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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133. Therefore there is a difference between the tincture in man, and the Holy Ghost ; and the bestowed virgin of the divine virtue [or power] dwelleth in the tincture of the soul, [that is] if it be true and faithful ; but if [the soul be] not 3 the virgin, [faithful] then 3she departeth into her centre, which is not wholly shut up ; for there is but half a birth between, except the soul pass into the * stock of a * stock of harshness and malice [evil or wickedness], grafted upon, and then there is a whole birth between. For the harshness standeth in the fourth form of the darkness, and the bitterness in the fire, between the fourth and fifth forms, as is mentioned before. Ch. 13] OF THE CREATING OF THE WOMAN 241 34. Now [reason's] question is, How hath Eve received the soul from Adam? Behold, when God's * harsh Fiat took the rib 2 out of Adam, l soar, then it attracted out of all essences also to it, and tr* the Fiat imaged [formed, imagined, or impressed] * Or in> itself together therein, [that it might] continually

2and eternally stay therein. But now the tincture in Adam was not yet extinguished, but the soul of Adam sat yet wholly with might and virtue [or power] in the tincture ; only the virgin was departed : And therefore now the Fiat * took the * received, tincture, and the [sour] harsh essences mingled [or qualified] with the [sour] harsh Fiat ; for it, (viz. the Fiat) and the [sourness or] harshness in the essences, are one kind of essence. 35. Thus the Fiat inclined itself now to the Heart of God, and the essences received the divine virtue [or power], and there sprang up the blossom in the fire ; and out of the blossom [sprang] again the own [proper] tincture, and thus Eve was a living soul : And the tincture filled itself in the growth (even as it is a cause of all growing), so that * instantly there was a whole body in the Suddenly tincture. For that was possible, they were not yet fallen into sin, neither were there yet any hard gristles and bones. 36. You must understand [or conceive] it aright : Eve gat not Adam's soul, nor Adam's body, but one only rib ; but she was extracted from the essences, and gat her soul in her essences 16 242 THE THREE PRINCIPLES [Ch. 13

3[that were] given her, in the tincture, and the body grew for [or to] her in her own sprung-up tincture, yet in virtue [or power] ; but the Fiat had already formed [or made] her a woman. Indeed she was not deformed, but altogether lovely ; for she was 'Ofdistino of a heavenly kind, in paradise, yet the * marks tion of sex. were already also set upon her by the Fiat of the 2 macrocosm. 2 great world ; and it could not otherwise be, she must be a woman for Adam ; indeed they were in paradise. And if they had not eaten of the tree, and if they had returned to God, then they would have continued in paradise ; but the propagation must now needs have been after a womanly manner, and would not have stood [eternally]. For Satan had brought it too far, although he had not yet suffered himself to be seen, only he strewed sugar abroad in the spirit of this world, till at length the lovely beast did lay itself forth upon the tree as a flatterer and liar. The Gate of our Propagation in the Flesh. 37. As I have mentioned above, the noble tincture is now henceforth generated thus in a manly [or masculine] and womanly [or feminine] kind [or sex] out of the soul ; the tincture is so subtle and mighty, powerful, that it [can go, or] goeth into the heart of another, into his tincture ; which the devilish bewitching whores well know ; yet they understand not the noble art, but they s Or poison, use the [false] tincture of the devils, and 8 infect

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