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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19. For as in the paradisical Principle the Holy Ghost in the Trinity of the Deity continually goeth forth, and tioweth very softly, immovably and imperceptibly as to the creature, and yet formeth and fashioneth all in the paradisical matrix, so also doth the third Principle. After that the matrix became visible and material, every virtue in the matrix hath had a great attractive longing towards another, a continual springing, blossoming, and fading again like a bud, or some boiling seething matter, wherein the sourness, coldness, and [eager fierce] strongness, attract without ceasing ; and this attracting, prickle [or sting], stirreth always without ceasing, and striveth [or resisteth], so that the sour matrix (because of the inward, hellish, or most original matrix) standeth continually in anguish, with a great desire of the light, which it espieth in the root of the fire, and is continually affrighted at it, and becometh mild, soft, and material ; whereby the elementary water is continually generated. 92 THE THREE PRINCIPLES [Ch. 7 10. In this manner you must understand the four elements, which yet are not four divided things, or essences, but one only essence : And yet there are four differences, or distinctions in this birth ; and each element lieth in the other, as in a chest, and it is its receptacle, also it is a member therein. Understand and consider the ground

2>r astrin- aright, which followeth : The l sourness is the >tofthe matrix, and a cause of all things, which in its own substance is very dark, cold, and as nothing ; but the eternal Deity being there, and speculating or beholding itself in the sourness, therefore the dark sourness is desirous after the divine virtue, and attracteth ; although there is no life or understanding in the sourness, yet it is the ground of the first essence, and the original whence something cometh to be : Here we can search no further into the ground of the Deity, for it troubleth [disturbeth, or confoundeth] us. 11. Now the sourness (in its lust or great longing [or panting] after the light) attracteth continually, and in its own substance it is nothing else but a vehement hunger, very dry, and as [a vacuum or] nothing at all, a desiring will, as the darkness after the light; and its hunger, or attracting, maketh the bitterness, the woe [or lamentation] that it cannot be satiated, or mollified, from whence the anguish ariseth, so that the will, if "^ike*1 °r Prick*e Lor sting] is rubbed, [or 2 struck] in itself, from the lust of the desiring, and it will not Ch. 7] THE FOUR ELEMENTS 93

3yield itself to the dark nothing, or dead will, but setteth its desire and anguish, and also its [eager or] strong will so very hard towards the hidden light of God, that thereby the will becometh a twinkling flash, like a sparkling or l crackling fire, l AS when you whereby the sourness, that is so very aching, is into the fire. continually filled, and as it were deadened, whereby the sour spirit cometh to be soft, sweet, and material, even water. 12. But the bitterness being so very much affrighted at the flash of fire in the sourness, it catcheth its mother (the sourness) which is become material from the crack, and flieth out, and is clouded or 2 swelled from the material sourness, as2 impregnated. if it also were material, and moveth, and strengtheneth itself continually in the mother ; and that is the element called air in this world, which hath its original in the watery mother, and the water hath ' its original from the air, and the fire hath its original from the longing anguish ; and the earth and stones took their beginning in the strong attraction at the fall of Lucifer, when the sourness was so fierce, strong, rising, and attractive, which attraction is stopped again by the light in the third Principle.

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