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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1in the beginning or the lite in Adam than the or faculties. beasts, which have their essences but merely from the spirit of this world, and it must also, with the spirit of this world in a corruptible substance, go into its eternal ether : Whereas, on the contrary, the essences of man are proceeded out of the unchangeable eternal mind of God, which cannot in eternity corrupt. 6. For we have a certain ground of this, in that our mind can find and conceive all whatsoever is in the spirit of this world, which no beast can do: For no creature can 2 conceive [further or] higher 2 think or than [what is] in its own Principle, out of which its l" own essences are proceeded in the beginning : But we (that are men) can certainly 3 conceive [of that 3 meditate, which is] in the Principle of God, and also [of that think of! which is] in the anguishing kingdom of hell, where the worm of our soul in the beginning in Adam originally is, and this no other creature can do. 7. But they think [consider or imagine] only how to fill themselves and multiply, that their life may subsist ; and we also receive * no more from * than the the spirit of the stars and elements. And 6 therefore . ! 8 because our also our children are naked and bare, with great a higher be

2inability, and without understanding ; and now if Dn,g than the spirit of this world had full [perfect and absolute] power over the essences of the child, then he would easily put his rough garment upon it also (viz. a rough hide), but he must let that alone : And he 260 THE THREE PRINCIPLES [Ch. 14 must leave the essences in the first and second Principles to man's own choosing, to bind and yield himself to which [Principle] he will ; which man hath (undeniably) in his full power, which I will expound in its own place according to its worth, and deeply demonstrate it, in spite of all the gates of the devil, and this world, which strive much against it. 8. Our life in the mother's body hath its beginning wholly, as is above mentioned, and standeth there now in the quality of the sun and stars, where then, with the kindling of the light, a centre springeth up again, where instantly the noble tincture thus generateth itself (out of the light, out of the joyful essences of the [sour] harsh, bitter, and fiery kind [or quality]) and setteth the spirit of the soul in a great pleasant 1 beings or habitation : And the three * essences (viz. harshness, substances. . . i/>\ • i i ' IT /» i vr

3bitterness, and fire) are in the kindling 01 the lite so very fast bound one to another, that they cannot (in eternity) be separated one from another, and the tincture is their eternal house, wherein they dwell, which [house] they themselves generate from the beginning unto eternity, which again giveth them life, joy, and lust [or delight]. The strong Gate of the indissoluble Band of the Soul. 9. Behold, the three essences, (viz. [sourness or] harshness, bitterness and fire) are the worm or Ch. 14] BIRTH AND PROPAGATION OF MAN 261 spirit [that dieth not]. l Harshness is one essence, J Or sourness. und it is in the Fiat of God, out of God's eternal will ; and the attracting of the [sour] harshness is the sting [or prickle] of the bitterness, which the [sour] harshness cannot endure, but attracteth continually the more forcibly to it, from whence the prickle continually groweth greater, which yet the [sour] harshness holdeth 2 prisoner; and this 2 captive. together is the great anxiety, which was there in the dark mind of God the Father, when the darkness was anxious [or longed] after the light ; from whence in the anxiety (from the glance of the light) it attained the twinkling flash : Out of which the angels were created, which afterward were enlightened from the light of God (3 by their 3 by their imagination into the Heart of God) ; and the other

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