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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110. For Adam was the heart of everything in this world, created out of the originality of all things ; his soul was out of the first Principle, 8 Or shining, throughly 6 illustrated with the second [Principle] ; or enlightened. . ,, 1 r and his body was out ot the [/me] element, out of the 6 Barm, or birth, out of the divine virtue [which is] before God, which [body] was entered into the out-birth of the [one] element, viz. into the four elements, and wholly gone into the spirit of this world, viz. into the third Principle. And therefore he had the tincture of everything in him, 6 Or warm hatching. Ch. 21] THE CAINISH AND ABELLISH KINGDOMS 561 by which he reached into all essences, and proved [or searched] all things in the heaven, earth, fire, air, and water, and all whatsoever is generated from thence. 11. And so one tincture took hold of the other, and the stronger hath proved [or tried] the weaker, and given names to all things, according to their essences ; and that is the true ground of Adam's, fall, that he went out of the eternal [being] into the out-birth of the corruptible [being], and hath put on the l corruptible image, which God forbad » Or transihim. tory12. And here the two strong kingdoms of the eternity are to be seen, which have been in strife with one another, and are always so ; and the strife continueth to eternity, for it is also from eternity,

2viz. [between] 2 the fierceness and the meekness. » the wrath If the fierceness were not, there would be no and tbe lovemobility; but it overcome fch in this world only 'according to the kingdom of hell, and in the3 The wrath heaven it maketh the ascending joy, and the t meekness. '? the 'our elements, and 13. And it is highly to be found and considered by us, in the light of nature, how the fierceness [or wrath] is the root of all things, and, moreover, the originality of the life ; therein only consisteth the might and the power, and from thence only proceed the wonders; and without the fierceness [or wrath] there would be no enmity, but all would be [as it were] a nothing, as is formerly mentioned. 36 562 THE THREE PRINCIPLES [Ch. 21 14. And then we find also, how the meekness is the virtue and the spirit, so that where the meekness is not, there the fierceness (in itself) is nothing 1 working, but a darkness and a death, where no l growing can fruit, or bringing spring up, and it cannot generate nor discover its wonders ; and thus we find that the fierceness [wrath or sourness] is a cause of the essences, and [that] the meekness [is] a cause of the joy, and a cause of the rising and [budding or] growing forth of the essences ; and then that the spirit is generated by the flowing [working, springing] and rising up, out of the essences, and that the fierceness so becometh the root of the spirit, and the meekness is its life.

315. Now there can be no meekness without light, for the light maketh the meekness, and there can be no fierceness without the light, for the light 3 desiring, or maketh a 2 longing in the darkness ; and yet there attracting. is no darkness there, but the longing maketh the darkness in the will, so that the will attracteth to itself, and impregnateth the longing, so that it becometh thick and dark ; for it is thicker than the will, and therefore it shadoweth the will, and is the darkness of the will. 16. And if the will be thus in darkness, then it is in anguish ; for it desireth to be out of the darkness, and that desiring is the flowing [or working] and the attracting in itself, where yet nothing is attained but a fierce source in itself, which by its attraction maketh hardness and roughness, which „„ upon , and thu ° asan known ) ^ " ( is »eet give the Reader exaotlv f how the rell f 7 , unde«tand and know . « the beSS r C°r g]' Which U Was not tWainm; whog;;"7 m^lea» to understand «d woman' 2 /u ^""W- in the wi» «f -an is conceived rthet/W6W' ^ » the *><"«, ^tmcture, and sown in an earthly 564 THE THREE PRINCIPLES [Ch. 21

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