Concerning the Three Principles of the Divine Essence

Gate passedSeeker and aboveModern transcription — not a facsimileJacob Boehme (1575–1624)PUBLIC DOMAIN as published. Boehme d. 1624; the Sparrow translation is 1656. Per-part determination MADE 2026-08-29: the eight front-matter segments carrying the 2009 electronic edition own introductory apparatus were withheld (three excised in full, five redacted in part where a public-domain title block or Boehme text shared the page). The remaining 5,022 segments are public domain and are open at seeker tier.905 of 1000 segments carry a modern register · 343 pp

Jacob Boehme — the works in English, and one in Frencheditor’s preface to the volume

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.

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14 Or a being Sleep is nothing else but 4 an overcoming ; for the overcome. . ... n sun and the stars are still in a mighty strife, and the element of water, [viz.'] the matrix, is too weak for the fire and the stars, for that [element] is the [being] overcome in the centre of nature, as you find before in many places. 19. And the light of the sun is as it were a god in the nature of this world, and by its virtue [and Or bath. Cb. 12] OPENING OF THE HOLY SCRIPTURE 205 influence] it continually kindleth the stars [or constellations], whereby the stars [or constellations] (which are of a very terrible and anguishing essence) continually exult in triumph very joyfully. For it [the sun] is an essence like the light of God, which kindleth and enlighteneth the dark mind of the Father, from whence, by the light, there ariseth the divine joy in the Father. 20. And so it [the sun] maketh a triumphing, or rising [to be] in the l matrix of the water, always J root or like a 2 seething ; for the stars altogether cast their 3 Or ^ virtue [or influence] into the matrix of the water,

2as s being therein ; in like manner also now the 3 the stars matrix of the water is continually seething and matrix, rising, from whence cometh the * growing in trees, « vegetation, plants, grass, and beasts. For the uppermost regimen [or dominion] of the sun and stars, and also of the elements, ruleth in all creatures, and it is a blossom or bud from them, and without their power, there would be in this world, in the third Principle, no life, nor mobility, in any manner of thing, nothing excepted. 21. But the living creatures, as men, beasts, and fowls, have the tincture in them, for in the beginning they were an extraction [taken] from the quality of the stars and elements by the Fiat. And in the tincture [there] standeth the continual kindling fire, which continually draweth the virtue or oleum [the oil] out of the water ; from whence cometh the blood, in which the noble life 6 standeth. • Or i«. 206 THE THREE PRINCIPLES [Ch. 12

322. Now the sun and the stars [or constellations] continually kindle the tincture, for it is fiery ; and the tincture kindleth the body, with the matrix of the water, so that they are always boiling [rising] and seething. The stars [or constellations] and the sun are the fire of the tincture, and the tincture is the fire of the body, and so all are seething. And therefore when the sun is underneath, so that its beams [or shining] is no more [upon a thing], then the tincture is weaker, for it hath no kindling from the virtue of the sun. And although the virtue of the stars and the quality are kindled from the sun, yet all is too little, and so it becometh feeble [or as it were dead]. And when the tincture is feeble, then the virtue in the blood (which is the tincture) is wholly weak, and sinketh into a sweet rest, as it were dead or overcome.

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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Commentary

whole issue ·

Cross-estate[P-V]translated_asboehme:2:1:003

This English 'Concerning the Three Principles of the Divine Essence' and boehme:11 are the same work in two languages — and the French is not just any translation. It is Louis-Claude de Saint-Martin's own: 'Des trois principes de l'essence divine', issued by the Périsse brothers of the rue Mercière. Saint-Martin learned German in his fifties expressly to read Boehme, and spent his last years translating him. The estate therefore holds, side by side, the text that formed the Unknown Philosopher and the form in which he gave it to France — the single most direct documentary link between the two founders of this corpus.

→ boehme:11