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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116. Thus you must understand what it is [or meaneth] when the Scripture speaketh of revenging the ungodly, that there is joy in the saints at it ; for the fierce wrath [or grimness], and the source [or torment] of hell, is the 2joy of the heaven : For if there were no source [or pain], there would be 3 no flowing-up [or springing]. But if the light cometh [to be] in the fierce [austere, sour] source, then there is mere joy ; and in the darkness there is a peculiar enmity in itself, and therein is the eternal worm generated. 17. Therefore we must know, that God, as he is all in all, so where he is not (in the love) in the light, there he is (in the darkness) in the fierceness, and source [or torment] ; for before the time of the creation there was nothing but the source, and over it the Deity, which continueth in eternity. There is no other ground, you [can] find nothing more, therefore give over your deep searching, for it is the end of nature. 18. Although such 4 revelations have been hidden [or concealed] from the beginning of the world, yet because 5 it must now go into its ether, and into the breaking-through, therefore all standeth naked, whatsoever hath been hidden in nature ; and there shall very great things (which have been hidden) be revealed [or manifested] ; and this 6 Mystery is Ch. 18] PROMISED SEED OF THE WOMAN 431 the break of day. Therefore it is time to awake, for the awakening of the dead is near at hand.

219. Now when God had pronounced his sentence upon Adam, and ordained the Treader upon the Serpent for him, for his comfort and assistance in his toil and misery upon earth, then he pronounced Eve's [sentence] also, and established her perfectly to be a woman of this world, and said to her, Thou shalt bear children with much pain, and thy will shall be in subjection to thy husband [or man], and he shall be thy Lord, and I will cause many pains to thee, when thou art conceived with child. 20. And here it is as clear as the sun, that it was not intended that man (in the beginning) should generate in such a manner, for it should all have been done without l pain, without bestial 2 impregnation, l Or smart. without a wife [or woman], and without a husband 2orc™^gn' [or man]. And therefore the Treader upon thebi«withchildSerpent was born of a virgin, without the seed of man ; although now that [also] must come to be done in such a human manner, yet that was to this end only, that the Deity might enter into flesh, and [so might] generate the soul of flesh again out of dark flesh, out of death into life. But else, the Saviour [or Champion] is wholly the virgin's son, and a virgin mind, as the first Adam [was] in the creation ; for you must earnestly and accurately [consider and] understand what manner of person he is. 21. First, he is God, and is in the Father of 432 THE THREE PRINCIPLES [Ch. 18

3eternity, generated out of the Father of eternity from eternity, without beginning and end, out of the depth of the almightiness, out of the broken gates of the sharpness [or depths] of God in the iQrbegetteth.joy [or habitation], where the Father xattracteth the pleasant joy in his eternal will, whereby the will is impregnated with the attracted virtue of the light, out of which [impregnation] the Father 2 Or compre- 2 conceiveth the other [or second] will to generate hendeth. . . , . r _ the virtue ; and that conception [or comprehension] is his Word, which the Father speaketh (out of the 8 for, or to be will, s before the will) out of himself ; and this speaking remaineth in the mouth of the Father, 4 a Word as 4 a comprehended Word, with the second will ; comprehended -i i • /• •> -i TIT / • by the second and the issue out of the spoken Word (which goetn will forth out of the will through the Word) is the 6 Or for to be spirit ; and that which is spoken forth 5 before the will, is the eternal wisdom of God, the virgin of the chastity.

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