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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127. It was from eternity in God, and therefore it is eternally in God. But when God would create a similitude of his essence, and that it should be generated out of the darkness, then it stood in the flash of fire that went forth, in the place where the fifth form of the birth of love generateth itself in the similitude. For it was generated out of the fountain of the will, out of the Heart of God, and therefore its shadow continueth in the will of God eternally ; and for the sake thereof also the shadow of all creatures, and of every [essence] substance [or thing], which was ever generated Ch. 12] OPENING OF THE HOLY SCRIPTURE 209 in the similitude, remaineth eternally ; for it is the similitude of God, which is generated out of the eternal will ; yet its spirit continueth not eternally in the third Principle of this world ; that ceaseth, or passeth away with the ceasing of the springing, or the ceasing of the life.

228. For all whatsoever liveth in the third Principle, corrupteth [or passeth away], and goeth into its ether and end, till [it cometh] to the figure of the tincture ; and that continueth standing eternally as a shadow or will, without spirit or mobility : But in the second Principle the tincture continueth eternally standing in the spirit, and in the substance [or essence], all very powerfully, viz. in angels and men, as also in the beginning [or first springing] of every substance ; for their centre to the birth is eternally fixed [or stedfast]. Of its [the Tinctures'] Essences and Property. The deep Gate of Life. 29. Its essence is the flash in the circle [or circumference] of the springing of the life, which in the water maketh the glance and shining ; and its root is the fire ; and the stock is the [sour] harshness. Now the flash separateth the bitterness and harshness from the water ; so that the water becometh soft [fluid], and clear, wherein then the 1 sight of all creatures doth consist, so that the » or faculty spirit in the flash in the matrix of the water doth ° see ; and the flash standeth therein like a glance 14 210 THE THREE PRINCIPLES [Ch. 12 1 fuifiiieth or ("or lustre], and l filleth the spirit of the essences : satisfieth.

3from which the essence draweth vehemently to itself ; for it is the [sour] harshness, and the flash continually separateth the darkness from the light, and the impure from the pure ; and there now standeth the divine virtue [or power] : And the divine glance continually imagineth [or imprinteth] itself in the pure, from which the [sour] strong [property] is separated out from nature ; and the divine glance maketh the pure sweet ; for it mingleth itself [or infecteth] there. 30. But the sweetness is like oil or fire, wherein the flash continually kindleth itself, so that it shineth : But the oil being sweet, and mingled with the matrix of the water, therefore the shining 8 pleasant. light is steady [constant and fixed] and 2 sweet : But being it cannot, in the nature of the water, continue to be an oil only (because of the infection of the water) therefore it becometh thick ; and the [nature or] kind of the fire coloureth it red ; and this is the blood and the tincture in a creature, wherein the noble life standeth. Of the Death and of the Dying. The Gate of Affliction and of Misery. 31. Thus the noble life in the tincture standeth in great danger, and hath hourly to expect the [corruption, or destruction, breaking, or] dissolution ; for as soon as the blood (wherein the spirit liveth) floweth out [or passeth away] the essence Ch. 12] OPENING OF THE HOLY SCRIPTURE 211

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