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Eleven books by a shoemaker of Görlitz who wrote, by his own account, because he could not help it. Ten of them stand here in the seventeenth-century English of John Sparrow, who translated Boehme within a generation of his death and whose prose is itself now four hundred years old; where that English has drifted out of reach, the facing pane carries a modern register — the same text with archaic inflection and spelling normalised by rule, never paraphrased. Nothing is reworded, and where no register appears beside a passage it is because the rules found nothing to change.
The eleventh book is not in English at all, and it is the reason this note exists.
Des trois principes de l'essence divine, printed at Paris in 1802, is the same work as Concerning the Three Principles of the Divine Essence, which stands here as the second book — the same twenty-seven chapters in the same order, opening `Du premier principe de l'essence divine` against Sparrow's `Of the first Principle of the Divine Essence`. Its translator was Louis-Claude de Saint-Martin, who gave the last years of his life to putting Boehme into French, and who has a shelf of his own in this Lycaeum.
That makes a closed circuit inside this archive, and it is worth naming plainly. Saint-Martin translates Boehme. La Iniciación, printed in Montevideo a hundred and forty years later, traces its own descent through Saint-Martin. A reader can therefore follow one thread from a German mystic of 1619, through the French philosopher who carried him into another language, to a Spanish-language monthly of the 1940s that claimed them both — and read every step of it in the original.
The two are shelved as one work rather than two because that is what they are. They are not set as facing panes: an English translation of 1619 and a French translation of 1802 are two independent readings of a lost German original, and pairing them line by line would assert a correspondence neither translator ever claimed.
1[117. " Not that they apprehend and behold it, " but they have a kind of knowledge thereof in "the Centre."] 118. Here is lamentation and woe, yelling and crying, and no deliverance; it is with them as if it did continually thunder and lighten tempestuously. 119. For the kindled spirits of God generate themselves thus: I. The hardness generateth a hard, raw, rough, cold and astringent quality. II. The sweetness is grown faint, and gaspeth, like a glowing coal splits when there is no more sap in the wood, and there is no refreshment for it. III. The bitterness teareth like a hot plague, and is as bitter as gall. IV. The fire burneth as a fierce wrathful Sulphur. V. Love is an enmity here. VI. The sound is a mere beating, rumbling or cracking,* like the noise of a fire breaking forth out of a hollow place, as if it were great claps of thunder. * " a mere beating, rumbling or cracking." In this, and in several similar sentences where Sparrow has used such terms as the above, the original is "Pochen," a word difficult to render in English, but highly suggestive. It describes above all else a pulsation; it might be the throbbing of an engine, or the beating of the human heart; it might be the hammering of a poundingmachine, or the ticking of the "deathwatch" insect; but in every case it denotes a regular, continuous motion and alternating sound, and this both as a technical term and as a figurative. VII. The circuit, region, court or residence of the body of the seven is a house of mourning. 120. Their food is abomination, and groweth
2from the fierceness of all qualities: Lamentation and woe, and that for ever without end; there is no time there; another king sitteth on their throne, which keepeth or holdeth a judgment for ever; they are only his footstool. 121. O beauty, pleasure and voluptuousness of this world! O riches and proud stateliness! O might and power! Thy unrighteous judgment and great pomp, with all thy pleasure and voluptuousness, lie all together on a heap, and are become a hellish fire! 122. Now eat and drink, now trim and dress thyself * therewith, and domineer therein, thou fair goddess, how art thou become a whore, and thy shame and reproach continue for ever! * " trim and dress thyself" (schmincke dich), "paint thy face."
3THE ELEVENTH CHAPTER VII. Of the Seventh Qualifying or Fountain Spirit in the Divine Power. 1. THE Seventh spirit of God in the divine power is the corpus or body, which is generated out of the other six spirits, wherein all heavenly figures subsist, and wherein all things image and form themselves, and wherein all beauty and joy rise up. 2. This is the very spirit of nature, yea nature itself, wherein apprehensibility or comprehensibility consisteth, and wherein all creatures are formed in heaven and on earth. Yea heaven itself is therein formed; and all naturality in the whole God consisteth in this spirit. 3. If it were not for this spirit there would be neither angel nor man, and God would be an unsearchable being, subsisting only in an unsearchable power. Question. 4. Now the question is: How is this form? Or in what manner is this so? Answer. If thou art a rational mercurial spirit, which presseth through all the seven spirits of God, and beholdeth, proveth and examineth them, how they are, then thou wilt, by the explanation of this seventh spirit, conceive and understand the operation and the being of the whole Deity, and apprehend it in thy sense or mind. 5. But if thou understandest nothing by this spirit, then let this book alone, and judge neither of the cold nor of the warmth therein: For thou
The source text as printed, transcribed diplomatically. Where the source language uses a non-Latin script that reaches us only through a Victorian romanisation, this layer is labelled transliteration, because that is what we hold.
1[117. " Not that they apprehend and behold it, " but they have a kind of knowledge thereof in "the Centre."] 118. Here is lamentation and woe, yelling and crying, and no deliverance; it is with them as if it did continually thunder and lighten tempestuously. 119. For the kindled spirits of God generate themselves thus: I. The hardness generateth a hard, raw, rough, cold and astringent quality. II. The sweetness is grown faint, and gaspeth, like a glowing coal splits when there is no more sap in the wood, and there is no refreshment for it. III. The bitterness teareth like a hot plague, and is as bitter as gall. IV. The fire burneth as a fierce wrathful Sulphur. V. Love is an enmity here. VI. The sound is a mere beating, rumbling or cracking,* like the noise of a fire breaking forth out of a hollow place, as if it were great claps of thunder. * " a mere beating, rumbling or cracking." In this, and in several similar sentences where Sparrow has used such terms as the above, the original is "Pochen," a word difficult to render in English, but highly suggestive. It describes above all else a pulsation; it might be the throbbing of an engine, or the beating of the human heart; it might be the hammering of a poundingmachine, or the ticking of the "deathwatch" insect; but in every case it denotes a regular, continuous motion and alternating sound, and this both as a technical term and as a figurative. VII. The circuit, region, court or residence of the body of the seven is a house of mourning. 120. Their food is abomination, and groweth
2from the fierceness of all qualities: Lamentation and woe, and that for ever without end; there is no time there; another king sitteth on their throne, which keepeth or holdeth a judgment for ever; they are only his footstool. 121. O beauty, pleasure and voluptuousness of this world! O riches and proud stateliness! O might and power! Thy unrighteous judgment and great pomp, with all thy pleasure and voluptuousness, lie all together on a heap, and are become a hellish fire! 122. Now eat and drink, now trim and dress thyself * therewith, and domineer therein, thou fair goddess, how art thou become a whore, and thy shame and reproach continue for ever! * " trim and dress thyself" (schmincke dich), "paint thy face."
3THE ELEVENTH CHAPTER VII. Of the Seventh Qualifying or Fountain Spirit in the Divine Power. 1. THE Seventh spirit of God in the divine power is the corpus or body, which is generated out of the other six spirits, wherein all heavenly figures subsist, and wherein all things image and form themselves, and wherein all beauty and joy rise up. 2. This is the very spirit of nature, yea nature itself, wherein apprehensibility or comprehensibility consisteth, and wherein all creatures are formed in heaven and on earth. Yea heaven itself is therein formed; and all naturality in the whole God consisteth in this spirit. 3. If it were not for this spirit there would be neither angel nor man, and God would be an unsearchable being, subsisting only in an unsearchable power. Question. 4. Now the question is: How is this form? Or in what manner is this so? Answer. If thou art a rational mercurial spirit, which presseth through all the seven spirits of God, and beholdeth, proveth and examineth them, how they are, then thou wilt, by the explanation of this seventh spirit, conceive and understand the operation and the being of the whole Deity, and apprehend it in thy sense or mind. 5. But if thou understandest nothing by this spirit, then let this book alone, and judge neither of the cold nor of the warmth therein: For thou
The source text as printed, transcribed diplomatically. Where the source language uses a non-Latin script that reaches us only through a Victorian romanisation, this layer is labelled transliteration, because that is what we hold.
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