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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16 Or mingle, my sweetness ; but thou canst not 6 qualify with me ; for the divine virtue is my essence, therein is 3 at my disposal. 4 Or force. Oh. 12] OPENING OF THE HOLY SCRIPTURE 217 my fair [or orient] pearl, and my bright [shining] light generated ; my fountain is eternal : If thou darkenest my light, and defilest my garment, then thou wilt have no beauty [or lustre], and canst not subsist, but thy worm will [corrupt or] destroy thee, and so I shall lose my companion, which I had chosen for my bridegroom, with whom I meant to have rejoiced ; and then my pearl and beauty would have no l company : Seeing I have given ' recreation myself to be thy companion for my joy's sake ; if thou wilt not enjoy my beauty, yet pray continue in my ornament and excellency, and dwell with me in joy, I will adorn thee eternally. 46. And the young man said, Thy ornament is mine already, I [will] use thee according to my will ; in that thou sayest I shall be broken (corrupted or destroyed), yet my worm is eternal, I will rule with that ; and yet I will dwell in thee, and clothe thee with my garments.

247. And here the virgin turned her to the Heart of God, and said, My heart and my beloved, thou art my virtue, from thee I am clear and bright, from thy root I am generated from eternity ; deliver me from the worm of darkness which infecteth [poisoneth] and tempteth my bridegroom, and let me not be darkened in the obscurity ; I am thy ornament, and am come that thou shouldst have joy in me : Wherefore then shall I stand with my bridegroom in the dark ? And the divine answer said, The seed of the woman shall break 218 THE THREE PRINCIPLES [Ch. 12 1 angelical tongues. 2 the Son of God. 3 standeth. the head of the serpent, or worm ; and thou shalt, etc. 48. Behold, dear soul, herein lieth the heavenly tincture, which we must set down in a similitude, and we cannot at all express it with words. Indeed, if we had the tongue of angels, we could then rightly express what the mind apprehendeth ; but the pearl is clothed [covered or veiled] with a dark [cloak or] garment : The virgin calleth stedfastly to the 2 Heart of God, that he would deliver her companion from the dark worm ; but the divine answer 3 still is, The seed of the woman shall break the serpent's head ; that is, the darkness of the serpent shall be separated from thy bridegroom ; the dark garment wherewith the serpent clotheth thy bridegroom, and darkeneth thy pearl and beauteous crown, shall be broken [corrupted or destroyed], and turn to earth ; and thou shalt rejoice with thy

34 Or purpose, bridegroom in me ; this was my eternal 4 will, it must stand. 49. Now then when we consider the high mysteries, the spirit openeth to us the understanding, that this [afore-mentioned] is the true ground concerning Adam : For his original spirit (viz. the soul) that was the worm, which was generated out of the eternal will of God the Father, and in the time of the creation was by the Fiat (after the manner of a spirit) created out of that place where the Father from eternity generateth his Heart, between the fourth and the fifth forms in the centre Ch. 12] OPENING OP THE HOLY SCRIPTURE 219 of God, where the light of God from eternity discovereth itself, and taketh its beginning, and therefore the light of God came thus to help him, as a fair virgin, and took the soul to be her bridegroom, and would adorn the soul with her fair heavenly crown, with the noble virtue of the pearl, and beautify it with her garment. 50. Then the fourth form in the centre of the soul brake forth, there where the spirit of the soul was created, [viz.'] between the fourth and the fifth forms in the centre, * near the Heart of God ; and J next to. so the fourth form was in the glance in the darkness, out of which the world was created, which in its form parteth itself in its centre into five parts in its rising, till [it attain] to the light of the sun. For the stars also in their centre are generated betwixt the fourth and the fifth forms, and the sun

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