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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1he is himself a wolf, and there hangeth a fox behind him, and in the fox there groweth up an [other] Antichrist again, never a whit better than the first ; he goeth flattering with his 2 fox's skin, 2 Or fox's tail. 470 THE THREE PRINCIPLES [Ch. 18 smelling about (and the wolf sticketh therein) till he getteth the kingdom [or dominion]. If he should come to be old enough, how would he devour the poor people's hens, in the fierce [cruelty] : Therefore the lily in the wonder destroy eth him, which groweth towards the north [or midnight], in the [bitter or] fierce storm. 103. Seeing the world forgeth so much concerning purgatory, therefore I will also set down the ground of it in the light of nature, and see how it will be endured, and whether we can search it out or no ; for we must look upon life and death, and upon the gate where the soul entereth through death into life, and [upon] all the three Principles, because the root [the pith or kernel] lieth therein. THE NINETEENTH CHAPTER Of the Entering of the Souls to God, and of the wicked Souls Entering into Perdition. Of the Gate of the Body's Breaking off [or Parting] from the Soul. '

21. TF we consider now (in the light of nature) of -L man, the image of God, of his beginning, and of his eternal enduring, being [or substance], and then of the breaking of his body, how body and soul part asunder, and whither the souls go, when the spirit of their breath doth break [or dissolve] in them, and the springing or moving in the tincture of this world doth cease, then we find the ground of the unquietness of the soul, when it is separated from the body, [being] unregenerated ; from whence lamentation and desiring arise ; from whence then the Babel of confusion hath arisen, so that very many things have therefore been invented to ransom souls [out of distress]. 2. Many of which [things] have no foundation in the light of nature, nor can be found [therein], but were rather invented for covetousness, and for 471 472 THE THREE PRINCIPLES [Ch. 19 1 for livings. l filling of the belly, and for deceit, upon which the antichristian kingdom is founded. And thereout is a right Babel of confusion come to be, out of which then also the [grim] fierce, cruel enmity and hatred is arisen, from whence Babel is broken in 2 wrangling, herself, and [enmity] is generated out of 2 Babel-, dissension, . and waning, and it is the fierce wrath of God which appeareth in the breaking [or destruction] of Babel, because she is generated in the deceit.

33. But now that the wrath devoureth all, and wholly darkeneth the Hysteria [Mysteries or hidden secrets], and maketh the source [or quality] of the eternal birth [to be] a darkness, only that it may exalt its wrath, and seeth nothing in the birth of eternity, but bringeth all things that are therein to nothing ; that is a very great Babel, for it not only devoureth itself, but maketh itself 3 Or stock- 3 stark blind in nature ; and it maketh of man's blind. image mere evil wolfish beasts, which think that they are gone out from Babel, and yet are begotten in Babel, and are in the body of the evil devouring beast, and so devour the house of their mother, and manifest it to be a vile stinking lake ; and yet themselves will not go out from it, and it is altogether a kingdom, which continually generateth itself, in its own voluptuousness and pride, and also continually manifesteth its own shame, and devoureth itself in the wrath of its own sins, and is rightly called Babel. 4. But if we go out from Babel into the new Ch. 19] ENTERING OF THE SOULS TO GOD 473 regeneration, and consider our corruption, wherein the poor soul lieth captive, and also consider our regeneration in Christ Jesus, how we are regenerated out of God, and then, how man must enter into this new regeneration, and be regenerated in the birth of Christ, then we shall well find what the unquietness of the soul is after the [departure or] breaking off of the body.

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