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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172. 0 how have all the Prophets written of thee, and yet thou knowest not thyself ; thou ridest so upon thy fat pampered beast, and that riding pleaseth thee so well, that thou wilt rather go to the devil into the abyss of hell, than that thou wilt light off thy beast. What shall become of thee then, thou blind Babel ? Do but light off from thy great ugly beast, [which indeed is] thy might, pomp, state, and pride. Behold ! thy bridegroom cometh, and reacheth forth his hand to thee, and would lead thee out of Babel. 73. Did not he walk on foot upon earth ? He did not ride in that manner. He had not whereon to lay his head. What kingdom do you build for him ? Where is the place of his rest ? Doth he 458 THE THREE PRINCIPLES [Ch. 18 not rest in thy arms? Wherefore dost thou not embrace him ? Is he [according to thy reason] too poor in this world? Yet he is rich in heaven. Who wilt thou send to him to be reconciled to thee ? The mother of Jesus ? 0 no, that will not avail ; he doth not stand behind thee and absolve thy wickedness, for thy inclination of falsehood. He 1 thy em- knoweth not thy l letters which thou sendest to messages. him by the saints, who are in the still rest before him in the heavenly element. 74. The spirit of their souls is in the stillness, in the still habitation before God. It doth not let thy rough sins come into it to sleep upon them, but its imagination and whole will standeth directly

22 the original bent into the Heart of God, and the 2 spirit of the the spirit of first Principle of its original source saith, Lord, when faith. avengest thou our blood ? And the meekness of Jesus Christ saith : Rest in the stillness, till thy brethren also come to thee, who shall be slain in Babel for the witness of Jesus. 8 the holy 75. 3They make no intercession for thee, neither souls do not , , . ., , . „ , , , pray for thee. doth it avail anything ; lor thou must be regenerated anew, through earnest sorrow and repentance ; thou must light down from off thy beast, and must go on foot with Christ over the brook Kedron, into his sufferings and death ; and through him thou must rise again out of his grave ; thou thyself must come to this. Another cannot save thee ; thou must enter into the birth of Jesus Christ, and with him be conceived by the Holy Ghost ; thy soul Ch. 18] PROMISED SEED OF THE WOMAN 459 must in the Word, and in the new man Christ, in the [one eternal] element, be born [or brought forth] out of the four elements into the water of the element of eternal life ; thy antichristian feigned fables help thee not ; for it is said, Such 1 belief as people have, such a God also they have J Or faith. to bless them. 76. But that thy 2 predecessors after their death 2 forefathers. have 3 appeared in deeds of wonder (upon which 3 Or done thou buildest), that was caused by the faith of the living, and their 4 imaging in [or impression upon] 4

3their tincture, which is so strong that it can remove mountains. An evil faith also (if it be strong) can (in the first Principle) stir up wonders, as may be seen by 5 incantation, and by the wicked showers 6 Of witches of signs before Pharaoh : 6as they believed, SG was done. . their faith. 77. And while the faith of the living [at the time of thy forefathers] was yet somewhat good and pure, [as] to the kingdom of God still, and they did not seek their bellies and pomp [as they do now], therefore their faith [or belief] pierced into the heaven, into the [pure] element, to the saints [or holy souls] ; who thus did also naturally appear with works of wonders [or miracles], to the living saints (in their element) in the strong faith, which [works of wonders] were only comprehended [or taken hold of] in the faith, and that 7 not 7 Or the onj , , godly did not imparted to tne ungodly. partake of 78. For one tincture caught hold of the other, 460 THE THREE PRINCIPLES [Ch. 18

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