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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11 infidels or Turks, and l Pagans, and they keep them back from the Christian faith. Therefore now we must write for the sake of the Tree of Pearl, and not conceal what appeareth to us in the great wonder. Behold, thou child of man, consider what we set down here ; gaze not on the hand of the pen ; if you do, you err, and will lose the jewel, which in all eternity you will be sorry for ; consider thyself only, and thou shalt find in thyself all the causes [of the Passion of Christ] that are here written down ; for there was a wonderful pen in the writing of it, and neither thou nor the hand A knoweth him sufficiently, that directed it in the writing; though indeed the spirit knoweth him very well, yet the natural man is blind in it, neither can it be expressed with earthly words. Therefore consider thyself, and if you search into the new-born man, then you will find the Pearl. The very horrible wonderful Gate of Man's Sins. 17. As we have, in the beginning of this book. 3 Or working, mentioned the eternal 2 birth in the originality, so we have mentioned the birth of the essences, and the seven spirits of the eternal nature ; and therein we shewed how there is a cross-birth in the eternal birth in the fourth form, where the essences in the turning wheel make a cross-birth, because they cannot go out from themselves, but that the eternal birth is everywhere so in all things, in the essence of all essences. Ch. 25] CHRIST'S DEATH AND RESURRECTION 687

218. And we give you to understand thus much (in very exact knowledge) at the instant of this text ; that all essences in all qualities at the time of the overcoming of death (when Christ was to overcome death and destroy hell and captivate the devil) were predominant, for so it must be ; he must release the soul from all essences. 19. Now the cross-birth is the middlemost in the essences, yet before the fire ; l it standeth in * the crossthe anxious death in the fierceness of the hell, asb you may read before ; for from the fierce flash in the brimstone-spirit, the fire cometh forth, and in the flash the light, and the fierceness itself maketh the brimstone-spirit and out of that (in the light) cometh water, as is before mentioned. Now then the soul of man is discovered in the flash, as a spirit, and held by the Fiat, and so is created or generated, and was brought in itself into the fifth form of the birth, as into the love, where then it was an angel in the light of God. 20. But this world being created (as a Principle) in the fourth form (as an out-birth), and the paradise [being] between the fourth and the fifth forms, and the 2 element [being] in the fifth form, «the one pore and therein the eternal light of the Deity having element< opened another centre, and the soul having reflected back again into the fourth form, and entered thereinto, it made all essences predominant in it, which stood in the fourth form.

321. And now when the body of the soul, in the 688 THE THREE PRINCIPLES [Ch. 25 fourth form, was come to be a mass out of the water, with a mixture of the other forms, then stuck all essences, out of the fourth form, upon the soul, and it was captivated with this body ; and it had continued in an eternal prison, if the 1 Or put. eternal Word had not instantly l given itself into the centre of the fifth form, as was manifested in Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. 22. And now when the time came that the Word became man, then the dear life came into the soul again. But when the strife came, that the fourth form should be broken, then the outward body of Christ and we all in the fourth form were environed with death, and then all the forms in nature did stir, and were all predominant together, whereupon the Person of Christ (in the garden) did sweat blood out of his body, when he cried, Father, if it be possible, take this cup from me : Thus the outward man cried out ; and the inward said, Yet not my will (understand [my] outward will) but thy will be done.

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