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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189. But if any say, that God doth [abhor or] loathe the great tyranny and oppression, when they domineer and take away the sweat of the poor and needy, and consume it in pride and stateliness, that, Cain cannot endure ; if the terrible example of the flood [or deluge] did not stand there, then [tyranny] would be accounted holiness; but thy 2 kingdom, 2 The time 0 Cain ! is set up in Babel, and thy beast ruleth the exposition in Sodom and Gomorrah ; there is a fire from the every one find lord of heaven in it ; it is time to go with Lot out own' eyes!* of Sodom, sin is awakened in Cain. 90. Now when Cain had murdered his brother, then he went securely as a lord, and thought, now 542 THE THREE PRINCIPLES [Ch. 20 thou art sole prince on earth ; but the voice of the fierce anger of God came, and said, Where is thy brother Abel f And he answered, / know not. Shall I be my brother s keeper-? And 1 God's anger. l he said, What hast thou done f Behold, the voice of thy brother's blood crieth to me from the earth ; and now thou art cursed upon the earth, which hath opened its mouth to receive thy brothers blood from thy hands. When thou shalt till the ground, it shall not yield its strength to thee henceforward ; thou shalt be a vagabond and fugitive upon earth.

291. And now when the anger of God stirred the sin in Cain, then it became awakened, and he was perplexed [or troubled], and then his false faith was seen ; for he despaired, and said, My sins are greater than that they can be forgiven me ; behold thou drivest me away from the Lord this day, and 2 Or before. / must hide myself zfrom thy countenance, and I must be a fugitive and vagabond upon the earth ; 3 Or meeteth. and it shall so befall me, that whosoever 3Jindeth me will slay me. 92. Here there appeareth to us the most terrible, lamentable, and miserable gate of despair, upon the 4 This con- committing of sins ; for when God said, 4 Cursed tendomto art thou upon the earth, which hath opened its mouth, and received thy brother's blood from thy hands; then the lofty, self-potent, glistering, hypocritical, flattering kingdom of Antichrist was rejected of God ; and it hath (with its entering Ch. 20] ADAM AND KVfi's GOING OUT OF PARADISE 543 into the fierce wrath, in the murder) separated itself from God. 93. Therefore said God, Be thou cursed. And the distinction of this cursing or flying out of the fierceness l is, that the love of God will not dwell J Or sheweth. in the fierceness, and that kingdom must not be called after his name ; for God consented not to the murder, but the fierceness [or wrath] of which God warned Cain at his sacrificing, [saying], Be thou upright, and thou shalt be accepted; if

3not, then sin (and the kingdom of fierce wrath) lieth at the door ; he should not let 2 it have * the wickedany power, but should rule over it ; but when fierceness. he letteth it have power, then it ruleth and vanquisheth him. 94. Thus also God withdrew, that is, Cain went out from God, from the kingdom of God into the kingdom of the fierceness of the driver ; therefore also his affairs (which he further [managed, held forth, and] pretended) were not of God, but from the kingdom of the fierce wrath ; that [fierceness] led him, and generated or awakened its 8 wonders through him, that the [kingdom of 3 the wonders the] fierceness might be also manifested, even as wrath. it was a great wonder, 4how the noble image in4 Or that. Abel, by the fierceness of hell, and of this world, 6 could be separated in the 6 breaking of the body ; » or was. whereas the kingdom of hell would fain have 6 dissolution, found [or felt] it; and therefore the first death must be hastily [or suddenly], where then the 544 THE THREE PRINCIPLES [Ch. 20 1 scholarship. Treader upon the Serpent shewed his first l master2 Or was piece, when the kingdom of this world 2 parted from Abel, when the Cherubim did this first time 3 with his 8 cut off the four elements from the holy element. sword.

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