The importance of the mystical and speculative theological writings of the seventeenth-century theosopher Jakob Böhme for Schelling’s middle period is well known in the German literature and usually overlooked in recent English studies of Schelling. Schelling would have been familiar with Böhme from his Pietist upbringing, but it was only after his move to Munich in 1806 that he took the writings of Böhme seriously. It is likely that Franz von Baader, who was a well-known Böhme enthusiast, compelled Schelling to turn to Böhme’s theosophy for the solution to certain problems in post-Kantian philosophy that were of particular concern to Schelling in the years 1801–1806. The crucial question emerging out of the identity philosophy was: How are we to think the emergence of the finite from the infinite? Granted the infinity and self-sufficiency of the absolute, why does the world exist? The absolute, Böhme showed Schelling, is an individuating subject, seeking self-revelation through creation. This creation must be really other than God and subsistent, having its own ground of existence, if it is to serve as the medium of God’s self-revelation. To think creation in these terms, philosophy needed to break with the static notion of God as unchangeable, eternal act, an undivided absolute unpolluted by potency and untroubled by need or desire. It needed to think a dynamic, evolutionary God, a productively dissociated God, and this is precisely Böhme’s God.