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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1up above the elements, and make thyself a region [or dominion]. Art not thou the king? Here is the gate where the children of this world are wiser than the children of light. 0 man ! consider thyself ! 272 THE THREE PRINCIPLES [Ch. 14 And he draweth the constellations to him, and bringeth them into the essences, and sets them over the elements, with their wonderful and unsearchable various essences, (whose number is infinite), and maketh himself a region and kingdom of his generation in a strange country. 32. For the essences of the soul are not this king's own, he hath not generated them, nor they him ; but he hath, by lust, imprinted himself also in its essences, and kindled himself in its fire-flash, on purpose to find its virgin, and live in her; which is the amiable divine virtue [or power] : Because the spirit of the soul is out of the eternal and had the virgin, before the fall, and therefore now the spirit of the great world continually seeketh the virgin in the spirit of the soul, and supposeth that she is there still, as before the fall, where the spirit of the great world appeared in Adam's virgin with very great joy, and desired also to live in the virgin, and to be eternal. Because he felt his corruptibility, and that he was so rough in himself, therefore he would fain partake of the loving kindness and sweetness of the virgin, and live in her, that so he might live eternally, and not break [corrupt or perish] again.

233. For by the great longing of the darkness after the light and virtue of God, this world hath been generated out of the darkness, where the holy virtue of God [shone, or] beheld itself in the darkness ; and therefore this great desiring and longing Ch. 14] BIRTH AND PROPAGATION OF MAN 273 after the divine virtue, continueth in the spirit of the sun, stars, and elements, and in all things. All groan and pant after the divine virtue, and would fain be delivered from the vanity of the devil : But seeing that cannot be, therefore all creatures must wait till their l dissolution, when they [shall go] * corruption. into their ether, and get a place in paradise, yet only in the figure and shadow, and the spirit [must] be dissolved, which here hath had such lust [or longing].

334. But now this lust [or longing] must be thus, or else no good creature could be, and this world would be a mere hell and wrathfulness. And now seeing the virgin standeth in the second Principle, so that the spirit of this world cannot possibly reach to her, and yet that the virgin doth continually behold herself [or appear] in the spirit of this world, to [satisfy] the lust and longing in the fruit and growing of every thing, therefore 2 he is 2 the spirit of so very longing, and seeketh the virgin continually, worid^ He exalteth many a creature in great skill and cunning subtlety, and he bringeth it into the highest degree that he can ; and continually supposeth that so the virgin shall again be generated for him, which he saw in Adam before his fall ; which also brought Adam to fall, in that 2 he would dwell in his virgin, and with his great lust so 3 pressed Adam, that he fell asleep ; that is, he set 3 See more of A -i t 1 tf"8 strife in himself by force in Adam s tincture close to the chap. 12 v. 39-47. virgin, and would fain have qualified in her, and 18 274 THE THREE PRINCIPLES [Ch. 14 [mingled] with her, and so live eternally, whereby the tincture grew weary, and the virgin withdrew. 35. And then Adam fell, and was feeble, which 1 Adam's in- is called sleep : This was the l Tree of Temptation, Temptadon. [to try] whether it were possible for Adam to live

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