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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142. For the desiring is the attracting of whatsoever the will desireth ; and that will is first pure, neither darkness nor light, for it dwelleth in itself, and it is even the gate of the divine virtue that filleth all things. And thus the attracting filleth the will with the things which the will desireth ; and although it be pure, and desireth nothing but the light, yet there is no light in the dark anxiety that it can attract, but it draweth the spirit of the essences of the stars and elements into itself, and therewith the will of the divine virtue is filled, and the same is all rough and dark. And thus the will Ch. 15] KNOWLEDGE OF THE ETERNITY 323 is set in the darkness, and this is done also in the heart. 43. The will now standing thus in the dark anxiety, it l getteth another will to fly out of the l Or conanxiety again, and to generate the light ; and this other will is the mind, out of which proceed the senses [or thoughts] not to continue in the anxiety : And the will [appeareth] discovereth itself in the essences of the sourness, as in the fierce hardness of death ; and the glimpse [or glance] breaketh through the essences of the sour hardness, as a swift [or sudden] flash, and sharpeneth itself in the sour hardness, that it becometh [pale, white, or] 2 glimmering, like a flash of fire, and in its sudden 2 Text, flight breaketh the sour darkness ; and there o standeth the hardness, and the harsh sourness of

2death like a broken turning wheel, which with the flash of the breaking flieth swiftly as a thought; as also then the re-conceived will (which is the mind) appeareth so very suddenly. And seeing it cannot fly forward out of the essences, it must go into the turning wheel, (for it cannot get from that place), and so it breaketh the darkness. And when the darkness is thus 3 broken, [then] the ' or dispelled. sharp glance discovereth itself in the pleasant joy without [or beyond] the darkness in the sharpness of the will, viz. in the mind, and findeth itself habitable therein, from whence the flash (or glance) is terrified, and flieth up with strong might through the broken essences out of the heart, and would out 324 THE THREE PRINCIPLES [Ch. 15

3at the mouth, and raiseth itself far from the heart, and yet is held by the sour [or harsh] Fiat, and it then maketh itself a several region (viz. the tongue) wherein then standeth the shriek [or the crack] of the broken essences. And seeing then it reflecteth [or recoileth] back again into the heart, as into its first dwelling-house, and findeth itself so very habitable and pleasant (because the gates of the darkness are broken), then it kindleth itself so highly in the loving will, by reason of the meekness, and goeth no more like a stern [or fierce] flash through all essences, but [it] goeth trembling with great joy ; and the might of the joy is now many hundred times stronger, than first the flash [or glance] was, which yielded [or discovered] itself through the sour harsh essences of the death, and goeth with strong might out of the heart into the head, in the will [or purpose] to possess the heavenly region. 1 the will. 44. For l it is paradisical, and it hath its most inward root therein. When Adam in sin died the first death, then said God, The seed of the woman shall * break with 2 break the serpent's head. The same word 3 im- ^e* ing upon prm^e(j itself m Adam, in the centre of the spring3 imagined, ing-up of his life, and so in like manner with the figured, or

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