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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143. And yet every form hath its own height, source [or quality] and perception ; and [yet] the divine [source] hath not so mixed, that [thereby] it is the less ; but what it was, that it continueth to be ; and that which it was not, that it is, without severing from the divine substance ; and the Word abode in the Father ; and the natural humanity, in this world, in the bosom of the Virgin Mary. Of the. three Regions of the [Incarnation, or] becoming Man ; the forming [or imaging'} of the Lord Jesus Christ. 44. The forming of this highly worthy person is severally [done] ; first there is the Word, or the Deity, which hath had its forming from eternity in the Father; and assumed in the becoming man no other forming [or image], but continued in the Father, as it was from eternity, in its seat. 45. The second forming is done naturally, in the same time of the angel Gabriel's greeting, when the virgin said to the angel, Let it be done unto me as thou hast said. In the performance of the same Word, the imaging [or forming] in the 1 element was done, which [image] was like the i inward first Adam before the fall, which then should have e generated such an angelical creature out of himself ; 444 THE THREE PRINCIPLES [Ch. 18

2and the whole propagation of the angelical men [should have been] so ; and that he could not do now, because he had entered into the spirit of this world ; and therefore there must be such a virginlike creature born in the earthly virgin, which must bring the earthly virgin (with her brethren and sisters) out of the earthliness again into the [pure] element (before God) through himself. And this forming [or imaging] is done in the twinkling of an eye, wholly and perfectly without any defect ; and nothing at all hath happened to it the more with the length of time. 46. And the third forming was together, in the same twinkling of an eye, with the other formings also at once (out of the [pure] element) produced, just as if an earthly seed were sown, out of which a whole child springeth forth, and took its beginning naturally ; and the new creature (in perfection of the element) was the masculine seed of the earthly man, which the earthly matrix of the virgin conceived in the bosom of the Virgin Mary ; yet the earthliness defiled not the limbus of the new creature in the holy element, for the Word of the Deity (which was the mark of the limit of separation) did hinder that. 47. And the angelical image, as to the limbus of the [holy pure] element, came naturally to be flesh and blood, with the infecting and figuring of all natural regions of human members, as in all the children of men, and attained his natural soul in

3Ch. 18] PROMISED SEED OF THE WOMAN 445 1the beginning of the third month, as all other l or in the children of Adam, which hath its ground out of ei the first Principle, and hath raised up its throne and seat into the divine element, into the joy [or habitation] wherein it sat (in the creation) in Adam ; and there it hath attained its princely throne (in the kingdom of heaven, before God) again, out of which it was gone forth with sin in Adam. 48. And thither the second Adam (with his becoming man) brought it in again, and [there] as a loving child it was bound up » with the Word of God, in love and righteousness ; and there the new creature (out of the element) came to be the body of the soul. For in the new creature of the limbus of God, the soul was holy, and the earthly essence (out of flesh and blood) clave to it, in the time of the earthly body ; which [essences] Christ (when his soul with the new creature went into death) left in death, and with the new body in the natural soul he arose from death, and triumphed over death ; as hereafter you shall see the wonders concerning the death and resurrection of Christ. 49. But that the soul of Christ could be generated both in the new, and also in the old earthly creature, is because the gate of the soul in the first Principle .standeth in the source [or quality] of the eternity, and reacheth into the deep gate of the eternity, in the Father's original will, wherewith he breaketh

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