Table of Contents

Acknowledgements
Introduction
Chapter One: Towards an Understanding of Kafka's Mystical Life
Chapter Two: Mystical Experience in Kafka's Early Prose
Chapter Three: Kafka's Meditation and the Materialization of a Spirit
Chapter Four: The Obsession with Dreams
Chapter Five: Kafka, the After-Life and Transmigration of Souls
Chapter Six: Cabala, Freemasonry and the Trials of Brother F.K.
Chapter Seven: The Mystical Life of Animals: Investigations of a Vegetarian
Conclusion: The Mystical Life of Franz Kafka in Perspective
Notes
Bibliography
Index

About the Author

June Leavitt is a freelance writer and researcher who has published fiction, scholarly works, and critically-acclaimed memoirs as well as articles that have appeared in major newspapers and magazines. She frequently teaches courses on mystical literature in religious traditions in the Overseas Program at Ben Gurion University of the Negev in Israel.

Reviews

"June Leavitt leads us through ethereal and esoteric realms of theosophy and the occult in a pathbreaking attempt to situate Kafka within Europe's Modern Spiritual Revival, associated with the names of Rudolf Steiner, Madame Blatavsky, Annie Besant, W.B. Yeats, Gustav Meyrink, T.S. Eliot, and others. Benefiting from Leavitt's scholarship, we can now understand better Kafka's clairvoyance, dream-life, and mystical experience and their inner relationship to his
writings. Contextualizations she provides derived from Jewish and Christian Cabala, Freemasonry, and Gnosticism inform Kafka's notions of reincarnation, transcendence, and transmigration of the soul, as
well as the mystical life of animals. Nothing short of a new way of 'experiencing' Kafka is achieved here."
---Mark H. Gelber, Director of the Center for Austrian and German Studies, Ben-Gurion University, Beer Sheva
"This is a book that gets better and better as it goes along. Through her theosophical framing, Leavitt illuminates some of Kafka's lesser known works and brings his more famous texts, such as 'Investigations of a Dog,' to new life. She convincingly interweaves Kafka's dreams, his Nietzsche readings, his early involvement with synaesthesia and modernism - and, of course, his vegetarianism. Kafka declared that he was 'nothing but literature.' The Mystical
Life of Franz Kafka broadens that life into its full, fascinating cultural context."
-- James Rolleston, Professor Emeritus of German & Literature, Duke University
"June Leavitt's original study explores neglected moments in Kafka's spiritual landscape and mystical experiences early in his life, and enables a better understanding of some of the uncanny dimensions of his later oeuvre. She describes fascinating aspects of the Prague intellectual ambiance that was permeated with Rudolph Steiner's theories and of Freemasonic approaches at the beginning of the twentieth century, contributing thereby to a new picture of the
young Kafka's inner life in this framework."
--Moshe Idel, Max Cooper Professor in Jewish Thought, Emeritus, Hebrew University, Jerusalem
"In making her case, the author augments the established views on Kafka's familiarity with the Jewish mystical tradition and Cabala with convincing detective work on Kafka's interest in non-Jewish or secular mystical traditions."--CHOICE
"Leavitt strives to demonstrate how Kafka's interest in the occult was shaped not only by contemporary spiritualist discourse but also by his own clairvoyant experiences. In making her case, the author augments the established views on Kafka's familiarity with the Jewish mystical tradition and Cabala with convincing detective work on Kafka's interest in non-Jewish or secular mystical traditions, including Christian Cabala and
Freemasonry...Recommended."--CHOICE
"Leavitt's Mystical Life remains a valuable work for the boundary zone it manages to expose...The Mystical Life of Franz Kafka ultimately teaches us that what distinguishes Kafka as the central Jewish writer of modernity remains, despite the best efforts of his doorkeepers, precisely what his central parable tells us about his fiction. Franz Kafka, whether conceived of in Jewish or Christian terms, remains the writer of the open
door."--H-Judaic
"Leavitt is surely right to remind us of the enormous popularity of theosophy and related notions in the European fin de siècle...and Leavitt is right to suggest that his apparent fascination with Jewish mysticism, which scholars have made much of in recent decades, probably came to him via Christian sources...Where does Kafka stand? He was, we know, a notorious faddist, solemnly subjecting himself to nature therapy, raw food diets and gymnastics,
Mazdazanism, Fletcherism and the rest. But what of his writing, which is surely the important thing? Leavitt trawls his oeuvre to find examples of mystical experiences and out-of-body states."--Times Literary
Supplement