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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1acknowledge ourselves great sinners, then we will invocate the holy mother of Christ, and his disciples, that they may pray for us, that so our sins may not be known. When we go in pilgrimage (to honour them) and perform divine service, or worship, then she will make intercession, and speak to her Son for us, and pray for us, so that we may thus (in her service) be holy ; and though we stick continually in bestial lechery, self-honour, and voluptuousness, yet that is no matter, we have the keys of Peter, and the mother of Christ for our assistance. 69. [Thus it is with the holy priests], as it was not Israel's meaning (in Moses) concerning the calf, to acknowledge it for a god, and to account it for the true God ; because they knew that [the calf] was gold, and that the true God had made himself known to be otherwise ; and also they had good experience [of the true God] by the wonders [which were wrought] before Pharaoh ; but they would thereby worship and reverence the absent God, and make a remembrance and worship of God for themselves : As king Jeroboam with his calfworship, where yet the honour must be l done to 1 intended the true God. 70. And as Jeroboam's calves were an abomination to God, which he yet with earnest zeal set up to serve the true God thereby, only that he might preserve his worldly kingdom, that the people might not fall from him, when they were to go up 456 THE THREE PRINCIPLES [Ch. 18

2to Jerusalem to offer sacrifice ; and God rejected him and his whole house for it ; and as Moses came (in wrath) because of their divine service before the calf, and brake the Tables of the divine law, and took his sword, and one brother must slay the other, because of their abominations and sins of false worshipping of God ; so also (thou blind world in Babel of confusion) seeing thou art fallen away from the everywhere-present, all-knowing, all-seeing, all-hearing, all-smelling, and all-feeling Heart, Jesus Christ, and set upon thy own conceited ways, and dost not desire to see the gracious countenance itself of Jesus Christ, and wilt not lay aside thy shame and whoredom, thy appearing show of holiness or hypocrisy, thy self-conceited wilful pride, might, authority, pomp, and state, but livest in thy invented holiness, for thy pleasure, in covetousness, gormandizing, gluttony, and drunkenness, and in mere exalting of thyself in honour ; therefore the second Moses (who was promised by the first, and whom men should hear) hath broken the Or becoming Tables of his law, whereupon his precious 1incarnanan. . .

3tion, suffering, death, resurrection, and entering into heaven stood, and hath stopped their entering into thy ears ; and he hath sent thee strong delusions (out of the spirit of thy own invented show of holiness) as St Paul saith ; so that thou believest the spirit of lying, and livest according to thy fleshly lust, that so thy own invented show of holiness with thy false key (which doth not open Ch. 18] PROMISED SEED OF THE WOMAN 457 the suffering and dying of Jesus Christ in his death) doth deceive thyself. 71. For thou art not entered into the Father by the intercession of men, but by the precious incarnation of Jesus Christ ; and if thou dost not instantly turn in the last voice of God's call (whereas many of you have been much called) and go out from Babel, then Moses standeth in wrath, and saith, Gird every one his sword to his side, and slay his brother in Babel, and so thou destroyest thyself. For the spirit of thy own mouth will destroy thyself, so that thou shalt be no more 'called Babel, but fierceness, wrath and sword within thyself, which will consume thee, and not spare ; for thou murderest thyself, thou great wonder of the world.

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