The Confessions of Jacob Boehme

At nineteen, Boehme returned to Gorlitz, where he married the butcher's daughter. In 1599 he became a master-shoemaker and settled down to his trade. In the following year, his first great illumination took place. Its character was peculiar, and indicative of his abnormal psychic constitution. H aving lately passed through a new period of gloom and depression, he was gazing dreamily at a polished pewter dish which caught and reflected the rays of the sun. Thus brought, in a manner

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which any psychologist will understand, into a state of extreme suggestibility, the mystical faculty took abrupt possession of the mental field. It seemed to him that he had an inward vision of the true character and meaning of all created things. Holding this state of lucidity, so marvellous in its sense of renovation that he compares it to resurrection from the dead, he went out into the fields. As Fox, possessed by the same ecstatic consciousness, found that "all creation gave another smell beyond what words can utter," so Boehme now gazed into the heart of the herbs and grass, and perceived all nature ablaze with the inward light of the Divine.

It was a pure intuition, exceeding his powers of speech and thought : but he brooded over it in secret, "labouring in the mystery as a child that goes to school," and felt its meaning " breeding within him " and gradually unfolding " like a young plant." The inward light was not constant ;

xvi CONFESSIONS OF JACOB BOEHME his unruly lower nature persisted, and often prevented it from breaking through into the outward mind. This state of psychic disequilibrium and moral struggle, during which he read and meditated deeply, lasted for nearly twelve years. At last, in 1610, it was resolved by another experience, coordinating all his scattered intuitions in one great vision of reality. Boehme now felt a strong impulse to write some record of that which he had seen, and began in leisure hours his first book, the Aurora, The title of this work, which he describes as " the Root or Mother of Philosophy, Astrology, and Theology," shows the extent to which he had absorbed current theosophic notions : but his own vivid account — one of the most remarkable first-hand descriptions of automatic or inspirational writing that exists — shows too how small a part his surface mind played in the composition of this book, which he " set down diligently in the impulse of God."

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Boehme, like the ancient prophets and many lesser seers, was possessed by a spirit which, whether we choose to regard it as an external power or a phase of his own complex nature, was dissociated from the control of his will, and "came and went as a sudden shower." It poured itself forth in streams of strange and turbid eloquence, unchecked by the critical action of the intellect. He has told us that during the years when his vision was breeding within him he " perused many masterpieces of writing." These almost certainly included the works of Valentine Weigel and his disciples, and other hermetic and theosophic books ; and the fruit of these half-comprehended studies is manifest in the astrological and alchemical symbolism which adds so much to the obscurity of his style. Like many visionaries, he was abnormally sensitive to the evocative power of words, using them as often for their suggestive quality as for xviii CONFESSIONS OF JACOB BOEHME their sense. A story is told of him that, hearing for the first time the Greek word " Idea," he became intensely excited, and exclaimed : " I see a pure and heavenly maiden ! " It is to this faculty that we must probably attribute his love of alchemical symbols and the high-sounding magical jargon of his day.