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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1[or power], speech, and 2 senses, and the noble and 2 Or thoughts, most precious mind ; then we find the cause whereof we have made such a long 'register con- * catalogue or relation. cernmg the eternal birth ; for the speech, senses, and mind, have also such an original, as is abovementioned concerning the eternal birth of God, and it is a very precious gate [or exposition]. 28. For behold, when the gate of this world in the child is made ready, so that the child is [become] a living soul out of the essences, and now [henceforth] seeth only [by or] in the light of the sun, and not in the light of God, then cometh the true 4 artificer, instantly in the twinkling of an eye, 4 the master, (when the light of the life kindleth), and figureth [that which is] his ; for the centre breaketh forth in all the three Principles. First, there are the four essences in the Fiat in the stern might of God, which there are the child's own, the worm of its soul, which standeth there in the house of the great anxiety, as in the originality. For the seed is sown in the will, and the will receiveth the Fiat in the tincture, and the Fiat draweth the will to it inwardly, and outwardly [draweth] the seed to a 6 mass ; for the • concretion, inward and outward 6 artificer is there. body. 29. When the will thus draweth to it, then it 6 Or m*8terbecometh inwardly and outwardly impregnated, 316 THE THREE PRINCIPLES [Ch. 15

2and is darkened ; the will cannot endure this, viz. to be set in the dark, and therefore falls into great anxiety for the light ; for the outward materia [or matter] is filled with the elements, and the blood is choked [checked or stopped] ; and there then the tincture withdraweth, and there is then the right abyss of death, and so the inward [materia or matter] is filled from the essences of the virtue [or power], and in the inward there riseth up another will, out of the stern virtue of the essences, [that it might] lift itself up into the light of the meekness ; and in the outward standeth the desire to be severed, the impure from the pure, for that the outward Fiat doth. 30. We must consider, in the virtue [or power] of the virgin, that the will first is threefold, and each in its centre is fixed [stedfast or perfect] and pure, for it proceedeth out of the tincture. In the first centre there springeth up between the parents of the child the inclination [or lust], and the bestial desire to copulate ; this is the outward elementary centre, and it is fixed in itself. Secondly, there springeth up, in the second centre, the inclinable love to the copulating ; and although they were at the first sight angry and odious one to another, yet in the copulating the centre of love springeth up, and that only in the copulating ; for the one pure tincture receiveth [or catcheth] the other, and in or the copulating the l mass receiveth them both.

331. Now thus the love qualifieth [or mixeth] Ch. 15] KNOWLEDGE OF THE ETERNITY 317 with the inward [one] element, and the element with the paradise, and the paradise is before [or in the presence of] God. And the outward seed hath its essences, which qualify first with the outward elements, and the outward elements qualify with the outward stars, and the outward stars qualify with the outward sternness [grimness, fierceness, frowardness], wrath and malice, and the wrath and malice in the fierceness [severity, or austereness] qualifieth with the original of the first fierceness of the abyss of hell; and the abyss qualifieth with the devils. 32. Therefore, 0 man ! consider what thou hast received with thy bestial body, to eat and to drink of evil and good, which God did forbid. Look here into the ground of the essences, and say not with reason, It was merely for disobedience, which God was so very angry at, that his anger could not be quenched. Thou art deceived, for if the clear Deity were angry, it would not have become man for thy sake to help thee ; look but upon the l mark, in the eternity, and then thou wilt 1 Or aim. find all. 33. Thus also the kingdom of darkness and of the devil is sown together in the copulating, and

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