossroads
The first time that Kafka hints at the idea of reincarnation in The Trial is after the Student has carried the Usher’s wife off to the Examining Magistrate. Kafka writes: “how well-off K. was compared with the
Magistrate… True, he drew no secondary income from bribes or
percolation and could not order his attendant to pick up a woman
and carry her to his room. But K. was perfectly willing to renounce
these advantages, at least in this life.”188 Later on, Kafka makes another reference to the idea in the course of Joseph’s contemplation
of whether or not to retain his lawyer. He relates to us that in one
of the “harangues” which make him doubt the Lawyer’s efficiency,
the latter had said that “you felt astonished to think that one single ordinary lifetime sufficed to gather all the knowledge needed for
a fair degree of success in such a profession.”189 These hints are
somewhat elucidated by the following passages from Kafka’s Blue
Octavo Notebooks:
186 Ibid., 154.
187 Kafka,
The Trial, 229.
188 Ibid., 60 – emphasis mine.
189 Ibid., 122.
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A man has free wil , and this of three kinds: first of all he was
free when he wanted this life; now, of course, he cannot go back
on it, for he is no longer the person who wanted it then, except
perhaps in so far as he carries out what he then wanted, in that
he lives. Secondly, he is free in that he can choose the pace of the
road of this life. Thirdly, he is free in that, as the person who will sometime exist again, he has the will to make himself go through life under every condition and in this way come to himself,
and this, what is more, on a road that, though it is a matter of
choice, is still so very labyrinthine that there is no smallest area
of this life that it leaves untouched. This is the trichotomy of free
wil , but since it is simultaneously also a unity, an integer, and
fundamental y is so completely integral, it has no room for any
wil , free or unfree.190
Many shades of the departed are occupied solely in licking at the
waves of the river of deat
h because it flows from our direction
and still has the salty taste of our seas. Then the river rears
back in disgust, the current flows the opposite way and brings
the dead drifting back into life. But they are happy, sing songs of thanksgiving, and stroke the indignant waters. Beyond a certain
point there is no return. This point has to be reached. 191
One of the first signs of the beginnings of understanding is the
wish to die. This life appears unbearable, another unattainable.
One is no longer ashamed of wanting to die; one asks to be moved
from the old cell, which one hates, to a new one, which one will only in time come to hate. In this there is also a residue of belief that during the move the master will chance to come along the corridor, look at the prisoner and say: “This man is not to be locked up again.
He is to come to me.”192
190 Brod.,
The Blue Octavo Notebooks, 95.
191 Ibid., 15-16.
192 Ibid., 88.
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Not only do these passages establish that Kafka believed in
reincarnation of some sort, they also gift us a key to understanding
the metaphor of the three paths that are offered to K. by the painter
Titorelli. The last of the passages cited above, uses the image of
‘imprisonment’, which is preceded by an ‘arrest’, as a metaphor for
the embodiment of the soul by the flesh. It suggests that one body
is exchanged for another, as one prison cell for another, until final y one may be released once and for al . There is a clear parallel between this and the path of “ostensible acquittal” described by Titorelli. The Painter explains how a definite acquittal cannot be granted by the
Judges of the Court that K. is involved with, and that Titorelli is able to influence. Rather: “that power is reserved for the highest Court of al , which is quite inaccessible to you, to me, and to all of us. What the prospects are up there we do not know and, I may say in passing,
do not even want to know.”193 It seems likely that the Judge of this
unknowable “highest Court of al ” is the same figure as “the master”
in the last of the notes cited above, who tel s the other Judges that:
“This man is not to be locked up again. He is to come to me.” Titorelli goes on to explain the difference between this definite acquittal and
ostensible acquittal in the following terms:
…when you are acquitted in this [ostensible] fashion the
charge is lifted from your shoulders for the time being, but it
continues to hover above you and can, as soon as an order comes
from on high, be laid upon you again….In definite acquittal
the documents relating to the cases are said to be completely
annulled, they simply vanish from sight, not only the charge but
also the records of the case and even the acquittal are destroyed,
everything is destroyed. That’s not the case with ostensible
acquittal. The documents remain as they were, except the
affidavit is added to them and a record of the acquittal and the
grounds for granting it. The whole dossier continues to circulate,
as the regular official routine demands, passing on to the higher
Courts, being referred to the lower ones again, and thus swinging
193 Kafka,
The Trial, 158.
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backwards and forwards with greater or smaller oscil ations,
longer or shorter delays. These peregrinations are incalculable.
A detached observer might sometimes fancy that the whole case
had been forgotten, the documents lost, and the acquittal made
absolute. No one real y acquainted with the Court could think
such a thing. No document is ever lost, the Court never forgets
anything. One day – quite unexpectedly – some Judge will take
up the documents and look at them attentively, recognize that in
this case the charge is still valid, and order an immediate arrest.
I have been speaking on the assumption that a long time elapses
between the ostensible acquittal and the new arrest; that is
possible and I have known of such cases, but it is just as possible
for the acquitted man to go straight home from the Court and
find officers already waiting to arrest him again. Then, of course,
all his freedom is at an end.” “And the case begins all over again?”
asked K. almost incredulously. “Certainly,” said the painter.194
In light of the passages from the Blue Octavo Notebooks, one could read “ostensible acquittal” as the soul being temporarily released
from the prison of the physical body. It may remain on the ethereal
spiritual plane for a long time before reincarnating, or it may return almost immediately. In any case, the “documents relating to” one’s
case, i.e. the karmic traces of one’s actions in life, are not “completely annulled” as they are if one’s soul achieves liberation from the
transiently manifest world of multiplicity altogether. We should
remember that definite and ostensible acquittal are two of the three paths that Titorelli proposes, and we have already suggested how these may be the three roads that are watched over by Hecate, the
Triune “Goddess of the Crossroads.”
It is also notable that the metaphor Kafka employs in his Blue
Octavo Notebooks is that of being locked up. Again, one of the three implements held by Hecate is a key. Two others are a rope and a
knife.195 (Unlike other Greek divinities, and very much like Indian
194 Ibid., 159.
195 D’Este,
Hekate, 157.
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ones, she had multiple arms to hold all of these implements, with
her lower arms sometimes being depicted as serpentine – another,
particularly Indian, affinity to shakti.) These original y signified her role as the Goddess of child labor, where the knife was used to
cut the umbilical cord. In the mystery cults, however, her cutting
of the ‘rope’ by the ‘knife’ al uded to the severing of the soul’s ties to the physical body. Thus Hecate is the goddess who presides over
the kind of entry and exit of spirits to and from the physical world
that is described in the first quote above from the Blue Octavo
Notebooks. Hecate was connected to Orpheus and his mysteries, and she was central to the Orphic belief in reincarnation.196 Many of her
devotees were vegetarians on account of the credence they gave to
transmigration of the soul.197
There is an essential difference between Kafka’s notion of
reincarnation and that present within (non-tantric) Vedanta or
(orthodox schools of) the Buddha Dharma. Kafka believes that one
should choose not to avoid subjection to all kinds of experiences,
whether nominal y ‘good’ or ‘evil’, but experience all of them as ful y as possible within one single lifetime. Otherwise, it is implied, one
will have to return to the prison cel . We see this idea more clearly
expressed in other passages of the Blue Octavo Notebooks:
You can hold yourself back from the sufferings of the world: this
is something you are free to do and is in accord with your nature,
but perhaps precisely this holding back is the only suffering that
you might be able to avoid.198
Your will is free means: it was free when it wanted the desert,
it is free since it can choose the path t
hat leads to crossing the
desert, it is free since it can choose the pace, but it is also unfree since you must go through the desert, unfree since every path in
196 Ibid., 27.
197 Ibid., 46.
198 Brod,
The Blue Octavo Notebooks, 97.
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labyrinthine manner touches every foot of the desert’s surface.199
In the struggle between yourself and the world second the world.
One must not cheat anyone, not even the world of its victory.
There is nothing besides a spiritual world; what we call the world
of the senses is the Evil in the spiritual world, and what we call
Evil is only the necessity of a moment in our eternal evolution.200
Not shaking off the self, but consuming the self.201
Joseph K. is guilty because there is an aspect of him that has preferred to “consume the self” rather than ‘throw it off’ as an ascetic might
do. What he does not understand, at least with his conscious mind,
and what Leni attempts to convey to him, is that he should not be
trying to prove that he is ‘innocent.’ The Court and its officials,
including the promiscuous women who hold sway over them, are
all bathed in sin. Their aim is not to prevent a person from doing
‘Evil’, it is to drive a person to the spiritual depths beyond Good and Evil. In his Blue Octavo Notebooks, Kafka has this to say about binary moral oppositions:
Evil is a radiation of human consciousness in certain transitional
positions.202
There can be knowledge of the diabolical, but no belief in it, for
more of the diabolical than there is does not exist.203
One cannot pay Evil in installments – and one always keeps on
trying to.204
199 Ibid., 50.
200 Ibid., 91.
201 Ibid., 39.
202 Ibid., 94.
203 Ibid., 96.
204 Ibid., 90.
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Evil knows of the Good, but Good does not know of Evil.205
Evil is the starry sky of the Good.206
The way beyond Good and Evil may be the third way proposed by
Titorelli, the path of “indefinite postponement.” Titorelli proposes
this option when it appears to him that “ostensible acquittal” is
unappealing to K. He explains that in this procedure, one must
maintain occasional contact with the Court, but the interrogations