Rhizome of Boehme and Deleuze:

Esoteric Precursors
of the God of Complexity
Mark Bonta

1. Deleuze and the Occult

Though it has been claimed that Deleuze sought to delink his thought
from all religion (Bryden), a close examination of his major writings, as
well as his collaborative work with Guattari, shows that he was closely
attuned to the subterranean mystical currents that pervade Western reli-
giosity, often running counter to the dogmas of surface theology and not
infrequently becoming entangled with sorcery and things un-faithful.
Deleuze was steeped in the esoteric and the occult, as a brief perusal of
the “1730: Becoming-Intense, Becoming-Animal” plateau in A Thousand
Plateaus (henceforth “ATP”) makes obvious (Kerslake Occult Unconscious,
Somnabulist; Reggio), and consistently references their French artistic/liter-
ary and German Idealist derivations and offshoots (e.g. Novalis, Schelling,
Artaud, Klossowski). Nevertheless, he seemingly taunts his readers by
burying important (but uncited) nods to the likes of Hermeticist Giordano
Bruno and Tarot revivalist Court de Gébelin deep inside Difference and
Repetition (henceforth “DR”) and the Logic of Sense (henceforth “LS”). One
has to know one’s way around the literature of mathesis universalis, her-
meticism, and the 19th-century European occult revival (see, for example,
Ebeling, Harvey, Jacob, Monroe, Owen, Szonyi, C. Webster) to begin to
understand just how and why Deleuze makes use of what is clearly neither
Science nor Philosophy--to get beyond them, as it were, in his ontological
project of explaining the workings of the chaotic cosmos. There IS religion
in Deleuze, even God, but It comes as one of H.P. Lovecraft’s Outsider
abominations, via witchcraft, trickery, and all things unholy.
Christian Kerslake, as well as Reggio, MacKay, and Delpeche-
Ramey, have now opened the door for a closer examination of Deleuze’s
substantial but often difficult-to-detect engagement with esotericism and
the occult, which in this article I shall argue brings him into resonance
with Jakob Boehme. So as to not scare the reader off, it needs to be stated
categorically that “we sorcerers” (ATP 239) do not claim Deleuze as an
esotericist—rather, we simply recognize that he is one of many in a long
line of Western intellectuals who have engaged Western esotericism

62 © Board of Regents, University of Wisconsin System, 2010

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Rhizome of Boehme and Deleuze 63

and “secret knowledge” but--possibly out of fear of losing credibility in

mainstream philosophical circles--have buried it deep in their work. In
this, he is far more adept than Schelling and Hegel, who plagiarized—or
perhaps sanitized--the concepts of mystical alchemists (see Magee, Mil-
bank, D. Webster, Wirth). German Idealism, it is generally recognized,
was heavily indebted to the mysticism of Jakob Boehme and Meister
Eckhardt—Schelling, Schopenhauer, Hegel, and Novalis being the most
obvious examples—though Philosophy is still at pains to belittle and
minimize the influence of what is often naively misunderstood as inef-
fable, vitalist, and so forth. Hegel himself regarded Boehme as the father
of German philosophy (Wirth). Moreover, the French arts and letters upon
which Deleuze draws (Antonin Artaud is a flagrant example) were as
indebted to the various strains of the Western occult revival as they were
to non-Western shamanisitc practices such as those of the Tarahumara.
As MacKay tells us in an introduction to Deleuze’s youthful work on the
Mathesis Universalis of Romantic occultist Malfatti, intellectuals in post-
war Paris did not exclude Western esotericism as they eagerly delved into
“exotic” beliefs and practices for ideas on how to construct an anti-Fascist
“new earth.” Deleuze evidently learned to mix and match unorthodox
sources where he needed to, as one can surmise from this account:

During his early years (1944-48) at the Sorbonne, Deleuze participated

in monthly salons organized by the wealthy banker Marcel Moré, a
friend of Bataille’s. In the leftist Catholic context of the soirées at Moré’s
apartment and the so-called sessions de la Fortelle hosted in mediaeval-
ist Marie Madeleine Davy’s grand château as “cover” for Resistance
activities, discussions of esoteric topics undoubtedly played a part in
what must have been a heady atmosphere, mingling extra-academic
intellectual exploration with furtive, morally-charged acts of resistance.
Young lights of the Parisian intellectual scene including Deleuze and
his close friend Michel Tournier were also, no doubt, respectful of
mystically-inclined hostess Davy, whose work suggested that the truth
of mediaeval philosophy was to be discovered in a closely-guarded,
esoteric, monastic thought that had remained faithful to the mystery
of divine revelation. (MacKay 17-18)

Deleuze’s contribution to occult literature (Mathesis), which he later ex-

cluded from his corpus, is clearly a result of this activity.

2. Deleuze in the company of Boehme

Deleuze’s intellectual “dabblings in the occult” opened him to a
highly complex and--as I will show--mystical approach to religion, bring-
ing him into a rather startling resonance with that most unorthodox of
all Christian mystics, Jakob Boehme. Reggio (n pag.) points out that as a
result of having come of age in the open-minded milieu of 1940s Paris,

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64 Mark Bonta

“Deleuze…would reply [to Kostas Axelos’s 1964 call to think Difference,

in Vers la Pensée Planétaire] with the invisible, Böhmian-Heideggerian
dark precursor scouring the depths and surfaces in that almost hermetic
phenomenology he deemed Difference and Repetition, where he would
find the ‘larval subject’ with ‘an enigmatic depth.’” Reggio mentions
Boehme several more times, and of particular relevance, in reference to
Jankelevitch’s translation of Boehme’s last work, Mysterium Magnum,
which had become available in Paris in 1945.
Though it is never evident that Deleuze read Boehme, his ontologi-
cal and political alignments are closer to Boehme’s than to the long line
of Western Hermeticists, magi and alchemists who themselves drew not
only from the writings attributed to Hermes Trismegistus but also from
a vast array of Gnostic, Neo-Platonic, Kabbalist, Roman Catholic, Arabic,
Llullian and other sources for their Man-as-microcosm, Men-becoming-
gods philosophies and practices. As Yates describes, the initiatory high
Renaissance magic tradition stretched unbroken from the post-1453
Florence of Marcilio Ficino and Pico de la Mirandola, through Johannes
Reuchlin and the Abbé Trithemius, to Cornelius Agrippa, Paracelsus,
John Dee and Giordano Bruno, spanning 150 years. Thence, despite the
dangerously arch-orthodox, post-Brunian environment of the early 1600s
(in which Boehme was a significant figure), Hermeticism endured via the
Rosicrucian manifestos, the birth of speculative Freemasonry, the occult
leanings of Isaac Newton, Francis Bacon, Gottfried Leibniz, and others,
and finally the efforts of late-18th-century Hermetic Freemasonry and allied
movements, particularly through the Boehmian Louis-Claude de Saint-
Martin, whose writings--along with those of other French mystics such
as Fabre d’Olivet, Saint-Yves d’Alveydre, and Charles Nodier—survived
the turmoil of the early 1800s and formed the bedrock for the explosion
of occultist movements across Europe and the United States known as
the “occult revival.”
Deleuze directly engages virtually nothing of this tradition, and a
primary reason for this is most likely because of Hermeticism’s emphasis
on the primacy of Man as microcosm; the figure of the Magus strives to
become a god in part by bending Nature to his will--an activity surely
distasteful to Deleuze. Thus he prefers instead to draw from a heterodox
collection of misfits such as Antonin Artaud (from whom we get the Body
without Organs), Carlos Castañeda, Hoene Wronski (esoteric calculus),
H. P. Lovecraft, and others who struck his fancy. The thread that runs
through these authors is the characterization of the “beyond” that can
become accessible to us via meditation, drugs, nightmares, and other
mind-altering experiences and techniques. In Deleuze, as in Boehme, and
in the entire Western occult tradition, the “subtle” realms of existence--the

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Rhizome of Boehme and Deleuze 65

“ether”-- go by many names, but access to them is always key to gaining

knowledge of the cosmos as well as the potential for altering it, or at least
altering one’s place in it.
Jakob Boehme stands alone in Western thought for what is often
characterized as the extreme difficulty, even non-sense, of his writings,
“burdened” as they are with alchemical terminology. Koyré called his
language “embarrassing and stammering” (qtd. in Nicolescu 17), his
books repetitious and “barbaric.” Thus we are heavily indebted here to
Weeks for his fine exegesis of Boehme’s oeuvre, as well as Nicolescu’s
physicist’s slant, taking note at the same time that much other scholar-
ship on Boehme is of poor quality, misunderstanding him just as Deleuze
has been so often misconstrued (Bonta and Protevi). Even the superficial
resemblances between Deleuze and Boehme are startling. To begin with,
each of Boehme’s seven major projects reworks the same concepts, yet
he continuously invents new terms for the innumerable forces at play in
his account of the generation and continuity of material and spirit. There
is, Weeks shows, no totalizing Boehmian system; nor, I would argue, is
there a Deleuzean system of this type. In both cases, the endless creativity
of matter--the rhizomatic nature of the cosmos--can produce only partial
accounts, flexible ontologies. Following from this, there is no such thing
as the “mature” Boehme--Aurora, his first, is reworked again and again
until Mysterium Magnum, his last. Weeks points out that the tone certainly
changes as the times grow darker: Aurora is suffused with light and hope
(and angels), while the later works are riven by darkness and gloom on
the cusp of the 30 Years’ War. Boehme’s overarching term for the divine,
generative energy, the “force of all forces” (Weeks 66) of the Cosmos is
known as Salitter, then Matrix, or Tinctur, or Mysterium Magnum. Likewise,
there is a bewildering plethora of terms for the seven forces, source-spirits,
or qualities at work when the Ungrund (uncertainty, groundlessness) de-
velops itself through virtual, intensive, and actual processes. In Deleuze,
we see hints of his ontological project as early as 1946; “mathesis univer-
salis” is taken up again in DR, and with LS, we see the complex nature
of his thought emerge full-fledged, then, and with Guattari, reworked
through engagements with numerous disciplinary concerns across the
humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences for the next quarter-
century. Deleuze doesn’t seem to evolve, but rather evidences a process
of conceptual involution. His terminology, it should go without saying,
nearly gets a complete makeover with each new book.
In terms of influence, Deleuze and Boehme may have some striking
similarities. For Deleuze, it is to early to tell how his legacy will fare in
Western/world thought, though the heterodox nature of his “followers,”
of those who “use” him, suggest that his concepts will eventually become

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66 Mark Bonta

the “ungrounding,” as it were, of the “new world” of chaos and complex-

ity (Bonta and Protevi) as it inevitably makes its way into the hidebound
social sciences and sweeps away the mechanistic paradigms of the natu-
ral sciences. Boehme did turn the world upside down and inside out, as
his closest progenitor, Paracelsus, had also done (C. Webster), but with
apparently a broader appeal than the latter. How else could he become
so beloved to such unlikely bedfellows as George Fox and the Quakers,
via English Behmenism; the Western occult and esoteric traditions, via
Louis-Claude de Saint-Martin; and the German Idealists (except Kant)?
By comparison, Spinoza, more purely immanentist than Boehme, offers
but “rigid and unyielding substance,” as Hegel said (qtd. in Magee 163);
Boehme’s source-spirits that “energize and expand in each other” (ibid.)
herald a dynamic cosmos that is attractive to those who seek not only to
study it or to be at peace with it, or to passively follow “God’s plan,” but
also to intervene in it.
Neither Boehme nor Deleuze dreamed up their exotic multiverses
through cold and sober reflection and “rational” consideration. Boehme’s
battery of strange terms draw heavily from Paracelsian alchemy and an-
gelology (thence the superficial appeal for the supposed resurrectors of
initiatory high magic in the West, such as Eliphas Lévi). But he was in no
way an “ascended master” claiming unbroken access to the secret know-
ledge of the universe. His mystical experience, upon which he claimed his
entire account of the cosmos was based, lasted for a scant 15 minutes--not
much longer than a Dimethyltryptamine (DMT) or Salvia divinorum trip.
There have always been arguments over whether the “doors of percep-
tion” opened for him or not; would Deleuze have sided with the occultists
who have always believed that Boehme accessed some sort of ethereal
“place”? Deleuze himself, according to Boothroyd, was no stranger to
entheogens, so we can draw our own conclusions.
Not unsurprisingly, as fringe figures with “difficult” relationships to
mainstream hierarchal structures, Deleuze and Boehme shared political
alignments. Both were radically anti-hierarchical, only ever begrudging
enough hierarchical striation in the human world to assure that everything
didn’t fly apart, but nothing more. Boehme was tragically peaceful (hence
his attraction for the Behmenist-Quaker lineage) and apparently espoused
an anarchism along the lines of Leo Tolstoy. Deleuze was not openly non-
violent per se, but his “crowned anarchies” and nomadic smooth spaces
suggest at least an intellectual commitment to the removal of as much as
possible of the world State apparatus on the way to the construction of
the Terre Nouvelle. This Deleuzean new earth--a reaction to the horrors
of the 20th century--was something in which Boehme, as much as anyone
in the Rosicrucian era, believed passionately (as did all the progeny of
Hermeticism).

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Rhizome of Boehme and Deleuze 67

I am arguing here that the concepts of Deleuze and Boehme reso-

nate. In what follows, we will explore these resonances further. We’ve
seen a brief outline of this: both “tapped into” visions of the complexity
of the cosmos by various means, and, as Nicolescu asserts for Boehme,
both “received” something “authentic” that transcended the accepted
hierarchical, mechanistic, and/or overly structured cosmologies of their
times, and actually managed to “get it right”--or so it would seem to a
generation familiar with non-linear dynamics and the notion of an open-
ended, fractal multiverse. God, it generally follows from such accounts,
becomes the name for some force or the sum of forces that underpins the
cosmos, or is the cosmos, as it expands in the process of exploring itself.
Thence, the genealogy of such grandiose and dangerous concepts, though
intriguing, is not paramount. Deleuze and Boehme resonate not primarily
because Deleuze knew Malfatti and Wronski who were steeped in Boehme
and who heavily influenced the occultists who influenced the artists from
whom Deleuze drew, nor even because of the German Idealist lineage.
Instead, they resonate primarily because they both tapped into the same
cerebro-cosmic milieu. This, at least, is my suggestion. From there we can
more firmly ascribe many obvious and profound differences between the
two to the radically different epochs that they inhabited. Deleuze’s world
is one of fairly open exchange, while Boehme’s entailed the necessary
engagement with orthodox theology and the careful burying of heretical
notions, even those of Eckhardt and certainly Paracelsus and Bruno. But
on a more fundamental level, Boehme is still a child of his time, the end
of the world (prolonged, it is true) and the beginning of eternity. Boehme
is essentially teleological, and utilizes a modified doctrine of signatures,
à la Paracelsus, to assert correspondences between the celestial and the
terrestrial; he suffers from what Deleuze characterized as semiosis, the
disease of priests—everything is connected, everything is significant.
Nevertheless, both Deleuze and Boehme held a dim view of linear cau-
sality in the matrix of forces; the latter “mistrusted all proof by logical
reason” (Nicolescu 15) and detested the blind obedience to tradition; both
unleashed the free play of concepts in their imaginations (both placed a
heavy emphasis on the role of the imagination) and their works mirror
such perceived activity in the cosmos.
Finally, both Deleuze and Boehme insisted on the univocity of be-
ing. Hallward, though harshly critical of the former, brings them into
the company of Eckhardt and Spinoza in this respect. Furthermore, both
proceeded backward and forward between univocal being (becoming)
and multiplicity. In Boehme, evil is the result of the consolidation of the
many into the One: “Evil emerges when one voice, one spirit, attempts
to rise too high and thus departs from the ‘temperance’…of the clock-
like divine plan of self-revelation” (Weeks 189). Here, as Weeks points

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68 Mark Bonta

out, “clocklike” refers to a wheels-within-wheels, nonlinear image of

“harmonious simultaneity” (Weeks 190) that Boehme often uses, not
any Deistic metaphor. The parallel with Deleuze is striking: uniformity,
homogenization, simplification, brought about by striation, is the Enemy;
“God’s plan” is unbendingly complex and heterogeneous, otherwise the
“chaos containing everything” (Boehme, qtd. in Weeks 196), the deeply-
structured cosmos, brought about by the repetition of difference, would
not be “right”; ultimately, “the world means just what it is” (Weeks 192).

3. Deleuze, Boehme, and the Esoteric

In Logique du Sens, Deleuze links the deployment of esoteric words to
the time of Aion, “eternally Infinitive and eternally neutral…incorporeal,
unlimited, an empty form of time, independent of all matter” (62). Esoteric
words “of the first order…coordinate the two heterogeneous series..”
(ibid., 67): they are virtual words. “They [guarantee] the separation, the
coordination, and the ramifications of series at once” (ibid., 183)--that is
to say, they are quasi-causal operators. From his Lewis Carroll-inspired
theory of esoteric words, Deleuze goes on to suggest the existence of three
languages: real language, ideal language, and esoteric language--the latter
being the very enunciation of “the undifferentiated ground, the groundless
abyss” (ibid., 139). He remarks that “always extraordinary are the mo-
ments in which philosophy makes the Abyss [Sans-fond] speak and finds
the mystical languages of its wrath, its formlessness, and its blindness:
Boehme, Schelling, Schopenhauer” (ibid.,106). The reference to Boehme
invokes the Ungrund, his term for the groundlessness so often referred
to in Difference and Repetition.
In reference to attempts at esoteric language, Deleuze cites as ex-
amples the “grand literal, syllabic, and phonetic synthesis of Court de
Gébelin” (ibid., 140) as well as the “evolutive tonic synthesis” of Jean-
Pierre Brisset. Neither’s projects succeeded (indeed, the latter’s was widely
ridiculed), though de Gébelin, a central figure for occultists ever since,
was originator of the theory that linked the Tarot card deck divinatory
system to ancient Egyptian mystical knowledge of the cosmos. After these
bizarre examples, Deleuze calls for “a new type of esoteric language”
(ibid.,141) spun from impersonal, pre-individual, nomadic singularities.
It seems obvious that the Capitalism and Schizophrenia project involved an
attempt, if not to create an entire esoteric language, at least to generate a
large number of esoteric words that might have the power to let the Plane
of Consistency, the world of Ideas, speak.
In Difference and Repetition, Deleuze had already referred to snark,
blituri, and abraxas as “nonsense words” that express themselves and their
sense together (DR 155). Significantly, Abraxas, via Jung, Hesse, Aleister

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Rhizome of Boehme and Deleuze 69

Crowley and others, refers to an enigmatic god-force of the Gnostic Basi-

lideans, and is associated with that most famous of generative nonsense
words, abracadabra--the supreme magical incantation. The esoteric words
of DR are “linguistic dark precursors” (121; 122-124): they have no iden-
tity, but are refrains (ritornelles). This shows that esoteric language is the
language of Ideas, or better put, is the language of the dark precursor
which, in its simultaneous forward-backward movement, is the Boehm-
ian Schrack (see below) that actualizes the virtual while simultaneously
inscribing a new virtual. He says that “what takes place in the system
between resonating series under the influence of the dark precursor is
called “epiphany” (DR 121).
Boehme made serious attempts to create or reconstruct the Adamic
language of the Cosmos, the “Natursprache” or language of nature, or
at least that language appropriate to authentic human speech--a non-
representational network of utterances that would bear out his belief
that, as he says in The 3 Principles of the Divine Being (Boehme, qtd. in
Weeks, 101), “all things are concealed within and born out of all other
things.” Even the language he uses to describe the cosmos necessarily
reflected his view that, as Weeks puts it, “the very syntax of nature is
wrapped up and interwoven into its own being” (102); “in this language
of ubiquity, verbs overshadow objects and the intransitive supersedes the
transitive relation…spatial relationships are contorted into graphically
inconceivable spiritual equivalents…movement of spirit which unfolds
outward by going into itself” (Weeks 90). Boehme’s Natursprache, akin to
the semi-legendary alchemical green language or language of the birds,
is the speech engendered by physical forces themselves--for example
in its recognition of the importance of the human mouth itself and the
muscles involved in creating sounds. It was to be the language of the
“non-hierarchical intermingling” (Weeks 76-77) of the seven Quellgeister,
the source-spirits--an erotic image in Aurora of “lovers who wrestle…
first one and then the other is on top” (Boehme, qtd. in Weeks, 76-77): an
orgiastic, non-representative language.
In Difference and Repetition, Deleuze had also already developed
a Bergsonian-influenced theory of esoteric time—the time of the prop-
erly understood Nietzschean eternal return, the return of difference,
un-grounded in the pure future: “Eternal return, in its esoteric truth,
concerns…only the third time of the series…time as a pure and empty
form [Aion]…a less simple and much more secret, much more tortuous,
more nebulous circle” (DR 90). He refers to “the ‘every time’ of the final
esoteric circle…In this manner, the ground has been superseded by a
groundlessness, a universal ungrounding which turns upon itself and
causes only the yet-to-come to return” (DR 91).

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70 Mark Bonta

In the 3 Principles, and in other works, Boehme’s concept of esoteric

time is as the whole attractor of the world-to-be, apparently where/when
“God” (Ungrund, or uncertainty, in 40 Questions on the Soul) completes
its self-exploration known as the Cosmos, and eternity is born; what we
inhabit is the matrix or womb of this eternity, in which microcosm (Man)
and macrocosm work toward fusion. In other words, “the world is the
progression from the inchoate desire for self-knowledge, articulating itself
in Creation, to the end that the Eternal Being becomes self-transparent
through its works of self-revelation” (Weeks 192).
Deleuze’s third esoteric realm in DR is that of differential calculus,
particularly following the famous occultist Wronski, and with overtones
of the mathesis universalis of Malfatti; the calculus, in whatever form, and
even with Leibniz, is the language of structured chaos, of the Joycean
chaosmos itself, at its core Hermetic:
This chaos is itself the most positive, just as the divergence is the object
of affirmation. It is indistinguishable from the great work [magnum
opus] which contains all the complicated series, which affirms and
complicates all the series at once. (It is not surprising that Joyce should
have been so interested in [Giordano] Bruno, the theoretician of com-
plicatio.) The trinity complication-explication-implication accounts for
the totality of the system –in other words, the chaos which contains
all, the divergent series which lead out and back in, the differenciator
which relates them one to another. (DR 123)

The differenciator, it should be clarified, is the esoteric word, the dark

precursor, the refrain, the eternal return of the different, the object = x.
To recapitulate: Deleuze employs the term “esoteric” to refer to the
world of Ideas, or to the measurements/maps of abstract machines on
the Plane of Consistency. Thus, esoteric time—the time of Aion, esoteric
language—the language of the dark precursor, and esoteric calculus—the
very equations of difference--all resonate strongly with occultist and mys-
tical beliefs, and deep sympathies can be discovered with the Boehmian
approach.

4. Systems of Simulacra, Source-Spirits and the Matrix

Without getting too far over our heads, let us attempt a rough paral-
lel between the two heptamerous quasi-systems of Deleuze and Boehme:
the former’s collection of series or “sites for the actualisation of ideas”
where “no series enjoys a privilege over others,” and “crowned anarchies
are substituted for the hierarchies of representation” (DR 278); the latter’s
one of “source-spirits” that perpetually give rise to each other, whence
God = Cosmos can come about.
Deleuze’s “systems of simulacra” (DR 277-78)--abstract machines
with their assemblages and collective assemblages of enunciation, to use
the terminology of ATP--are:

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1. “the depth or spatium in which intensities are organized”

[apparently equivalent to the Boehmian Ungrund];
2. “the disparate series these form, and the fields of individu-
ation that they outline (individuating factors)”;
3. “the ‘dark precursor’ which causes them to communicate”
[the Schrack or flash or fright];
4. “the linkages, internal resonances, and forced movements
which result” [here, and in #5, the systems are coalescing];
5. “the constitution of passive selves and larval subjects in the
system, and the formation of pure spatio-temporal dynamisms;”
6. “the qualities and extensions, species and part which form
the double differenciation of the system and cover over the
preceding factors;” [this is equivalent to Boehme’s seventh
source-spirit, corpus (nature)—Earth, cooled substances wait-
ing for rebirth];
7. “the centres of envelopment which nevertheless testify to the
persistence of these factors in the developed world of qualities
and extensities” (DR 277).
In Boehme’s Aurora, the sevenfold series of source-spirits “begin”
with the four preanimate Quellgeister: dry (cold, sharp, astringent, death,
melancholy, the force of Saturn) wrestling with sweet (sanguine, gentle life
source) and bitter (“raging, storming, poisonous, destructive”) sources of
life (Weeks 71), and hot (sour, fire), equated with the biunivocal pairings
such as Moon/Sun, night/day, evil/good, and sin/virtue. The continuous
and complex interactions of these four forces engender and are engendered
by the Schrack--the Flash or fright, “resulting” in the threefold intertangling
of love, i.e. the coordination of limbs, spirits, senses, the magnetic attrac-
tiveness of desire as a universal force; sound--the animation of the first
four, via the Schrack, into music or “perceptive and penetrating spirit and
understanding” and presumably language, and “finally” corpus, cooled,
material things. Corpus, sound, and love are copresent and co-dependent
qualities of the world that humans have access to, whereas dry, sweet,
bitter, and hot are virtual qualities, co-existent with actual qualities. Weeks
(69) helpfully explains that “the[se] all-pervading spirit-forces were like
the virtual consensuality uniting the limbs and organs of the body” and
that “if all of creation was held in a condition of harmonious free-play
by ubiquitous, indwelling forces, these forces could hardly have been
blind or indifferent.” The underpinning energetic matrix of the Boehmian
cosmos is the Salitter, later the Matrix or Tinctur, because “the desire for
life, consciousness, and self-knowledge is woven into the very fabric of
the world” (Weeks 69).
In Boehme’s “middle period” (Weeks 142), the Quellgeister are
re-invented as the seven qualities: attraction/contraction becomes desire,
agitation/pang/fleeing becomes szientz (movement, life, feeling, or cause of
enmity), movement becomes fear (senses, the fire-root of heat), and so forth.

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72 Mark Bonta

5. Deleuze, Boehme, and Non-linear Complexity

What is Philosophy uses new words and a different approach to circle
back around many of the same concepts used by Deleuze and Guattari
since the 1960s. In this work, with more obvious connections drawn to
theories of non-linear dynamics (see Bonta and Protevi), they feature the
revamped chaosmos, the Plane of Immanence,
the formless, unlimited absolute, neither surface nor volume but always
fractal…the abstract machine of which these assemblages [concepts]
are the working parts. Concepts [Ideas] are events, but the plane is
the horizon of events…the indivisible milieu…the image of thought.
(Deleuze and Guattari, What is Philosophy, 36-37)

In an oddly ambivalent way, the complicatio of incinerated Hermeti-

cist Giordano Bruno—who of course had called for the supplanting of
Christianity by Hermes Trismegistus’s version of Egyptian religion—is
given a nod at the twilight of Deleuze’s career: “Putting their work and
sometimes their lives at risk, all philosophers must prove that the dose
of immanence they inject into world and mind does not compromise
the transcendence of a God whose immanence must be attributed only
secondarily (Nicholas of Cusa, Eckhart, Bruno)” (WP 45).
Bonta and Protevi have provided a materialist interpretation of
Deleuze and Guattari akin to those of Brian Massumi and K. A. Pear-
son, whom they cite in their characterization of ATP and other works as
ontologies of non-linear dynamics, albeit with utility for the humanities
and social sciences as well as for the natural sciences. The resonances
between Deleuze and such luminaries as Ilya Prigogine are of course
not accidental. But parallel to the emergence of Deleuze and Guattari
as complexity theorists is the idea that Boehme, as well, achieved some
insight into chaos and complexity. Jocelyn Godwin, in the Foreword to
Nicolescu (4), asserts that Boehme’s “metaphysical temperament” led
him to some flash of insight on the level of those experiences by Planck,
Einstein, Bohr, and Heisenberg, though he lacked the language, context,
and evolved mathematics sufficient to the task (otherwise, one wonders
how much dreadful, mechanistic physics might we have avoided?). Ni-
colescu (9-10) writes:
Like a modern physicist, Boehme is haunted by the idea of the invari-
ance of the cosmic processes and by the paradoxical coexistence of unity
and diversity. All is movement, in a continual creation and annihilation,
in a perpetual genesis where nothing is stable and permanent. But this
movement is not chaotic or anarchic; it is structured, organized by
virtue of an order that is certainly complex and subtle, but neverthe-
less perceivable.

In the chapter “Structure and self-organization in the Boehmian

universe,” Nicolescu portrays the seven Quellgeister as a “self-organizing

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Rhizome of Boehme and Deleuze 73

cycle or process” (21) dynamically interacting with a virtual threefold

structure of light, dark, and a third, reconciling force. Here he is referring
to Boehme’s 1618 The 3 Principles of the Divine Being that describes three
interpenetrating cosmic principles: matter, light, and matter transformed
by light, which then interact with the Quellgeister, but are ultimately
animated by the Tinctur, the “mysterious energy which sublimates and
transforms things” (Weeks 101). Weeks provides us a very useful table
(108) distilled from The 3 Principles that shows how the interaction of
simple forces spawns complex forces that create, sustain, and destroy
(simultaneously) the dark-world (fire-world), the light-world, and this
world, which is formed in the middle of these two. Weeks says that from
the interaction of the seven source-spirits “many vital centers [are formed],
each of which continues and varies the generating qualities” (109). Thus,
for example, the first source-spirit is transformed from dry into attraction
or contraction, whereas the second, sweet, becomes agitation, pang, or flee-
ing. The interaction of these two is rubbing or opposition. The third, bitter,
becomes movement, as in liveliness, such that 1+2+3 = revolving. Schrack
becomes release and passivity, such that 1+2+3+4 = the flaring up of the
flash; and so forth. Weeks adds that “simplifications are unavoidable
since the interactions are characterized as simultaneous or overlapping
occurrences of a single, many-sided process displaying different features
when one focuses on one or another of its facets” (107) and tells us that
his table is a “variable palimpsest [that] synthesizes overt references to an
escalating chain reaction of mechanical forces…” (108). So much for any
mysterious vitalist force—Boehme was intent on exorcising any ghost by
arriving at complexity via energies that could, ultimately, be explained
and described.
To summarize: the concepts of Deleuze and Boehme appear to
resonate when interpreted in light of what we know of the non-linear
dynamics of the cosmos. What is presented above is merely a first approxi-
mation of what could ultimately yield a rich field of discoveries, when
both are read not only parallel to each other, but also in light of adequate
critiques (because in terms of inadequate interpretations, Boehme has
already generated several centuries’ worth). Thus, can we at least make
the bold claim that both Boehme and Deleuze, above and beyond what
most others have achieved in what passes for the Western onto-theological
“tradition,” explore the virtual and emergent properties of the non-linear
multiverse? Their conceptual paths criss-cross despite radically different
milieux and audiences; it is not that one must be forced into equivalence
with the other, but rather that both are mouthpieces for the chaosmos.
Neither discard God, but they render It unrecognizable, an abomination.
Delta State University

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74 Mark Bonta

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Webster, Charles. Paracelsus: Medicine, Magic and Mission at the End of Time. New Haven:
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