In ‘What is Philosophy?’ Deleuze and Guattari describe 3 ways in which we understand the chaos that we are and that surrounds us. These are Philosophy, Science and Art. The chaos of existence is filtered in each place by a different plane. Philosophy has a plane of immanence, science has a plane of referennce and art has a plane of composition. Each of these planes in turn has a different types of structure that.

Deleuze and Guattari seem to want to place magickal type phenomena on the plane of immanence. I am not entirely sure this is correct and I propose that magick be considered to be drawn on a different plane. It is true that magick, considered as a opening of ontologies by implication is drawn on the plane of immanence, however when magick is magick as craft and not philosophy it is drawn on its own plane. That is, an ontology that accounts for paranormality may be drawn on the plane of immanence precisely because doing so draws conceptual apparatus for this description.

Considering this matter this does seem to create kind of heuristic division in the analysis. Magick must be divided into naive and chaos magick. Naive magick accepts the system that it works with unreflectively as real, the spirits, Gods, incantations are the actual entities. Whilst chaos magick utilises belief to harness any given system, acknowledging that each system is a construct and not a real ultimate unit of spiritual reality. The former of these is not inscribed upon the plane of immanence whereas the chaos magickal underpinning is a redrawing of the plane of immanence, it is a conceptual (philosophical) alteration of the ontology of magick. As praxis though, neither of them is drawn upon the plane of immanence but rather they are drawn on an occult plane, that is nevertheless entirely entwined with the other 3 planes -and not of an especial transcendent nature.

The occult plane is laid over the chaos as the others are and acts as a filter, it shares a curious cross section of the traits of the others. It has the open endedness of the philosophical concept by having an infinitely receding causal structure, yet it strives for the coordinated nature of the scientific plane of reference —spells can be very specific in material, spatial and temporal co-ordination in their attempt for replicability. It also gathers affects and percepts in its construction (scents, sigils, visualisations) and its very nature accords to the description of art in that it finds the hidden language within language (divinatory, numerological practices). Despite this intersection of planes the occult plane still has its own essential feature, these we may call adepts.

The adept is a becoming that emerges between two or more phenomena whose relation is entirely undetectable other than by occult means. This becoming is one of endless potential that may be utilised by the sorcerer or may remain inert. E.g. We might form an adept between red things as a general adept structure. We might then seek to connect two red things through a magickal act and intensify the adept further. At a scientific level any discovered connection between the red things (frequency) here is not relevant, the red percept (and we do mean percept in Deleuzo-Guattarian sense, it is not just a perception) creates an adept in relation to another red percept. The adept itself could be called a pneuminous structure, it is through these structures that magick ‘operates’.

Let us consider the synchronicity as an example of adept formation. A person becomes, through a significant experience, attached to the number 47. They begin to experience the number in their lives in strange uncanny way. It (the number) seems curiously common and to appear in strange places that seem definitely out of line with their previous experience of reality. Because we are considering a paranormal compatible ontology here, we will bracket off the materialist coincidence model(1). These instances of the numbers’ manifestations are adepts. They are connected through the rupture event that attached the power/accretion to the particular person —this too was an adept. This is not psychological connection, this is a real connection, it is as if in the umbratic it was like a fungus of connecting mycelial threads; the fruiting bodies (the mushrooms) were the synchronicity (the adept).

None of this though should be conceived with the model of reality that we commonly hold, material, consistent, fixed. Adepts look like they do because they are ruptures in the solid; the proliferated pneuminous mycelial threads inserting themselves into a reality that might have been otherwise. The involved person is not deluded, they are more like infected. But the infection is related to what we call spritual. The infection can be used to learn the nature of things; it is the closest regular perception gets to seeing multidimensionality.

(1)This though is an incredibly complicated issue that crosses over the areas of an occult phenomenology and a metaphysics compatible with the phenomena being ‘actual’. That is, the same agnostic disjunctive issue in a sense raises its head. The adept as we define it, is justified in having its own occult plane whether or not there is anything occurring that constitutes magick/paranormality.