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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1her body, which is called Tei^narius Sanctus [the holy Ternary], the holy earth ; and into this holy 614 THE THREE PRINCIPLES [Ch. 22 1 formerly. a the image of God. Ternary the invisible Deity is entered, that she may be an eternal espousal [or union] ; so that (in a similitude) the Deity is in the pure element, and the element is the Deity ; for God and Ternarius Sanctus are become one thing, not in spirit, but in substance, as body and soul. And as the soul is above the body, so also God is above the holy Ternary. 64. And this now is the heavenly virgin, of which the spirit of God spake, in the wise men l of old ; and Ternarius Sanctus is our true body in the 2 image which we have lost, which now the Heart of God hath taken to him for a body ; and this noble body (as also the virgin of God) was put upon Mary, not as a garment, but very powerfully in her essences ; and yet incomprehensible as to the essences of this world of flesh and blood in the body of Mary, but comprehensible as to the soul of Mary ; for the soul did pass into the holy Ternary ; and yet she could not so be severed 3 Or cormpti. from the 3 fierce wrath, but that was to be in the breaking of the earthly body from the heavenly, in the death of Christ.

265. Thus the Word in the holy Ternary let itself into the earthliness, and received to it a true soul out of the essences of the soul of Mary (like all other men) in the time, viz. in the end of three months, not out of the holy Ternary, but our soul ; yet not our body, wherein the kingdom of this world and sin did stick. Ch. 22] THE NEW REGENERATION IN CHRIST 615 66. It is true indeed he took our body on him, but not mingled with the holy Ternary ; for death stuck in our body, and the Ternarius Sanctus was 1 his death, and victory ; and in the holy Ternary 1 Or its death i • -TV • -. , . PI The death of was his Deity ; and that man is come irom heaven, the death of and hath put on the earthly [man,] and brought to °l pass the redemption (between the earthly and the heavenly), whereby the soul was 2 severed from the 2 Or freed, anger and wrath.

367. You must not say that whole Christ with body and soul came from heaven. He brought no soul out of the holy Ternary ; the heavenly virgin was the soul in the holy Ternary ; and that he brought with him for a bride to our soul, as this whole book doth treat of it. For what would it help me, if he had brought a strange soul with him ? Nothing at all. But that he hath brought my soul into the holy Ternary, I rejoice at that ; and thus I can say, that Christ's soul is my brother, and his body is the food of my soul ; as he saith in the sixth chapter of John, My flesh is meat indeed, and my blood is drink indeed. 68. Come hither, ye contentious 3 shepherds of3 pastors, Babel, open your eyes, and consider what his presbyters, or Testaments of the Baptism and his Last Supper are : I shall shew you well enough, if you be but worthy ; however, we write for the children of the lily ; therefore let every one see where he harboureth ; it is in earnest. We slight not the understanding of the ancients. It may be, it was 616 THE THREE PRINCIPLES [Ch. 22 purely generated in the beginning, but we find how Antichrist hath set up himself upon it, and made gods of the creature.

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