Kerslake, C..

The Somnambulist and the Hermaphrodite:

Deleuze and Johann Malfatti de Montereggio and
Occultism
APRIL 2007. Culture Machine, North America, 028 04
2008.
Culture Machine, InterZone

The Somnambulist and the Hermaphrodite:

Deleuze and Johann de Montereggio and
Occultism
Christian Kerslake
One of Gilles Deleuze's first articles, published in 1946, was an introduction to a new French
edition of an arcane work of philosophy bearing the title Mathesis: or Studies on the Anarchy
and Hierarchy of Knowledge, by one Dr Johann Malfatti de Montereggio.1 Deleuze was twentyone when he published his introduction to the French edition of Malfatti's Mathesis, which was
the first new edition for a hundred years. 'Mathesis, Science and Philosophy' is one of a group of
five texts he published in the period 1945-7, and which he subsequently repudiated and omitted
from French bibliographies of his work. 2 In the previous French edition of Malfatti's work
(published in 1849), the entire book had been given the abbreviated title of what is in fact the
first of its five essays, La Mathse. The edition to which Deleuze adds his introduction in 1946
is a revised translation of this volume.3 The original book had first been published in Leipzig in
1845 as Studien ber Anarchie und Hierarchie des Wissens, mit besonderer Beziehung auf die
Medicin [Studies on the Anarchy and Hierarchy of Knowledge, with special reference to
Medicine]. The titles and topics of the five separate but interconnected studies are enough to
show that we are dealing with a rather curious volume:
1. 'Mathesis as Hieroglyph or Symbolism of the Triple Life of the Universe, or the Mystical
Organon of the Ancient Indians' is a detailed account of the principles of esoteric numerology.
2.'Only in the Process, Not in the Product' is a development of Schellingian Naturphilosophie,
with frequent reference to alchemy.
3. On the Architectonic of the Human Organism, Or the Triple Life in the Egg and the Triple
Egg in Life' is an application of a nature-philosophical notion of embryogenesis to the whole of
human life.
4. 'On Rhythm and Type, Consensus and Antagonism in General, and Particularly in Man' is an
analysis of periodicity in physiology.
5. 'On the Double Sex in General and on Human Sex in Particular', is an analysis of human
sexuality from the perspective of the esoteric notion of the hermaphrodite.

Who was this Malfatti and by what narrow route did the young Deleuze come upon his work?
The name is not familiar from histories of Western philosophy, nor does it appear in histories of
German thought in the nineteenth century. But it turns out that this enigmatic figure left
important traces in a number of distinct areas in modern thought and culture. He was born in
1775 in Italy, but in the early 1800s based himself in Vienna, becoming a physician in the
German Romantic tradition, a follower of Schellingian Naturphilosophie. He became soughtafter as a physician, and became personal physician to members of Napoleon Bonaparte's
family, and to Beethoven, as well as to other figures from royalty and the nobility. Studies on the
Anarchy and Hierarchy of Knowledge was his second book, published thirty-six years after his
first, an Entwurf einer Pathogenie aus der Evolution und Revolution des Lebens [Sketch of a
Pathogenesis out of the Evolution and Revolution of Life] (1809). Another work on medicine
followed, Neue Heilversuche (1847), and what appears to be his final work, published in 1853,
was an account of Kartoffel-krankheit, with particular reference to the hermaphroditic nature of
the potato (Malfatti 1853). He died in 1859. Although it is true that his two main books are
rarely referred to in histories of Naturphilosophie, it turns out that Anarchy and Hierarchy
exerted a significant influence in a more subterranean milieu of modern culture. When Ren
Gunon, the leading French esotericist of his time, reviewed the 1946 edition of Malfatti,
(whose book was 'one of those which is often spoken about, but which few have read'), he
acknowledged the historical value of the re-publication, due to 'the considerable role that this
work and others of the same genre played in the constitution of occultism at the end of the 19th
century' (Gunon 1947: 88). Malfatti's influence is found most explicitly in the work of one of
the leaders of the esoteric movement of Martinism, Grard Encausse, otherwise known as
'Papus' (see Reggio 2003). Papus appended a detailed analysis of Malfatti's Mathesis to his 1894
medical dissertation L'Anatomie philosophique et ses divisions, and in his ensuing occult works
he continued to refer to Malfatti at crucial points.4
Martinism was one of the main currents of occultism in the nineteenth century, originating in the
thought of Martins de Pasqually (?-1774), and his follower Louis Claude Saint-Martin (17431803). The former, a Spanish or Portuguese Jew, had inaugurated a number of secret societies in
France devoted to theurgic ritual, while his follower Saint-Martin was the author of mystical
tracts (including one entitled L'Homme du dsir) which gave primacy to the mystical task of
interior transformation over ritual (Harvey 2005). By the end of the 19th century, a number of
Rosicrucians, Freemasons, Illuminati and theosophists inhabited Paris and assembled to form a
new movement of French Martinism, in which Papus and Stanislas de Guaita were the
intellectually dominant figures.5 The theoretical foundations of late French Martinism were
provided by Malfatti and Hone Wronski (also cited by Deleuze, in his main philosophical
treatise, Difference and Repetition). The philosophical ideas of Malfatti and Wronski mediated
the Martinists' access to the traditional texts of Hermetic and occult philosophy.
The new edition of Anarchy and Hierarchy for which Deleuze wrote the introduction was issued
in a limited edition by a small publishing house, 'Griffon d'Or', which published books mostly
on occult themes in the immediate aftermath of the war, including a number of books on
Martinism. The unnamed editors revised the 1849 translation, reproducing the exceedingly
strange illustrations of Indian divinities and hermaphrodites that Malfatti had included in the
German version.6 Given that Malfatti's name does not appear ever again in Deleuze's writings,
we could be forgiven for thinking that Deleuze's introduction to Malfatti's Mathesis is merely a
youthful dalliance with occultism. But occult themes continue to run throughout Deleuze's
work: not only does the term 'mathesis' appear at crucial points of Difference and Repetition,
along with a weird emphasis on the esoteric use of the mathematical calculus, but his interest in
somnambulism, the notion of the world as an egg, the theory of the second birth and the
recurring image of the hermaphrodite all refer back to ideas found in Malfatti's book. Many

ideas that can be traced back to Malfatti's Mathesis resurface in disguise in one of Deleuze's
valedictory texts, 'To Have Done with Judgment', published in 1993 in Critique et Clinique.7
Could the esoteric theory of mathesis found in Malfatti's Anarchy and Hierarchy be the key that
unlocks the mystery of Deleuze's avowedly 'esoteric' use of the calculus in Difference and
Repetition? There Deleuze explicitly says that there is a mathesis universalis that corresponds to
his theory of Ideas (Deleuze 1968: 181; 190). Strangely, Deleuze's admission that his interest
lies in 'the esoteric history of differential philosophy' (ibid, 170) has been overlooked. It has
been assumed that by 'esoteric' Deleuze simply means 'obscure'; and of course it is true that the
figures of Solomon Mamon, Hone Wronski and Jean Bordas-Desmoulin are rarely referred to
in standard histories of the mathematical calculus. But it is also true that both Malfatti's mathesis
and Wronski's use of the calculus played important roles in the birth of modern occultism.
Sarane Alexandrian writes that 'Wronski holds, in occult philosophy, the place that Kant holds in
classical philosophy' (Alexandrian 1983: 133).8 Both Malfatti and Wronski had arrived in the
nebulous terrain of occultism after apprenticeships in post-Kantian philosophy. Wronski was the
author of the first exhaustive presentation of Kant's philosophy in French (Philosophie critique
dcouverte par Kant, 1803). He subsequently developed a post-Kantian theory of calculus and
attempted to develop a cabala-influenced philosophy of the absolute (which he called
'Messianism') that would surpass that of Schelling and Hegel. Malfatti was a Schellingean
nature-philosopher who developed and synthesised Schelling's ideas in the areas of medicine,
somnambulism and mythology. Deleuze's interest in these thinkers reveals legacies of postKantian philosophy which are quite other to the landscapes of Marxism, neo-Kantianism,
existentialism, etc, that are familiar to contemporary continental philosophy. It is a possibility
worth considering that one of Deleuze's clandestine aims, from the beginning, was to contribute
to a specifically post-Kantian resurrection of the esoteric notion of mathesis.
In his fascinating survey of occultist philosophy, the surrealist Sarane Alexandrian connects both
Malfatti's account of 'mathesis' and the philosophy of Wronski with an older occult tradition of
'arithmosophy'. The notion of mathesis, he tells us, is used by theologians and occultists to
denote the conjugation of metaphysics and mathematics in a scientia Dei, or science of God. For
instance, in 1660 the bishop of Vigenavo, Juan Caramuel, wrote a Mathesis audax, in which he
declared that 'there are numerous questions in the philosophy of the divine which can not be
understood without mathesis' (cited in Alexandrian 1983: 112). Frances A. Yates, the scholar of
the Hermetic tradition, has brought to light a tradition of 'mathesis' that first fully emerges in
European thought in the work of Ramon Lull, but which has influences further back in Arabic
alchemy and the Hermetic writings of 3rd century Alexandria. Yates's aim was to show that
Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake not because of his affirmation of Copernicanism, but
because of his attempts to initiate a 'new religion of Love, Art, Magic and Mathesis' (Yates
1966: 371; Yates 1964: 354). In his introduction, Deleuze places Malfatti in a more mainstream
philosophical tradition, reminding us that, despite his mind-body dualism, Descartes too
(according to Baillet's biography) dreamed of a mathesis universalis. But he could have cited
other earlier and later philosophical sources with more overt connections with hermetic
esotericism, such as Leibniz or Novalis (both important to his work). Leibniz searched for an
arithmetica universalis or scientia generalis, which would allow one to deal with all possible
permutations and combinations in all disciplines. Novalis in turn took up the project of an
arithmetica universalis (III, 23-25; Dyck 1959: 22). This universal mathesis was to include 'all
mental operations, volitional and aesthetic experiences, and all knowledge' (Dyck 1959: 93).
After Wronski and Malfatti, philosophical interest in mathesis declines, and the works of Papus
and Guaita are notably lacking in philosophical references (apart from to Wronski and Malfatti
themselves). But the promises made for mathesis were very great. Deleuze cites Malfatti's claim
that 'mathesis shall be for man in his relations with the infinite, what locomotion is for space'
(Deleuze 1946: xv). So the question is: what happened to mathesis? Was it ever declared to be

impossible? Did anyone ever think there was any need to declare it impossible? That Malfatti
and Wronski both explicitly explore the possibility of a post-Kantian mathesis, and that Deleuze,
the great 'contemporary' French philosopher, takes them up on it, suggests that the question of
the meaning of mathesis needs to be posed from scratch. Kantian philosophy may have killed
'intellectual intuition' -- but did it kill mathesis?
I do not attempt to answer any of these questions in this essay, the primary purpose of which is
to provide some basic historical information about Johann Malfatti de Montereggio, whose life
turns out to be almost as bizarre and fascinating as his ideas. The aim here is to sketch out the
background and context of Malfatti's life and thought, not to attempt a philosophical analysis of
his ideas, nor of the details of his possible influences on Deleuze's thought.9 His ideas are
frankly so strange that a basic reality-check on his existence and movements needs to be carried
out before any further examination of his work. The first section looks at Malfatti's background
in medicine and Schellingian Naturphilosophie, while the second section looks at the context for
his turn to esotericism in Studies on the Anarchy and Hierarchy of Knowledge. In the concluding
section, I make some suggestive remarks about Deleuze's relationship to Malfatti and occultism.

Johann Malfatti de Montereggio and Romantic Medicine

Malfatti was born in Italy in 1775 and in the last decade of the eighteenth century commenced a
study of medicine under Luigi Galvani in Bologna. Galvani had devised the famous experiment
in which the limbs of frogs were electrically stimulated to produce contractions; but he had

insisted that the electricity originated in the animal rather than in the metal conductors which
supported it, and his opponent Volta was proved right. Malfatti, however, remained devoted to
Galvani, who is discussed and lauded in the second essay of Anarchy and Hierarchy. In 1795
Malfatti moved to Vienna to work at the General Hospital, under Joseph Frank, who was his
next major influence. Frank was an enthusiastic follower of the medical theories of John Brown
(1735-1798), whose drug-based therapy was taken up with great enthusiasm by physicians
influenced by Romanticism, and in the first years of the nineteenth century, by Schelling
himself. It is essential to understand a little about 'Brunonian' medicine if we are to understand
Malfatti's background.
John Brown was a theologian who turned his attention to medicine after having discovered the
healing properties of opium, which he used to cure his gout. He had had little medical training
when he wrote the Elements of Medicine, published in 1790 in two volumes of church Latin. His
basic idea was that organisms should not be treated on the mechanical model as conduits for
external excitations, but that they also have an internal excitability. What the doctor should do is
evaluate the combination of degrees of internal excitability with the quantities of external
stimulus received. Living beings respond to external and internal stimuli: external exciting
powers include heat, wine and poisons, while internal stimuli arise from the bodily functions.
Pathology can be treated as a result of overstimulation (sthenia) or understimulation (asthenia).
Overstimulation leads to an exhaustion of the internal quantity of excitability, while
understimulation leaves quantities of the intrinsic activity of the organism unused. 'Health'
emerges when the appropriate quantity of stimulation is found for the patient. One of Brown's
well-known dicta was that 'Life is a forced state; if the exciting powers are withdrawn, death
ensues as certainly as when the excitability is gone' (Brown 1795: I, cxxvii). Since the organism
necessarily depends on stimuli from the external world, the state of balance must be achieved
rather than presupposed, and disease is to be treated by supporting the self-regulating power of
the organism.10
Brown thought that most illness was caused by lack of stimulation, which could be remedied
with various means, ranging from spirituous liquors, alkaloids such as ether, while 'highest of
all, as far as experiments have yet thrown light upon the subject, is opium' (Brown 1795: I, 1078). He specifically used liquid laudanum, also known then as the 'wine of the Turks'. Brown
disagreed with prevailing opinion that opium was a sedative, citing its use by Turkish soldiers as
a counter-example. He claimed that opium was the best treatment for gout, as well as numerous
other disorders. 'Opium is not a sedative; on the contrary, as it is the most powerful of all the
agents that support life, and that restore health, and a truly blessed remedy, to the divine virtue
of which the lives of so many mortals have been owing, and in future, will be owing; so it must
be identified that spasms and convulsions, over which it has such great power, do not consist in
increased, but diminished excitement, and that opium cures them by the same operation by
which it cures any other of the diseases, depending on debility' (Brown 1795: I, 241). Almost a
hundred years after the Western criminalisation of drugs, it is hard for us to imagine how easily
available and widely consumed drugs like opium and hashish were in the nineteenth century. For
centuries, opium in particular had been in common use in Europe as a universal panacea (for
instance, a census in 312 AD in Rome revealed 793 shops selling opium in the city of Rome
alone; Escohotado 1996: 20). In the nineteenth century opium was even regularly administered
to children (under brand names such as Atkinson's Infant's Preservative, or Street's Infant
Quietness) (Kohn 1987: 54), although the practice was also condemned by some physicians.
Although the addictive properties of opium had long been known (see Lewin 1924: 27-74), and
accounts such as Quincey's Confessions of an Opium Eater (1821) were widely read, it was not
until a decade or so after the invention of morphine, during the 1830s -- and then, even more
decisively, after the derivation of heroin in 1874 -- that opiates began to cause widespread
visible death and destruction across Europe and beyond.11 During the first half of the nineteenth

century, a large body of medical opinion (dating its lineage back to figures such as Thomas
Sydenham in the seventeenth century and beyond) still held strongly to the view that opium was
essential to medicine, and should be harnessed and put to more precise use for a variety of
ailments, rather than legally prohibited. Although contemporary reports of Brown's behaviour
suggest that he was in fact a total, almost maniacal, opium addict,12 the aim of the Elements of
Medicine -- to transform the problem of opium through the creation of a 'science' of dosages -would nevertheless have been granted a welcome even by many sober-minded doctors working
in Britain at the end of the eighteenth century.
At the turn of the nineteenth century Brown's work suddenly gained rapid popularity in some
parts of Germany and Austria, through the efforts of Andreas Rschlaub and Adalbert Marcus,
who ran the hospital in Bamberg in northern Bavaria. They developed their own
Erregbarkeitstheorie (excitability theory) on Brunonian principles. Rschlaub showed that
Brunonian 'excitability' was different in kind to Haller's more mechanical theory of 'Reiz'
(irritability'), to which it bore some resemblance. The difference was that Brown posited an
internal excitability which is actualised by the reception of stimuli; the response to stimuli was
therefore the combined product of the stimuli and the internal excitability (Tsouyopoulos 1988:
67). Stimulation does not only come from the outside, but also triggers the powers of internal
excitability. Quantitative measurements therefore had to express a proportional relationship. The
emergence of Fichte's philosophy in 1794 provided another context for the reception of Brown's
ideas. 'Fichte's Wissenschaftlehre is the theory of excitability', wrote Novalis, excitedly (Werke
3: 383). Fichte's account of the relationship between the 'I' and the 'not-I' found its biological
correlate in the relationship between the organism and its environment.
Schelling too came under Brown's influence, and saw in Brunonian medicine the domain in
contemporary science which was most suitable to the development of Naturphilosophie. In
1799, the German idealist movement in Jena had encountered a major setback when Fichte was
dismissed from the university of Jena on the charge of atheism. Schelling, who was not under
attack, left Jena in solidarity with Fichte, and devoted himself for the next few years to
medicine, in which he had put his hopes for the development of his version of idealist
philosophy. 'If natural scientists are all . . . priests of the powers of nature, still the physician
guards the sacred fire at the centre' (Werke 7, 131). His chosen medical instructor was Rschlaub
in Bamberg, where he stayed before going on to Vienna, where the Brunonian movement was
also gaining force.13 Schelling's First Outline of a System of a Philosophy of Nature (1799) was
strongly influenced by Brown's ideas.
I have to say that Brown was the first to understand the only true and genuine principles of all
theories of organic nature, insofar as he posited the ground of life in excitability. Brown was the
first who had had enough sense or fortitude to propound that paradox of living phenomena, at all
times understood, but never articulated. He was the first who understood that life consists
neither in an absolute passivity nor in an absolute activity, that life is a product of a potency
higher than the merely chemical, but without being supernatural, i.e. a phenomenon submitted to
no natural laws or natural forces (Schelling 1799: 68).
In this important 1799 system, Schelling attempts to put Brunonian medicine on a more solid
Naturphilosophische basis, 'deducing' the concept of excitability according to transcendental
principles. He also attempts to solve the problem of whether opium is a stimulant or sedative by
dialectical means (ibid, 63; cf. 162). Schelling's own involvement with opium in this period has
not been well-documented, but certain inferences can be made. It is known, for instance, that in
1800 Schelling prescribed opium to Auguste Bhmer, the 16 year-old daughter of his partner,
Caroline Schlegel, who died as a result (Zeltner 1954: 36). Whether Schelling continued to use

opium after this tragedy is unclear, but his novel Clara, written after the death of Caroline
(1810), is full of implicit references to the hallucinatory properties of opium.
Schelling found in Brown the materials for a dynamic account of the development of the lifeprocess. He suggested that his concept of a 'formative drive' operating through biological
evolution was identical to Brown's: that 'organic formation happens only through the mediation
of the process of excitability' (Schelling 1799: 48) 14However, he thought that Brown's
apprehension of the principle of excitability was 'discovered more through a lucky groping than
deduced in a scientific way', and stated that Rschlaub was the only one of 'Brown's disciples
[to] have understood the scientific seeds which lie in his principles' (ibid, 68). Brown's own
account of the dynamic relationship between stimulation and excitability could be confusing.
For instance, overstimulation resulted in the exhaustion of internal excitability, but the latter
itself also needed to be supported, and the prescription of stimulants was therefore also
necessary, so Brown's argument went, for overstimulation as well as understimulation. Thus,
rather than calming over-excitation through bloodletting (as was still common), one simply had
to administer more opium. Schelling tried to elicit the dialectical meaning of such apparent
contradictions. The poles of sthenia and asthenia as states of disease required that one explain
what a 'normal amount of excitability' was. Schelling argued that as every individual organism is
in a continual state of self-reproduction, it requires a special 'rhythm', in which the degrees of
sensible receptivity and 'magnetic' activity are balanced. Disease emerges when the rhythm of
self-reproduction is disturbed, and qualitative changes result in the organism (ibid 168-172; see
Tsouyopoulos 1988).
Schelling's attempt to transmute 'Brunonian' medicine into a system of Naturphilosophie in turn
found its own enthusiastic disciples in Vienna in the early years of the new century. From a
history of the Vienna Medical School in the nineteenth century (Lesky 1965), we learn that
Malfatti played a leading role in this movement. Malfatti worked at the Vienna Medical School
as an assistant under Johann Peter Frank (and his son Joseph). Lesky writes that under the
Franks and Malfatti, 'the so-called 'stimulating' medicines, opium, cinchona bark, camphor,
wine, etc, now dominated the therapy of the Vienna clinic', in place of the customary purgatives,
laxatives and expectorants (Lesky 1965: 10). However, the new wave of Brunonian medicine
soon ran into problems after it emerged that mortality rates in the Vienna General Hospital had
risen as a result of its influence. Patients were frequently to be found lying drunk in their beds,
after imbibing large, 'invigorating' doses of wine (ibid, 11). Given Brown's fervent advocacy of
opium, it is likely that Malfatti and his cohorts were also deploying large quantities of that
substance. In Anarchy and Hierarchy, Malfatti explicitly mentions the use of opium as a means
of stimulating what he calls 'artificial fire' (Malfatti 1845: 194). 15 His deployment of
alchemical ideas in the book also suggests the use of more unusual compounds (such as arsenic
and mercury), but it is unlikely he was using these at the Vienna Hospital; this side of his
research was something he went on to develop only later.
Despite the scandal at the hospital, Malfatti did not relinquish Romantic medicine. He became a
friend of Ignaz Paul Vital Troxler (1780-1866), a follower of Schelling, whom he was stimulated
to study. The main publication by Schelling on medicine at this point was the 1799 system, with
its speculative appropriation of Brunonian medicine. In 1809 Malfatti published his first major
work, Entwurf einer Pathogenie aus der Evolution und Revolution des Lebens [Sketch of
Pathogenesis from the Evolution and Revolution of Life], which developed Schellingian
Naturphilosophie through the more practical medical ideas of Brown and Rschlaub.
Specifically, Malfatti attempts to apply the principles of Schelling and Oken within the sphere of
human ontogeny. Prefaced by a long introduction in which Malfatti discusses the current state of
Naturphilosophie, the aim of the work is to present a complete account of the ontogeny of the
human being, from 'The Life of the Fetus' (Ftusleben), through childhood, youth, maturity and

old age, ending in 'Marasmus' (wasting-away). Schelling's ideas about the self-productive nature
of the organism, along with his theory of 'metamorphosis', permit a determination of the internal
polarities and thresholds of transformation of each stage of development. Already for Malfatti,
the embryo is the primary model of self-development, with spatial divisions arising
autonomously in the egg through polarisation of the liver and brain. In The Anarchy and
Hierarchy of Knowledge, the model of the embryo becomes completely dominant, and 'embryos'
are uncovered in the abdomen, the thoracic region, and even in the head of the developing
human being. The Sketch of Pathogenesis is more conventional, albeit within the norms of
early-nineteenth century Naturphilosophie. Malfatti is concerned to identify periodic rhythms
within the body itself, for instance, the cycle of respiration, sleeping and waking, the periodic
sexual impulses in male and female (on rhythm and type, cf. Malfatti 1809: xxii). Each
developmental stage has its own governing polarity, and disequilibrium within this polarity is
correlated with the tendency towards particular pathologies. Each age has its own particular
diseases (childhood has its rickets and scrofula, youth phthisis [tuberculosis or lung disease
generally], maturity has arthritis, old age scirrhus and cancer). The childhood propensity to
rickets, according to Malfatti, is due to 'the abnormally persisting direction of the two
predominant polarities of head and stomach, brain and liver' (Malfatti 1809: 58; Lesky 1965:
39).
By all accounts after the publication of his first book Malfatti went on to become highly soughtafter as a physician. He was physician to the brother and sister of Napoleon Bonaparte, as well
as Napoleon II, the Duke of Reichstadt.16 He is said to have had an outstanding reputation as a
doctor, and in 1815 the foreign heads of state who convened for the Congress of Vienna
reputedly benefited from sessions with Malfatti (Altman 1999: 84). The fact that Malfatti gained
such success as a physician to royalty, nobility and politicians using a Brunonian system of
medicine suggests that, if Schelling's Naturphilosophische transmutation of Brunonian medicine
failed to achieve acceptance in the subsequent 'official' history of science and medicine, it found
a comfortable niche as a system of medicine for lites. Perhaps it remained a more or less 'secret'
system of medicine, until it was discovered and developed by the French Martinists at the end of
the century.
From 1809 until 1817, Malfatti was Beethoven's doctor. The composer and the doctor enjoyed a
close but turbulent relationship, and Malfatti attended the master at his death-bed. Given
Malfatti's development of Schelling's appropriation of Brunonianism, we can imagine Malfatti
preparing an elaborate system of invigorating and intoxicating potions for Beethoven in this
period (which coincides with the end of the second period in the composer's development and
the beginning of the experimental final period). In 1814, Beethoven wrote a cantata for his
doctor (Un lieto brindisi, Werke ohne Opuszahl, 103); 'Fr Elise' was written for Malfatti's
niece, Therse. However, in 1816, Beethoven began to develop the peculiar illness which was to
plague him until his death. There remains continuing doubt about the nature of the illness, but
Gail Altman has noted that its symptoms are consistent with arsenic poisoning. Whispers about
Beethoven's condition of mind persisted throughout his lifetime, but these rumours reached a
pitch in 1817, 'when the Master showed a high degree of excitability and his behaviour and
appearance deteriorated' (Nettl 1957: 99). In April 1817, there is a sudden breaking off of
relations with Malfatti, who Beethoven then went on to denounce in a letter as a 'sly Italian [ein
pfiffiger italiener] [who] had powerful secondary motives [so starke Nebenabsichten] where I
was concerned and lacked both honesty [Redlichkeit]and insight [Einsicht]' (Letter of June 19,
1817 to Countess Erddy; in Beethoven 1961: II, 683). Nevertheless, Beethoven returned to
Malfatti for help in 1827 during his final illness. Malfatti prescribed the ailing Beethoven a
mixture of rum, tea and sugar, and Beethoven wrote 'Miracle of miracles! . . . Only through
Malfatti's science shall I be saved' (cited in Thayer 1921: 1032). However, Beethoven soon
began to overindulge in the frozen punch, and died a few months later. The possibility that

Malfatti correctly saw that Beethoven's illness was incurable and therefore tacitly licensed his
overindulgence in the punch should not be ruled out, and in fact this is how Thayer presents it in
his life of Beethoven (Thayer 1921: 1032). This in turn leads to the possibility that the reason
for Beethoven's break with Malfatti was a conflict over dosages; Beethoven may have been
overindulging in 1816-17, which would have been linked with his change in behaviour and
appearance.
In 1816, Malfatti took up Mesmer's theory of animal magnetism in a modified
Naturphilosophische version. 'He had meanwhile become a practitioner very much in demand in
Vienna . . . and treated patients suffering from paralysis and chronic singultus by magnetic
healing but without a baquet' (Lesky 1965: 31).17 In 1817 Malfatti became personal physician
to the Archduchess Beatrix of Este, and was sent by the Viennese court to investigate animal
magnetism in the clinic of K.C. Wolfart, a follower of Mesmer who had set up a state subsidised
clinic in Berlin for the magnetic treatment of the poor (Gauld 1992: 89). In 1831, he was asked
by Metternich, the Austrian prime minister, to care for his seriously ill son. In 1834, there is
record of a visit to the Catholic theosophist Franz von Baader, with whom he discussed the
decadence of medicine due to materialism. Both von Baader and Malfatti saw in animal
magnetism the proof of the incorrectness of materialism, but agreed that Mesmer himself had
been an 'arch-materialist' whose therapy could only be understood properly within Schellingian
pantheism (Faivre 1996: 53). In 1837, Malfatti was honoured by the Austrian government, and
became a member of the nobility (an Edler). He became the first president of the Viennese
Society of Doctors (Gesellschaft der rzte), founded in 1837 (Schnbauer 1944: 403). In 1845,
when he was seventy years old, he published Studies on the Anarchy and Hierarchy of
Knowledge. In Anarchy and Hierarchy, Malfatti recalls presenting his ideas on mathesis in 1841
in a speech at the end of his term as president of the Viennese Gesellschaft (Malfatti 1845: 7).
Despite Malfatti's ongoing success with members of lite society, a series of his patients appear
to have mysteriously died in his care. No doubt our first suspicions will be directed at the
notorious Brunonian system of medicine itself. However, the truth may not be so simple.
Malfatti is suspected of being a state assassin in Gail Altman's historical 'whodunnit', Fatal
Links: The Curious Deaths of Beethoven and the Two Napoleons (1999). According to Altman,
Malfatti poisoned Beethoven, diluting lead into the punch, dispatching both Napoleon's sister
and the Duke of Reichstadt in similar ways. Altman suggests that Malfatti was working for the
Austrian government (who had interests in suppressing the Duke), and that this explains how he
remained unscathed, becoming a wealthy and respected figure in the nobility, even after a series
of his high-profile patients had expired (Altman 1999: 83-90, 181-205). She concludes that
Malfatti is the prime suspect in 'the crime of the nineteenth century' (196).
One starts to feel that there something a little too perfect about that name, Malfatti, with its
literal meaning of 'ill-fashioned', and its semantic resonances (mal fati . . . 'bad deeds'?, 'ill
fated'?, or just 'badly made'?). Who was this character? Was he one of the biggest medical
buffoons in history, accidentally killing the greatest composer in the West? Was he a state
assassin? Or was he in fact just an excellent Brunonian doctor, who unsuspectingly exposed the
disastrous shortcomings and dangers of Brunonianism as a 'system' of medicine? Let us note
only that in late 2005, a sample of Beethoven's hair showed the presence of vast quantities of
lead, thus appearing to confirm the theory that he was poisoned. Beethoven forums on the
internet are currently alive with speculations about the doings of the sinister Doctor Malfatti.
But the truth may be more complicated than Gail Altman makes out. Her thesis is highly
speculative, and overlooks the possibility that Malfatti's 'poisoning' of his clients could be the
result of overzealous application of Brunonian medicine, mixed with alchemical recipes
involving toxic minerals. For instance, if arsenic were detected in Beethoven's remains, that
would not necessarily mean that he was deliberately poisoned by it. Although arsenic was

indeed the poison of choice at this time, it was used as an aphrodisiac and for health reasons, as
well as having a long tradition of alchemical use.18 It seems possible that arsenic, along with
other toxic substances, might have served as elixirs in Malfatti's pharmacy, to be used in
carefully regulated dosages, rather than as poisons. Whether the lead found in Beethoven's hair
can be traced back to Malfatti will be a very difficult question to answer, and is complicated by
the fact that Malfatti's medicine was by this point (1827) already highly unorthodox.
We leave aside now the question of whether Malfatti was responsible for the 'crime of the
nineteenth century'. More research needs to be done. The tantalising report that the European
heads of state paid him a visit at an international congress in 1817 certainly raises the possibility
at least that Malfatti played an important role in an system of medicine for use by lites, the
risks of which might indeed have been known by those who felt it necessary to take them, in
order to gain and/or maintain power, be it creative or political. However, Malfatti's turn in the
1830s to mesmerism and theosophy, culminating in the publication of Anarchy and Hierarchy, is
still unaccounted for. The next section aims to bring to light the historical background of
Malfatti's transition from Brunonian Naturphilosophie in the Sketch of a Pathogenesis to the
extravagant theosophical theories of mathesis that characterise Anarchy and Hierarchy.

Malfatti and the Esoteric Turn of German Idealism

In 1806, Schelling made the acquaintance of the Franz von Baader (1765-1841), who at that
time doubled as an engineer and as a vocal advocate for the introduction of the theosophical
thinking of Bhme, Saint-Martin and the German mystical tradition into Catholic thought and
practice. For Baader, the term 'theosophy' indicated a world-view in which human consciousness
is understood as the coming to consciousness of God himself. In Bhme's theosophy, the course
of the world, its development in nature and history, was understood as the manifestation of a
drama taking place in God himself. Baader had found in Bhme a means of experiencing the life
of God, and thus achieving a version of the intellectual intuition apparently excluded by Kant.
Baader also introduced the discussion of sexuality into theosophy. In an article published in
Schelling's Jahrbcher in 1808, Baader suggested that there is an analogy between knowing and
sexuality, and that sexual instinct and consciousness contains a neglected key to cognition. He
went on to develop an elaborate theory of love, in which the image of the hermaphrodite served
as the symbol of the divine union achieved through the sexual act (see Betanzos 1998).
In the famous 1809 essay on human freedom Schelling appealed to Bhme and Baader for a
conception of pantheism which could, unlike Spinoza's, take account of the existence of
freedom and the choice of good and evil. The answer was to treat human freedom as a
replication of God's own inner struggle between radical selfhood (evil, wrath) and universality
(the good, love). 'Wrath' [Zorn] was a divine force rather than a human weakness, and 'love' was
the elementary form of universality. As Thomas O' Meara showed in his 1982 work Romantic
Idealism and Roman Catholicism, subtitled Schelling and the Theologians, Baader's influence
was decisive for Schelling. 'I know a man who is by nature a subterranean man', he wrote
glowingly of Baader at one point during these years, 'in whom knowing has become solid
reality; in whom knowing has become being, just as in metals sound and light receive mass'
(O'Meara 1982: 84; 'Kritische Fragmente', in Werke 7: 247). In 1806, under the influence of
Baader, Schelling had announced his renunciation of the Fichtean epistemological approach to
philosophy, stating that he now was not afraid to stand in 'the company of mystics' (O'Meara
1982: 84; Werke 7, 120). From 1806 onwards, Schelling became fully immersed in the occult,
working on somnambulism and 'clairvoyance'. His later philosophy, culminating in the
monumental 'Philosophy of Mythology', was to be dominated by theosophy. Following Baader,
his Erzeugungsdialektik or theory of potency/power, became more centred around the model of
the reproductive act (see Beach 1994 for an account of Schelling's theory of potencies).

However, Schelling's ambivalence towards Christianity became a point of increasing

disagreement between the two thinkers. For Baader, theosophy was ultimately a self-revelation
of the Christian God. Schelling, on the other hand, increasingly tended to treat all religions and
mythology, whether Christian, Persian or Indian, as equally justified within their own sphere of
historical development. Baader saw through Schelling's claim that the dialectic of mythologies
terminated in an overcoming of mythology itself in the internalised conscience of Christianity.
Schelling had in fact refashioned the notion of 'revelation' by developing the hermetic idea that
the only revelation is to be found in the recapitulation in the mind of cosmic and civilizational
history, with mythology as a guide. Baader was also irritated that Schelling had taken to
mocking Saint-Martin in his lectures (O'Meara 1982: 134).19 He rejected the late Schelling's
development of theosophy as barbarous and pagan. 'The light of Christ', he said, 'did not come
from the swamp of mythology' (ibid).
In his 1809 Sketch of Pathogenesis, Malfatti was already noting Roschlub's tendencies towards
'theosophical' thinking (Malfatti 1809: v). Roschlub was trying to follow Schelling on his
increasingly erratic path (Tsouypoulos 1982: 27). Schelling had presented the German-speaking
Brunonians with a philosophical deployment of Brunonianism, but had himself then gone on to
throw himself into mysticism and theosophy. For several years, Schelling had been following
the ideas and practices of the Brunonian doctors -- but could the Brunonians now follow him
into theosophy? In 1845, with Anarchy and Hierarchy, Malfatti at last outdoes any previous
attempt at synthesising Romantic Naturphilosophie and theosophy, with results unprecedented
in either medicine or in the history of religious thought. Malfatti rejects the residual traces of
Christianity in Schelling, and traces the origins of theosophical thought back to Hindu
mysticism, which is the origin, he claims, of a mysterious, ecstatic technique of thinking he calls
mathesis. Malfatti tells us that the 'mother-idea' of his later studies is 'the unity of science' as
spelled out in 'the mystical Organon of mathesis of the Indians' (Malfatti 1845: xxvii). In his
opening remarks to the first study, on mathesis itself, he asserts that metaphysics and
mathematics originally maintained a living unity in ancient India. If we look hard enough, we
can find in mathematics the 'mute debris of a spiritual monument' (ibid, 6). Mathematics did not
begin as a formal science, but functioned as an essential part of an integrated system of esoteric
knowledge and ecstatic practice. The numerical decad, and the forms generated within and from
it, were originally related to a system of occult anatomy, in which the vital forces that rule the
body were ordered hierarchically in polarities, potencies and planes. The purpose of mathesis
was to articulate bodily forces numerically, identifying their points of threshold and
transformation, and relating them back to macrocosmic patterns in the evolving universe. What
Malfatti has to say about Indian mysticism is rooted in ideas from the Tantric tradition of Indian
mysticism, the great sexo-cosmic system which took hold of Medieval India for several
centuries before undergoing convulsion and dissolution at around the time of the flowering of
the European Renaissance.20 Malfatti puts Schelling's emphasis on Erzeugung [procreation]
right at the centre of his system, taking the concept at both sexual and metaphysical levels,
attempting to find the pathways between the two. He continually focusses on the sexual and
ecstatic aspects of Indian mysticism, laying out a vast sexualised ontology, culminating (as in
Baader's system) in the 'hermaphroditic' consciousness of the human sexual act. In Anarchy and
Hierarchy it is as if Schelling's final theosophy comes to completion in a hallucinatory Tantrism,
in which the living body of God, in its most complete self-development, itself appears in
hermaphroditic form in human sexuality, where the coming-to-divine-consciousness becomes
identical to the psychosexual attainment, along Tantric lines, of spiritual 'bisexuality'. This
'system', uncovered by Malfatti, is said to form the basis for all subsequent Eastern and Western
esoteric thought, and now furnishes us with the long-lost key to the ultimate system of medicine.
German Romanticism had had a long-standing fascination with Indian tradition, beginning with
Herder and reaching an early high point with Friedrich Schlegel's Language and the Wisdom of

the Indians (1808); Malfatti refers to Schlegel's work as an influence.21 In his Philosophy of
Mythology, Schelling describes the triad of Brahma, Shiva and Vishnu as exemplifications of his
three primary divine powers. Schelling did not give primacy to any one world religion, and thus
treated the Indian trimurti as parallel to the Egyptian triad of Typhon, Osiris and Horus, and
indeed the Christian trinity of God, Son and Holy Spirit.22 Malfatti is more reckless in
suggesting that there is one universal philosophy which emanates first of all from Indian
mysticism, and then repeats itself in different forms throughout the history of religion, through
the Neo-Platonism of Proclus and Dionysius the Areopagite, down to Bhme and Saint-Martin.
This conviction that something eternal is repeated by various 'initiates' throughout history is a
background assumption of Malfatti's book, as well as of the esoteric and occult traditions in
general. The influence of Friedrich Creuzer's idealist history of religion, Symbolik und
Mythologie der alten Vlker (1810-12) is also apparent.23Creuzer had claimed that there was
originally one prehistoric religion, systematised by a caste of Oriental priests, who had
deliberately veiled their doctrines in symbols; the cult had travelled through Egypt and arrived
in Greece, where it underwent a degradation into anthropomorphism.24 Although Malfatti refers
to a number of sources apart from Creuzer he adheres to Creuzer's hypothesis that a 'primordial
revelation' in the Orient is at the root of all world religions.
But Malfatti's main source for Indian religion is Niklas Mller's Glauben, Wissen und Kunst der
alten Hindus [The Beliefs, Science and Art of the Ancient Hindus] (1822). The illustrations of
Hindu deities and figures which appear unchanged in Anarchy and Hierarchy are but a small
selection from over a hundred remarkable engravings appended to Mller's volume, with
detailed explications. Niklas Mller (1770-1851) worked as a curator at the municipal art gallery
at Mainz, writing local histories alongside erudite works on Indian religion and Mithraism
(Kucharski 1968: 2). His 1822 work on Indian philosophy, religion and art is immense and
bizarre. Despite the acknowledged influence of Creuzer and Grres, his approach is original,
and is structured around a highly metaphysical and detailed account of the relationships between
Hindu deities, based on their place in a system of emanations. On this basis, there are lengthy
discussions of cosmic sexuality (cf. Mller 1822: 299-332), including references to 'Shaktienergy' (323) which foreshadow Malfatti's later sexo-cosmic ideas. The twelfth chapter deals
with the theme of 'inner Doubling' [innern Entzweiung], rooted in the struggle of two cosmic
founding principles of primal good and primal evil (ibid, 463). The fundamental idea that the
human being is 'duplex' all the way up, from its physiology up to the hermaphroditic
consciousness of sexual activity, is central in Malfatti's book, finding its fullest exposition in the
final chapter on the 'Double Sex' implied by hermaphroditic consciousness.
The inaugural character of Malfatti's Anarchy and Hierarchy comes from its attempt to
synthesise Indian religious ideas with contemporary ideas about somnambulism. Neither 'history
of religion', nor 'medicine', Malfatti's text stands at the origin of the attempts of nineteenth
century occultism to combine ancient lore with contemporary theories of somnambulism. His
guiding claim is that modern Naturphilosophie, in conjunction with contemporary theories of
mesmerism, is the condition of possibility for the rediscovery of the powers of ecstatic healing
first discovered in Indian occultism.
That which, in the contemplation of life, was attained in principle through the mortification of
the senses, by the abasement of the individual, has been subject in our times (although rarely
with enough purity and elevation) through the means of a sort of artificial anticipation of death
(animal magnetism). The same fact has long been observed in the case of fortuitous alterations
of health, which have for their particular effect the concentration and momentary elevation of
the somatic life of the individual. In the first case it is called artificial somnambulism, in the
second case spontaneous somnambulism (Malfatti 1845: 5).

For Malfatti, the process of self-healing through natural and artificial somnambulism involves
the liberation of the same forces deployed in the occult anatomy of Tantric mysticism. But the
Indians had also had the advantage of the 'admirable mystical Organon of mathesis' as the means
to articulate a theosophical anatomy. Contemporary nature-philosophical medicine, he argued,
should therefore return to Indian tradition in order to exploit the discoveries opened up by recent
research into somnambulism. For whereas conscious thought is normally determined by selfconsciousness, if consciousness is relaxed through natural or artificial somnambulism, then the
single-minded apprehension of psychic tendencies which are usually unconscious becomes
possible, allowing in turn for the production of a higher synthesis of cognition. Malfatti's
Anarchy and Hierarchy is an attempt to control the power of dreams, to harness what Coleridge
called the 'somniacal magic . . . superinduced in the active powers of the mind' during states of
artificially induced somnambulism (Coleridge 1838: III, 397). 'What an astonishing advantage
man has drawn from the night-side of his life', remarks Malfatti in a passage that is still to be
found echoing in Deleuze's late essay 'To Have Done with Judgment' (Deleuze 1993: 130): 'to
open up through sleep [sommeil], by means of a state of interior vigil (the vigil of sleep [la
veille du sommeil]), the highest, most hidden astral region: this is what the magnetic
development of clairvoyance and ecstasy demonstrates to us, in the same way as the natural life
of dreams' (Malfatti 1845: 153).
Malfatti's Anarchy and Hierarchy inhabits the borderline between medicine (albeit of an
unorthodox kind) and occultism. If Gunon is right to assert the influence of Malfatti on later
occultism, this is not only due to his syncretic combination of numerology, Hermetism and
Indian religion, but also due to his explicit discussion and deployment of drugs in the production
of 'artificial somnambulism'. We find traces here of a historical bifurcation between 'occultism'
and 'esotericism'. Whereas occultists like Stanislas de Guaita, Papus and Paul Sdir (in his Les
plantes magiques, 1902) wrote explicitly about the role of drugs in attaining altered or 'higher'
consciousness, the 'esotericist' tradition tended to cast its gaze away from the haunted, halfswamped avenues explored by the psychopharmacological alchemist. Although Malfatti did not
think of himself as an occultist, it is not impossible to see how his original synthesis of drugexperimentation with Indian ideas of 'subtle' anatomy might have inspired the adventures of a
revived 'occultism' at the end of the nineteenth-century.

Deleuze and Occultism

We have seen that Malfatti's influence was felt at a number of 'singular' points in the
development of modern thought and culture, in the fields of music and medicine, and in fin-desicle occultism. The history of the real and manifold influence of the post-Schellingian vein of
'occultism' on later nineteenth and early twentieth-century thought and culture has yet to be
written. The names of the founding figures of modern occultism -- Malfatti and Wronski -remain almost unknown, and Deleuze was unusual for referring to them at all. To what extent,
then, might the ideas of Malfatti have continued to influence or inform Deleuze's 'mature'
philosophy? Because of the difficulty of Malfatti's central work, Anarchy and Hierarchy, and the
need for a relatively detailed preliminary analysis of the means for evaluating works of this
nature,25 it is not possible to attempt here any substantive comparison of Malfatti's and
Deleuze's theses. 'Mathesis, Science and Philosophy', Deleuze's text on Malfatti, moreover, is
often gnomic in itself, particularly in its passages on the meaning of 'initiation'.26The following
remarks merely attempt to suggest, as minimally and gently as possible, that some of Deleuze's
ideas might be rendered more intelligible by being related back to the modern European occult
tradition.27
For evidence, let us refer to just one of Deleuze's last essays, 'To Have Done with Judgment'
(1993). In this essay -- which makes no bones about being highly spooked -- Deleuze is to be

found inhabiting the same border zone between medicine and magic as his old friend Doctor
Malfatti. 'To Have Done with Judgment' presents four interconnected practices that Deleuze
holds to be essential for a proposed ethics that will break with 'Judeo-Christian' morality and (in
the words of Antonin Artaud) 'have done with the judgment of God'. Alongside 'power' and the
capacity for 'combat', Deleuze proposes that visionary drug experience and occult anatomy serve
as privileged means for escaping 'the consciousness of being in debt to the deity' which, he says
(following Nietzsche), is the basic condition of the system of 'judgment' (Deleuze 1993: 126).
The conjunction of drug-experience, on the one hand, and occult anatomy, on the other, installs
us firmly back within the context of modern occultism. Distinct echoes of the young Deleuze's
early encounter with Malfatti can be heard, as he retraces in this piece the path from visionary
drug experience to occult anatomy. Deleuze was one of the few philosophers to continue the
tradition of psychedelic experimentation whose last great philosophical proponent was William
James. There are a number of passages in his work which discuss drug-experimentation (see
Boothroyd 2006: 155-85). In an article published in 1975 for the French Encyclopedia
Universalis, 'Schizophrenia and Society', Deleuze made a case for the importance of
psychopharmacology in the study of psychopathology.28 In passages of A Thousand Plateaus,
however, and 'To Have Done with Judgment', the themes of drug-experience and occultism are
re-united once more, as they were in Malfatti. Drug intoxication, Deleuze tells us, can harness
the power of dreams, through mastery of what he calls sommeil (a term which is inaccurately
translated as 'sleep' in English). Peyote rites, for instance, 'are not dreams, but states of
intoxication or sommeil'. There exists, says Deleuze, a 'dreamless sommeil in which one
nonetheless does not fall asleep [dormer]'; and, moreover, 'such is the state of Dionysian
intoxication' (Deleuze 1993: 130).29 Then, immediately after this passage, so evocative of
Malfatti's own description of the powers of sommeil, Deleuze proceeds to imply that the basis of
his own theory of the 'body without organs' lies in ideas of occult anatomy, indirectly derived
from the tradition of Tantrism. 'The body without organs', he begins, 'is an affective, intensive,
anarchist body that consists solely of poles, zones, thresholds, and gradients'. He states that D.H.
Lawrence 'paints a picture of such a body, with the sun and moon as its poles, with its planes, its
sections, and its plexuses' (Deleuze 1993: 131). This is the sole example given, alongside a brief
reference to Artaud's use of the notion (which is also occult-influenced). Deleuze is referring
here to Lawrence's Fantasia of the Unconscious (1923), which contains a chapter entitled
'Plexuses, Planes and so on', an account of the 'subtle body', made up of a 'vital magnetism'
organised in dynamic polarities.30 Lawrence's account of the chakras in this chapter, however,
is itself derived, according to William York Tindall (1949; confirmed by Montgomery 1994),
from another piece of occultism, a Tantric interpretation of the Book of Revelation no less -The Apocalypse Unsealed, published in 1910 by James Pryse, an associate of Madame
Blavatsky's group of Theosophists. Pryse reads the Book of Revelation as a veiled account of
occult anatomy, derived from ancient Tantric sources.31 He attempts to relate each of the
symbols of the Revelation back to the 'intensive self-evolution' of esoteric practice.32 Although
it is impossible to argue that Lawrence's account of the body in Fantasia of the Unconscious
(not to mention his own Apocalypse of 1931) is entirely derived from and/or entirely consistent
with Pryse's own version of Tantric theosophy, it shares many of the same premises. Even
though Lawrence devotes himself to shaking off the faith in a secret 'Tradition' that is a recurring
motif in occultist thought, his account of the 'subtle', 'intensive' body is structurally similar to the
theories of occult anatomy advanced by both Pryse and Malfatti.
The similarity of the occult anatomies of Lawrence, Pryse and Malfatti may be due to the fact
that each indirectly refers itself back to ideas derived from Indian occultism; alternatively, the
structural identity may arise due to an approximation of practices between each of the three
thinkers. Either way, it would be unwise to ignore the textual connections between Deleuze's
'body without organs' and occult ideas of the 'subtle body'. Again, it is impossible to argue that
Deleuze's account of the body without organs in 'To Have Done with Judgment' is derived from

and/or fully consistent with any of the versions of occult anatomy held by Lawrence, Pryse or
Malfatti. Lawrence only 'paints a picture' of the Body without Organs; there could be any
number of pictures and even portraitists of this peculiar 'Body'. But it is hard to escape the
impression that some passages of the late Deleuze do seem to carry the last, dying and frenzied
echoes of the European occult tradition. After having directed the reader in search of a picture of
the 'body without organs' to Lawrence's text on plexuses and planes, Deleuze states: 'this
nonorganic vitality is the relation of the body to the imperceptible forces and powers that seize
hold of it, or that it seizes hold of, just as the moon takes hold of a woman's body' (Deleuze
1993: 131). It is difficult to imagine a more arcane utterance; it sounds like something out of
Lvi's Doctrine and Ritual of High Magic.
In order be able to assess the possible influence (or not) of occultism on Deleuze, and on
modern thought in general, we need to be open to reconceiving our ideas about the history of
modern European philosophy, its relation to practical techniques which put in question the
traditional division between body and mind, and to systems of 'medicine' that have more in
common with Renaissance magic or Indian occultism than with any current Western conceptions
of medicine.

Notes
1 Called 'Jean' in the French translation; sometimes also called 'Giovanni'.
2 The French bibliography of Deleuze's writings published at the end of The Desert Island, a
collection of early articles omits all texts published prior to 1953, apparently in accordance with
wishes expressed by Deleuze prior to his death. However, an English bibliography by Timothy
Murphy lists the missing articles (Murphy 1996). These writings are on quite disparate subjects.
They begin with two somewhat libido-soaked musings on sexuality, centred around a
pronounced cult of woman (e.g. 'Description of a Woman', 'Statements and Profiles'). See Keith
W. Faulkner's translations of these articles in Angelaki 7:3 (2002) and 8:3 (2003) respectively,
and his commentary on them (Faulkner 2002). The other articles are 'From Christ to the
Bourgeoisie', published in the literary journal Espace, which combines esoteric, elitist political
ideas with a dialectical account of the relationship of Christian 'interiority' and modern capitalist
bourgeois subjectivity; and an introduction to Diderot's La Religieuse from 1947. All these texts
are extremely interesting and deserve further study; there may even be a fundamental unity to
these writings as a group. But it is arguably the introduction to Malfatti's Mathesis that is the
most interesting for Deleuze scholars, for both Deleuze's introduction and, more intriguingly,
Malfatti's own work, shed unexpected light on some of the more obscure concepts of Deleuze's
philosophy. David Reggio has posted a draft translation of Deleuze's Malfatti piece online (see
Reggio 2003).
3 It still contains a 1849 preface by a Polish Messianist, Christian Ostrowski. See Reggio 2003.
4 See the philosophical chapter of Papus's What is Occultism?, translated into English in 1913
(Papus 1900). In his article on Malfatti, David Reggio notes that another Martinist, Paul Sdir,
gave lectures on Malfatti at the turn of the century to the Amities spirituelles organisation in
Paris (Reggio 2003).
5 Papus claimed to have been initiated into Martinism in 1882 by a mesmerist, Henri Delaage
(1825-1882). Guaita is the more enigmatic figure, and became notorious when Joris-Karl
Huysmans broadcasted allegations that Guaita had killed another French wizard (the Abb
Boullan) in a magical feud. (He denied this allegation, claiming that Boullan had died of natural
causes). Guaita wrote a massive (and unfinished) attempt at a synthesis of occult philosophy,

The Serpent of Genesis, based on the ideas of Jakob Bhme and Eliphas Lvi among others; the
last chapter of the third volume was to be devoted to mathesis, but he died of a morphine
overdose at the age of 36. Guaita also possessed a copy of the 1849 French edition of Malfatti's
Mathesis, which is described as 'extremely curious and rare' in the auction catalogue of his
occult library (Philipon 1899: 85). David Allen Harvey's recent survey of Martinism, Beyond
Enlightenment: Occultism and Politics in Modern France (2005) gives a lucid and colourful
account of the movement and its influences. The Martinists were extremely prolific for about
two decades, with two journals, L'Initiation and La Voile d'Isis, and groups spreading as far
afield as Italy and Russia. L'Initiation was founded in 1888 and continued until 1914. There was
also an offshoot of Martinism, the Gnostic Catholic Church, which attempted to bring about a
return to more Gnostic ideas about the relation of spirit to matter. For this church, the way of
salvation lay through the two extremes of libertinism or asceticism. However, the popularity of
these movements did not survive the first world war, which claimed the lives of many of the key
players.
6 The medievalist Marie-Madeleine Davy edited a series entitled 'Sources and Fires' [Sources et
feux] for Griffon d'Or. Deleuze had dedicated his article 'From Christ to the Bourgeoisie' to her,
and had attended intellectual soires hosted by her during and after the war (also attended by
Pierre Klossowski, Jacques Lacan and Jean Paulhan). In the book series directed by her are
listed a book on palmistry (with a preface by Davy herself), Cyrille Wilczkowski's Man and the
Zodiac: Essay on Typological Synthesis, selections from Paracelsus, Jean Richer's 1947 book on
the esoteric significance of the works of Grard de Nerval, Strindberg's Inferno and, rather on its
own, Lucien Goldmann's Man, Community and the World in the Philosophy of Immanuel Kant.
7 Many of the artists and writers Deleuze is interested in (for example, Artaud, Castaneda, late
D.H. Lawrence, Malcolm Lowry, Mallarm, Michaux, Stockhausen, Villiers de l'Isle Adam)
have strong interests in occultism.
8 Although Eliphas Lvi is often held to have inaugurated the French occult revival in 1855 with
his Doctrine and Ritual of High Magic (translated into English as Transcendental Magic), Lvi
was himself first initiated into the occult by Wronski; prior to the year he spent with Wronski, he
had been a utopian socialist (Chacornac 1926: 131-139; McIntosh 1972: 96-100; Williams 1975:
66-70). In an obituary for Wronski, Lvi wrote that he had 'placed, in this century of universal
and absolute doubt, the hitherto unshakeable basis of a science at once human and divine. First
and foremost, he had dared to define the essence of God and to find, in this definition itself, the
law of absolute movement and of universal creation' (cited in McIntosh 1972: 97-8).
9 See my Deleuze and the Unconscious (Continuum, 2007) for more on Deleuze's interest in
occultism/esoterica. Chapter 4 contains further discussion of Malfatti, and chapter 6 looks at
Deleuze's use of occult approaches to the unconscious.
10 Brown's ideas were also taken up in France by F. J-V. Broussais, first in his 1822 Trait de
physiologie applique la pathologie [Treatise on Physiology applied to Pathology], and then
in his De l'irritation et de la folie [On Irritation and Insanity], published in 1828. Comte claimed
that Broussais' work contained the first formulation of the idea that 'the phenomena of disease
coincided essentially with those of health from which they differed only in terms of intensity'
(cited in Canguilhem 1943: 49). Canguilhem shows that what Comte called 'Broussais's
principle' in fact derives from the ideas of Brown (ibid, 56-61). French caricature of the early
1830s, incidentally, is full of satires and caricatures about the failure of Broussais' system to
combat cholera.

11 The story of opium is a kind of historical tragedy. By the end of the nineteenth century, with
the increasing industrialisation and 'governmentalisation' of medicine (and as a result of
conflicts of interest between the state, physicians, pharmacists and apothecaries) opium had
become subject to increasingly strict legal controls. Following the earlier spread of morphinism,
the decisive moment in its recent history came with the synthesis of diacetylmorphine in 1874,
which was first marketed in 1898 in Germany under the brand name 'Heroin' (derived from
'heroisch', heroic). Heroin entered the nervous system more quickly, creating sensations of
intense pleasure, but the physical withdrawal symptoms were so marked that the drug was
unusable without the high risk of addiction. The story of the rise of virulently hedonic drugs like
heroin and cocaine in the early twentieth century is also the story of the loss of another age, in
which drug experimentation was an integral aspect of the Romantic tendency in medicine and
science. An account of the importance of drugs to Romantic thinkers in Germany has yet to be
written, although it is generally known that opium was important to Schelling and Novalis. On
the latter, see Neubauer 1971, and also Boon's overview in his informative book on drug use by
writers, The Road to Excess (Boon 2002: 28-31). Alethea Hayter's classic Opium and the
Romantic Imagination discusses Coleridge's and De Quincey's involvement with drugs in detail.
12 Thomas Beddoes recalls that 'before he began his lecture, he would take forty or fifty drops
of laudanum in a glass of whisky; repeating the dose four or five times during the lecture.
Between the effects of these stimulants and voluntary exertion, he soon waxed warm, and by
degrees his imagination was exalted into phrenzy' (cited in Lawrence 1988: 5).
13 'My plan is developed this far. I have decided to go for the summer to Bamberg. Rschlaub
insists that I study there privatissima, and, as you can imagine, this is just what I want' (Werke 7:
187). Adalbert Marcus wrote to Schelling that 'Bamberg was one of the first places where the
public hospitals employed the Brown system. Now Bamberg will have the praise of applying in
medical treatment that which your philosophy of nature is developing'. For these citations, see
O'Meara 1982: 32-35.
14 'It is just by this process of excitability that the product is elevated, becoming a product of a
potency higher than the merely chemical. Therefore, in the following, we will make use of his
[Brown's] concept, as long as we are able to lead this concept back to natural causes' (ibid).
15 Opium is placed in a polarity with ipecacuanha (a dried root used as a purgative and emetic).
16 Octave Aubry's novel The King of Rome includes an episode featuring the relationship of
Malfatti with the brother and sister of Napoleon Bonaparte, King Louis Bonaparte of Italy and
Elisa Bacciochi. Aubry describes how colleagues viewed Malfatti as 'much less a scientist than a
man of the world. His lively chatter and the pleasant taste of his medicines had endeared him to
everybody' (Aubry 1932: 190).
17 Mesmer put his patients in a 'baquet', a tub filled with 'magnetised' water.
18 There even existed a curious tribe of intentional arsenic eaters who inhabited the mountain
regions of Styria, Salzburg and the Tyrol in Austria (von Bibra 1855: 214). They used it to help
their breathing at those altitudes, and it also had other functions in these societies, both as an
aphrodisiac, and as a weight-gaining drug which also induced an attractive rosy glow in the
cheeks. Bibra reports that workers in arsenic mines have healthy and florid looks once they have
endured the first period in the mines (216).
19 Baader's diagnosis of the faults of Schelling and Hegel is worth noting: 'We see the error of
both Schelling and Hegel as they treat the relationship of nature to spirit. For Schelling spirit is

never free of nature or emancipated from nature. (He thinks that freedom would mean being
without a nature or being incorporeal). While, on the other hand, Hegel pictures a natureless
spirit that is only a ghost moving over fallen nature' (Baader, Werke 15: 593; cited in O'Meara
1982: 135). Baader holds on to an idea of pure, spiritual freedom, whereas Schelling insists that
freedom never entirely escapes its roots in irrational will. For Baader, this means that Schelling
is ultimately not a Christian.
20Malfatti does not use the word 'Tantrism' (from Tantra, a Sanskrit word meaning, among other
things, 'web' 'weave', 'warp', 'unfolding' and 'expansion'), but his hypersexual reading of Indian
mysticism, and his emphasis on occult anatomy, suggests that it is what he had in mind. There
are two forms of Tantrism, Hindu and Buddhist. Tantrism became a widely spread cult in India
during the eighth to eleventh centuries CE, from which most of the Tantric texts (Tantras) date.
The tantrikas believed that the Tantras were a 'fifth Veda', superseding the others. But there is
still disagreement as to what extent the magical writings in the ancient Atharva-Veda and the
hymns to Kali in the Rig-Veda contain the basic tenets expounded in the Tantric writings and
culture that emerged in medieval India. Only a portion of Tantric writings explicitly deal with
sexuality; the rest is concerned with magic, ritual, astrology, the construction of mandalas and
the preparation of ingredients for rituals.
21 Following Heidegger, it is now often assumed that the German Romantic mind was oriented
squarely towards the Greek world as the primordial source of thought and life. But it is truer to
say that it was the ancient Orient which was held to be the cradle of the idealism which was then
in the ascendant in Germany. According to Ernst Benz, Schlegel was convinced that the
discovery of Vedic literature would be as important for contemporary German philosophy as the
rediscovery of the ancients in the Renaissance (Benz 1968: 17). Mysticism was considered to be
a primordial revelation, and Indian mysticism in particular was seen by Schlegel as bearing
'everywhere traces of divine truth' (cited in Benz, ibid).
22 Nevertheless, Max Mller, who translated some of the Upanishads for Schelling, recalled that
'like Schophenhauer, [Schelling] considered the Upanishads as the original wisdom of the
Indians and of mankind' (cited in Glasenapp 1960: 29). See also A. Leslie Willson, A Mythical
Image: The Ideal of India in German Romanticism (1964), and Jean W. Sedlar, India in the
Mind of Germany: Schelling, Schopenhauer and their Times (1982). None of these studies refer
to Malfatti, reinforcing his obscurity.
23 Creuzer had schooled himself in Schelling's work (Williamson 2004: 121-6), and Schelling
himself was in turn to rely heavily on Creuzer's four-volume tome in his later philosophy of
mythology.
24 > 'When dealing with almost all major myths . . . we must, so to speak, first orient ourselves
to the Orient' (cited in Williamson 2004: 129).
25 See the methodological papers in Antoine Faivre & Wouter J. Hannegraaf, Western
Esotericism and the Science of Religion (1998).
26 For a partial analysis of some aspects of 'Mathesis, Science and Philosophy', see Deleuze and
the Unconscious, pp. 124-137.
27 Why use this rather obnoxious term 'occultism', rather than 'esotericism', which Deleuze
himself uses in Difference and Repetition and Logic of Sense, and which is still used today by
one of the main traditions of the scholarly study of hermetic philosophy? Antoine Faivre argues
for the unity of the notion of 'esotericism' by claiming that there are 'six constitutive elements.

Four of these are intrinsic to 'esotericism': the doctrine of universal correspondences, living
nature, imagination/meditation, and transmutation. The other two are extrinsic (i.e. they may be
absent in certain cases): concordance of traditions, and transmission of knowledge' (Faivre
1998: 2). Faivre is saying that the emphasis on tradition and initiation should not been taken as
essential to esotericism. So why, even in spite of Deleuze's use of the term 'esoteric', do I still
want to suggest that the term 'occultism' better describes what is at stake for Deleuze? First,
because the primary emphasis in 'occultism' of what is hidden from conventional perception or
understanding can be contrasted to an 'esotericism' which still implies an 'inner sanctum' that is
revealed through a traditional, established process of initiation. Second, in his 1974 Freud
Memorial Lecture, 'The Occult and the Modern World', Mircea Eliade makes an interesting
distinction between 'occultism' and 'esotericism' which has some relevance to Deleuze's
approach. Basing his discussion on the role played by occultism in nineteenth-century literary
France, Eliade argues for a bifurcation between a conservative 'esotericism' which insulates
itself from any contact with wider society, and an anti-establishment 'occultism' dedicated to the
transformation of society through the production of works of art with symbolic power, and
through the design and enactment of revolutionary political strategies. 'Quite another orientation
[from conservative esotericism] is evident among those French authors of the second part of the
nineteenth century who became attracted to occult ideas, mythologies, and practices made
popular by liphas Lvi, Papus and Stanislas de Guaita. From Baudelaire to Verlaine,
Lautreamont to Rimbaud, to our own contemporaries, Andr Breton and his disciples, all these
artists utilised the occult as a powerful weapon in their rebellion against the bourgeois
establishment and its ideology. They reject the official contemporary religion, ethics, social
mores, and aesthetics. Some of them are not only anticlerical, like most of the French
intelligentsia, but anti-Christian' (Eliade 1974: 52). There is something about the gaudy,
concertedly syncretic approach of occultism which makes it more suited to an emancipatory
Deleuzian perspective than the closed Masonic world of 'esotericism'.
28 'Pharmacology in the most general sense promises to be so extremely important for practical
and theoretical research on schizophrenia. The study of the metabolism of schizophrenics opens
up a vast field of research in which molecular biology has a crucial role to play. A chemistry at
once intensive and experiential seems able to go beyond the traditional organic/psychic duality
at least in two directions: 1) the experimental schizoid states induced through mescaline,
bulbocapnine, LSD, etc; 2) the therapeutic initiative to calm the anxiety of schizophrenics, while
dismantling their catatonic shell in order to jump-start the schizophrenic machines and get them
running again (the use of 'major tranquilizers' or even LSD)' (Deleuze 1975: 22). At the
experimental level, psychoactive substances can be used to induce schizoid states, says Deleuze.
The idea that hallucinogens can be psychotomimetics was advocated most influentially in the
1950s, but proponents of this view (such as Gordon Claridge) are still to be found today.
Deleuze elaborates that 'schizophrenic delirium can be grasped only at the level of this 'I feel'
which every moment records the intensive relation' (ibid) between stasis and excitation. At the
practical level, Deleuze says, drugs such as LSD can help restore vitality and movement to
schizophrenics who have plunged into a catatonic stasis. If Deleuze's ideas in this area are to be
taken as more than mere sketches of positions, then it should be asked how essential these ideas
are to his own general theory of schizophrenia, and his philosophy in general. They may be
aberrations or they may be intrinsic; or again, they may be merely confused. The means for
pursuing and resolving such questions, however, barely exist at present.
29 In the second part of his Psyche: The Cult of Souls and Belief in Immortality among the
Greeks, Erwin Rohde contended that Dionysiac intoxication is evidenced in its pure form in the
practices of the Thracian and Scythian tribes which bordered Ancient Greece. Referring to
Herodotus's famous account of the funerary hemp rituals of the Scythians (Histories IV: 73),
Rohde stresses that 'intoxication [Rausch] is generally regarded by savage tribes as a religiously

inspired condition' (Rohde 1894: 273). Proceeding to compare the use of hemp in the vapourhuts of the Scythians, Thracians with the practices of the North-American Indians, Rohde
suggests that the effects of this particular perfume are consistent with descriptions of 'the real
bakchoi at the nightly festival of Dionysus' (Rohde 1894: 274). Rohde, of course, was a close
friend of Nietzsche during the 1870s, publicly defending the latter's ideas about Dionysus in
Birth of Tragedy. However, Rohde does not refer to Nietzsche by name in Psyche. Deleuze and
Guattari also of course discuss the ways of the Scythians at length in A Thousand Plateaus, but
Deleuze never actually makes the move of identifying Nietzsche's Dionysiacs, or his primal
overmen, as Scythians or Thracians. Some might argue that such empirical correlates are beside
the point for Deleuze and Guattari, who are not historians but philosophers. The problem is how
to determine the function of Deleuze and Guattari's historical examples. Paul Patton's recent
article 'Mobile Concepts, Metaphor and the Problem of Referentiality in Deleuze and Guattari'
discusses developments in Deleuze scholarship which encounter and attempt to treat this
problem (Patton 2006).
30 In The Visionary D.H. Lawrence, Robert Montgomery states that 'if one were forced to
described the thought of the later Lawrence in one word, that word would have to be
'theosophical'. During the period from Women in Love to his death, the important new influences
on him were theosophical, and his most important writings were based on ideas drawn from
theosophical sources' (Montgomery 1994: 168).
31 For instance, the 'seven breaths' and 'five winds' of John of Patmos are related to the seven
tattvas and the five pranas. In Tantrism, 'kundalini' denotes vital energy, symbolised as a
Serpent, coiled around the spine. While this energy initially appears to be sexual, it is able to
move up three pathways (ndis, which Pryse translates as 'pipes' or 'tubes') in the body,
changing in nature as it develops. On the one hand, the sushumna is the pipe leading from the
spinal cord up to the cranium, while d and pingala, correspond to the left and right
vertical pathways of the sympathetic nervous system (Pryse 1910: 19). The gnostic yogi tries to
awaken each of the seven chakras or 'nerve centres', which are arranged in ascending order up
the spine. The central path of 'serpent power', the sushumna, can only be activated through the
creation of polarities between d and pingala, which are symbolised as moon and sun.
Pryse is happy to call the chakras 'nerve centres' or 'ganglia', and even suggests that readers of
his work should have a detailed knowledge of 'psycho-physiology' (6, 15).
32 'The esotericist', according to Pryse, 'refusing to be confined within the narrow limits of the
senses and the mental faculties, and recognizing that the gnostic powers of the soul are
hopelessly hampered and obscured by its imperfect instrument, the physical body, devotes
himself to what may be termed intensive self-evolution, the conquest and utilization of all the
forces and faculties which lie latent in that fontal essence within himself' (Pryse 1910: 8).

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Christian Kerslake is a Research Fellow at the Centre for Modern European Philosophy at
London. His research focuses on post-Kantian German philosophy and twentieth-century French
philosophy (particularly Bergson and Deleuze). He is the author of Deleuze and the
Unconscious (Continuum 2007)