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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137. And the will of the Heart of God in the Father, is from the heart entered into the will of the wisdom, before the Father, into an eternal 5 contract ; and the same virgin of the wisdom of God, in the Word of God, hath, in the bosom of the Virgin Mary, given itself into her virgin matrix, and united itself, as a propriety, not to depart in eternity ; [you must] understand, into the essences, and into the tincture of the element, which is pure and undefiled before God. In that, 4 Or maidservant or ministress. 8 Or espousal Ch. 18] PROMISED SEED OF THE WOMAN 441 the Heart of God is become an angelical man, as Adam was in the creation ; and the going forth out of the Heart of God, with the whole fulness of the Deity (out of which also the Holy Ghost [or spirit] of God, and out of the spirit the virgin, goeth forth) maketh this high angelical image greater than Adam, or ever any angel was ; for it is the blessing, and the might of all things, which are in the Father eternally.

238. For the Word (by its being given into the element, into the virgin matrix) is not severed from the Father ; but it continHieth eternally in the Father, and it is (in the heaven of the element) everywhere present ; into which [element] the same [Word] is entered, and is become a new creature in man ; which [new creature] is called God. And you must here very highly and accurately understand, that this new creature in the holy element is not generated of the flesh and blood of the virgin, but of God, out of the element, in a total fulness, and union l of the holy Trinity ; » or with, which [creature] continueth with total fulness without 2 ending therein eternally : Which [crea- 2 fading, ture] everywhere filleth all, in all the gates of the holiness, whose depth hath no ground, and is without number [measure] and name. 39. Yet you must know, that the corporeity of the element of this creature is 3 inferior to the * Or less than Deity ; for the Deity is spirit, and the element is generated out of the Word from eternity ; and 442 THE THREE PRINCIPLES [Ch. 18 the Lord entered into the servant, at which all the angels in heaven do wonder. And it is the greatest wonder that is done from eternity, for it is against nature ; and that may [indeed rightly] be [called] love.

340. And after that this high princely angelical creature, in the twinkling of an eye, in the Word and Holy Ghost (in the holy element) was figured [fashioned, formed, or made] a self-subsisting creature (with perfect life and light) in the Word ; then also in the same twinkling of an eye the four elements (with the dominion of the sun and stars) in the tincture of the blood, together with the blood and all human essences, which were in the body of the Virgin Mary in her matrix (according 1 assumed. to the counsel of God) in the element, x received the creature, wholly and properly, as one [only] creature, and not two. 41. And the holy [pure] element of the heaven, which encloseth the Deity, that was the Linibus (or the masculine seed) to this creature ; and the Holy Ghost, with the holy Fiat, in the virgin of the divine wisdom, was the master-builder, and the first beginner; and every regimen built its own (in its own centre) therein. 42. The holy spirit of God built the formation in the wisdom of the virgin, in the [holy] element, in its centre of the heaven, even the highly worthy princely and angelical formation ; and the regimen of the stars and elements of this world formed the Ch. 18] PROMISED SEED OF THE WOMAN 443 outward man (wholly, with all essences of our human bodies), with a natural body and soul (wholly like us) in one only person.

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