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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1or flying up. strengtheneth itself in the strong might of the terror, and createth again the uppermost [part] of the body, viz. the head : And from the hard terror (which is continually departing and yet cannot) cometh the skull, which encloseth the uppermost centre : And from the departing out of the essences of the tincture with the terror into the uppermost centre, come the veins and the neck to be, going thus from the body into the head, into the uppermost centre. 52. So also all the veins in the whole body come 4 choking, from the terror of the 4 stifling, where the terror goeth forth from all the essences, and would be gone ; and the Fiat withhdldeth it with his great strong might. And therefore one vein hath always Ch. 13] OF THE CREATING OP THE WOMAN 251 a diverse essence from another, caused by the first departing, where then the essences of the stars and elements do also mingle [or figure themselves] therein, and the Fiat holdeth it all, and createth it, and it supposeth that the Verbum Domini [the Word of the Lord] with the strong mighty power of God is there, where the Fiat must create heaven and earth. The Gate of the great Necessity and Misery. 0 man, consider thyself, how hardly thou art beset here, and how thou gettest thy misery in thy mother's body : Observe it 0 ye * lawyers, from what spirit you J jurist*, '[come to] 3 know [what is] right; consider this2 can go to well, for it is deep.

253. The spirit of the virgin sheweth us the mystery again, and the great secrecy ; for the stifling [or stopping] of the blood in the matrix (especially in the fruit) is the first dying of the essences, where they are severed from the heaven, so that the virgin cannot be generated there, which should [have been] generated in Adam, from the heavenly virtue [or power] without woman, also without rending of his body. And here the kingdom [or dominion] of the stars and elements beginneth in man, where they take hold of man and mingle [or qualify] with him, make and fit him, also nourish and nurture him, of which you may read more about Cain. 252 THE THREE PRINCIPLES [Ch. 13 Further in the Incarnation. 54. And so when the Fiat thus holdeth the terror in itself, so that the elements fill it, then that filling becometh hard bones ; and there the Fiat figureth the whole man with his bodily form, all according to the first wrestling of the two tinctures, when they wrestle [or strive] together in the sport of love, when the seed is sown ; and that tincture which there getteth the upperhand (whether the masculine or the feminine) according to that sex the man is figured. And the figuring [or shaping] is done very suddenly in the storm of the anguishing terror, where the blood is stifled [or stopped] ; and there the elementary man getteth up, and the heavenly [man] goeth down. For in the terror, the

31 Or pricking, bitter l sting is generated, which rageth and raveth in the hard terrified [sourness or] harshness in the great anxiety of the stifled [or stopped] blood. 55. Women have sufficient experience of this, in the third month, (when this is done in the fruit), [and feel] how the raging and pricking cometh into their teeth, loins, back, and the like. This cometh upon them from the stifled [choked, or stopped] tincture in the fruit, and from their stifled [or stopped] blood in the matrix, because the evil tincture qualifieth [or mingleth] with the good [tincture] of their bodies. Therefore in the same manner as the tincture in the matrix sufiereth pain, after the same manner also the good [tincture] Ch. 13] OF THE CREATING OF THE WOMAN 253 suffereth in the members [limbs or parts] of the mother, as in the hard bones, teeth, and ribs, as such people know very well. 56. So now when the bitter sting [or prickle] (which is generated in the anxious terror in the stifling [or stopping] and in the entering in of death), doth thus rage and rave, and shew forth itself in the terror, and flieth upwards, then it is caught and withheld by the [sour] harshness, so that it cannot get up aloft. For the [sour] harshness draweth it continually the more eagerly and vehemently, because of l its raging, and cannot endure it, from * the raging whence the pricking often becometh more terrible, °

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