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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1his kingdom. Ihe woman was out of the matrix, which (before the infection) was a chaste virgin, 3 Or gene- which Adam should have 3 brought forth out of rated. himself ; but when the modesty of the wisdom, and ability [or potency] departed from him, (when he passed into the spirit of this world), he could not then bring forth [or generate] ; for in his sleep the spirit of this world clothed him with flesh and blood, and figured [formed or shaped] him into a beast, as we now see by very woeful experience, and know ourselves to be blind and naked as to the kingdom of God, [being] without any virtue [or strength] in the sleep of the great misery, clothed with corruptible [frail and transitory] flesh and blood. 56. And now when Adam awaked from sleep, then he was a man, and no angel ; he drew breath 4 Or astral from the air, and therewith kindled his 4 starry spirit. spirit, which had taken possession of him ; he knew his wife to be a woman, and that she was 8 Or gene- 6 taken out of him, and took her to him, as all beasts rated. couple together ; yet he had then pure eyes, for the fierceness [or grim wrath] did not yet stick in them, but the infection [or longing]. The element of fire with its bitterness (which qualifieth, [or mixeth properties] with the abyss of hell) had not pressed him wholly. 57. Thus now Adam with his wife went (in Ch. 17] OF THE FALL OF ADAM AND EVE 393

2great lust and joy) into the Garden of Eden, where Adam told her of the commandment concerning the Tree : But Eve (being a woman of this world) regarded it but little, and turned her from Adam to the Tree, and looked upon it with lust ; and the lust instantly took hold of her ; and the lying devil (when she was talking with him, whom she knew not, neither had heard of any devil) persuaded her, and she laid hold on the Tree, and brake off [an apple], and did eat of the fruit of the four elements and stars, and gave to Adam ; and when Adam saw that Eve l died not, then he ate also. 1 By eating. 58. And then their eyes were opened, and they knew that they had flesh and blood, and were quite naked. For the spirit of the great world took them captive with the four elements, and figured [or framed in] them stomach and guts ; though indeed in the sleep of Adam (when the matrix was severed from the limbus) the same forms were already figured, but they knew it not, till after the biting of the apple ; and then the spirit of the fierceness first gat in, and made its region, (as may be seen in the heart, liver, lungs, gall, and bladder, as also in the stomach) ; this regimen had Adam gotten in his sleep, and with the biting of the apple the spirit of the great world hath set itself in that [government]. 59. And then they looked one upon another, and were ashamed one before another, and they were afraid of the wrath [or severity] that entered

3394 THE THREE PRINCIPLES [Oil. 17 into them, for it was the anger of God ; and thus they were captivated by the first Principle, (as by the abyss of hell), which held Adam and Eve captive in their souls in the eternal [part] ; for it sprang up with terror, fear, and doubt, concerning the kingdom of God ; and they could have no comfort [in that condition], for they saw the paradise no more, but the Garden in Eden ; so also they had lost the Deity, they could set no will [or desire] into it, for the wrath and doubt stood in the way. 60. Then came the spirit of this world with its rough garment, with heat and cold, and pressed upon them, as upon naked people, and so struck the image of God half dead, (with their fierceness, anguish, and doubt, with their quality [or property] of hot and cold), and let it lie in pain, anguish, and doubt. And here man went from Jerusalem (out of the paradise) to Jericho, into the house of murderers, who stripped him of his paradisical garment, and robbed him, and struck him (with their poison, torment, plague, arid sickness, from their infection) half dead, and so left him and went their way, as the second Adam said in the Gospel, in a similitude [or parable], 61. And here now was no remedy, neither in heaven, nor in this world, they were captivated in hard slavery, (in misery and death) ; the abyss of hell held the soul, and the spirit of this world held the body [captive]. Death and corruption was in

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