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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123. But now in the tincture only is the understanding, which governeth the mind, and maketh the [thoughts or] senses ; therefore all is as it were dead, and the constellation now only ruleth in the root of the first Principle, where the Deity, like a glance [lustre] or virtue, worketh in all things : There the starry spirit in the glance of the glass of the divine virtue in the element of fire looketh into the matrix of the water, and setteth his jaws open after the tincture, but that is void of power ; and therefore he taketh the virtue of the tincture (viz. the mind) and mingleth [or qualifieth] with it, and then the mind sealeth the elements, and Ch. 12] OPENING OF THE HOLY SCRIPTURE 207 worketh therein dreams and l visions, all according \representations. to the virtue of the stars ; for 2 it standeth in the 2 the mind working and quality of the stars ; and these are the Con818tethdreams and visions of the night in the sleep. The Gate of the highest Depth of the Life of the Tincture.

224. Though the doctor, it may be, knoweth what the tincture is, yet the simple and unlearned do not, who many times (if they had the art) have better gifts and understanding than the doctor, therefore I write for those that seek ; though indeed I hold, that neither the doctor, nor the alchemist, hath the ground of the tincture, unless he be born again in the spirit ; such a one seeth through all, whether he be learned or unlearned ; with God the peasant is as acceptable as the doctor. 25. The tincture is a thing that separateth, and bringeth the pure and clear from the impure ; and that bringeth the life of all sorts of spirits, or all sorts of essences, into its highest [pitch] degree [or exaltation]. Yea it is the cause of the shining, or of the lustre : It is a cause that all creatures see and live. But its form is not one and the same [in every thing] ; it is not in a beast, as in man ; so also it is different in stones and herbs ; although it is truly in all things, yet in some things strong, and in some weak. 26. But if we search what it is in essence and property, and how it is generated, then we find a 208 THE THREE PRINCIPLES [Ch. 12 1 being, essence, or thing. 2 the image of itself.

3very worthy [precious] noble l substance in its birth, for it is come forth from the virtue, and the fountain of the Deity, which hath imprinted 2 itself in all things. And therefore it is so secret and hidden, and is imparted to the knowledge of none of the ungodly, to find it, or to know it. And although it be there, yet a vain, false [or evil] mind is not worthy of it, and therefore it remaineth hidden to him : And God ruleth all in all incomprehensibly and imperceptibly to the creature ; the creature passeth away it knoweth not how ; and the shadow and the figure of the tincture continueth eternally ; for it is generated out of the eternal will : But the spirit is given to it by the Fiat, according to the kind of every creature ; also in the beginning of the creation it was implanted and incorporated in jewels, stones, and metals, according to the kind of every one.

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