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. And further, when the horror [or crack or shriek] of the fire is come into its harsh mother, and hath thus overcome its mother, then itself is much more terrified, for there it loseth its fierce or strong property, because the mother [hath] attained another 4 source ; and out of the horror of 4 Or root the fire a 6 brightness is come to be, in which, in "glance, or ,1 r i • lustre. the inanimate matrix, the matena [or matter], in the midst of the horror [or crack], is come to be a soft and bright 6 mixed matter, viz. from the crack 8 Or concrete. of the light [is proceeded] gold, silver, copper, tin, lead, etc. according as every place in the matrix stood in the wrestling centre. 11. For the birth in the whole space of this Note. world (as far as Lucifer's kingdom reached) was 84 THE THREE PRINCIPLES [Ch. 6 thus ; and therefore there are very different kinds of earth, metals, and other things in one place, than in another. And it is plain before our eyes, that all metals are mixed, which proceedeth from Or out- the l bringing forth in infinitum ; which we well understand and see, but cannot utter, nor dare we speak it, for it troubleth us, and it! reacheth into the Deity, which is without beginning, and eternal ; therefore the creature must let it alone upon pain of the loss both of its reason and sense.

212. But to declare this further : When the matrix stood thus in the birth, where the matter of the earth was generated, then the matrix with the kindling became water ; you must understand it aright, not wholly in substance, but it hath generated the earth, stones, and metals, and yet the matrix continueth still ; so also the water still continueth in the killing and overcoming ; whereby the material world took its "beginning, where the globe of the earth was drawn together in this moving, and standeth in the middle of the circle from above and from beneath as a point [or puncturn]. Note. 13. And there in the centre, in the paradisical matrix, and in the paradisical heaven, the spirit of God stood in his own eternal seat, neither did it depart from thence, and moved upon the material water with the Fiat, and there formed the heaven, which was created out of the midst of the watery matrix ; and he separated the root of the darkness Ch. 6] OF THE SEPARATION IN THE CREATION 85 from the light in the matrix, in which darkness the devils remained, and they have not comprehended the matter in the matrix, nor the new light, which sprang up in the matrix. And so with this creation and separation the length of one day was finished, and out of the beginning and end, and morning and evening, was the first day, as Moses writeth.

314. But that we may so speak of the heaven, that the Header might come to understand what that [heaven] is which God then created, [consider] what Moses writeth of it. God made a firmament between the waters, and separated the waters beneath the firmament from the waters above the firmament, and the firmament he called heaven, which is very right ; but hitherto it hath been very ill understood. 15. Now observe, the heaven is the whole deep, so far as the ethera, or skies, have l given up l expanded, themselves to the birth of this world, and that °r heaven is the matrix, out of which earth, stones, and the material water are generated. And there God separated the material water from the matrix. And here it is very plainly discerned, that the material water is as it were dead, or hath death in it; for it could not abide in the 2 moving mother, • Viz. the air. but was created [to be] upon the globe of the earth, and God called it sea \Meer\ ; in which [word] is understood, in the language of nature, as it were a springing [or growing] in death, or a life 86 THE THREE PRINCIPLES [Ch. 6 1 the corrupti- in l corruption : 2 Although herein I shall be as one 2 Thai i3> the that is dumb to the Reader, yet I 3 know it very well, and I am very well satisfied therewith. But because the bestial man is not worthy to know it, stuxi. therefore I will not here cast the Pearl before the

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