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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171. And the taste also is a trying and attracting of the tincture in the essences of the spirit. And so the feeling also, if the spirit of man with its essences did not stand in the sound, there would be no feeling ; for when the sour essences draw to them, then they awaken the bitter prickle [or sting] in the fire-flash, which stirreth itself, either by gripping, thrusting, or striking, and thereupon in all 2 driving the bitter prickle in the fire-flash is awakened ; and therein standeth the moving ; [and] all in the tincture. 2 Text, Anrilhren [C. J. B.]. THE SIXTEENTH CHAPTER

2Of the noble Mind of the Understanding, Senses and Thoughts. Of the threefold Spirit and Will, and of the Tincture of the Inclination, and what is inbred in a Child in the Mothers Body [or Womb]. Of the Image of God, and of the bestial Image, and of the Image of the Abyss of Hell, and Similitude of the Devil, to be searched for, and found out in J [any] » Or in one Man. oneThe nolle Gate of the noble Virgin. And also the Gate of the Woman of this World, highly to be considered. I~F we consider ourselves in the noble know- -L ledge, which is opened to us in the love of God, in the noble virgin of the wisdom of God, (not for our merit, honesty [virtue], or worthiness, but merely of his own will, and original eternal purpose) even in those things which appear to us in his love, then we must needs acknowledge ourselves to be unworthy of such a revelation ; and being we are sinners, we are deficient in the glory that we should have before him. 2. But seeing it is his eternal will and purpose to 339 340 THE THREE PRINCIPLES [Ch. 16

3do us good, and to open his secrets to us according to his counsel, therefore we ought not to withstand, nor to bury the bestowed talent in the earth, for we must give account of it in the appearing of his coming. Therefore we will thus labour in our vineyard, and commend the fruit to him, and will set down in writing a Memorial for ourselves, and leave it to him. For we can search or conceive no further, than only what we apprehend in the light 1 Or our com- of nature; where xour gate standeth open; not prehensibiiity. according to the measure of our purpose, when and how we will, but according to his gift, when and how he will. We are not able to comprehend the least sparkle of him, unless the gates of the deep be "• opened to us in our mind ; where then the zealous

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