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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188. Behold, dost thou know how a child cometh to be flesh and blood, and in the end a living soul ? And do you not know that the tincture of the mother is first, when a child shall be conceived ? Which is done in the desire of the will between man and woman ; where then the seed [for the child] is sown, and then the tincture in the matrix assumeth it, with the mixture of the limbus of the man. And though the outward mother doth not desire [to have] 2 the child, but desireth many times only to have her pleasure ; yet the inward [mother] doth desire it, and also first of all impregnateth itself in the tincture, and then Ch. 18] PROMISED SEED OF THE WOMAN 465 attracteth the l Fiat to it, and holdeth the limbus » Or the Word of the man, and becometh impregnated. formeth and 89. But now that tincture qualifieth [or mixeth] cr with the whole body, and also with the soul ; for if it [the tincture] be faithful, then it reacheth the virgin of God in the element, and it is rightly the habitation of the holy soul, in which God assisteth 2 it. 2 the soul. 90. Now thus the child qualifieth [or mixeth] with the mother, and with all essences, till it kindleth the light of life, and then the child liveth in its [own] spirit, and the mother* is its dwellinghouse. But now seeing the soul of the child is generated out of the limbus, and out of the essences of the mother, therefore 3 it is indeed half 3 the soul of the mother's, though now it is become the proper

2own of itself. 91. Thus also in Christ ; the will [to the child] was the mother's, when the angel declared the message to her, and the tincture (which received the limbus of God, and brought it into the will, that she was thus impregnated in the element) that was also the mother's, and thus the Deity was conceived, in the mother's tincture, in her will, like any other natural child. 92. Seeing then that the soul of her child was in the holy Trinity, what dost thou think here ? Seeing it went forth out of the mother's essences, whether might not the holiness of the child (especially his high light) in the mother shine 30 466 THE THREE PRINCIPLES [Ch. 18 bright and gloriously ? And whether this mother may not rightly stand upon the moon, and despise that which is earthly, as is to be seen in the Kevelation [of St John] ? 93. For she bore the Saviour of all the world, without any earthly mixture ; and she is also a virgin of chastity, highly blessed by her Son 1 Or above Jesus Christ, in the divine light and clarity, 1more the heavens, than the heavens, like the princely thrones of the

3angels. For out of her went forth the body, which attracteth all members to it, which are the children of God in Christ. And therefore her glance [lustre or brightness] is above the glance of heaven ; and the glance of her soul is in the holy Trinity, where all other children of Adam (which are born [or begotten] in Christ) are also members therein, in that one Christ Jesus. 94. Or dost thou think I make a god of her? No, the invocation doth not belong to her ; for the might [or ability] to help cometh only out of the Father, through the Son ; for in the Father only is the source [or fountain] of the omnipotence, which he in the Son speaketh forth, for the might of the strength is in the first Principle, which is the Father himself, and the Son is his love, and 2 brightness z light ; so now the Virgin Mary dwelleth in the heaven, in the light and in the love of the Father, as also all other saints [do]. 95. But that they feign [or babble] that she was taken up into heaven alive with soul and body, and Ch. 18] PROMISED SEED OP THE WOMAN 467 that she can carry our miseries, and present them before her Son, I would fain know what understanding and knowledge the author of such an invented fable hath had of the kingdom of heaven. Surely he took the kingdom of this world to be heaven.

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