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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1fiery l nature had not been severed : But because J property or the eternal essence (viz. God) would manifest himself in the dark matrix, and [hath desired] to make the nothing something, therefore he hath severed the kindled virtue, and made the matrix clear or pure. 27. And thus now the matrix staudeth incomprehensibly, and longeth after the fiery nature [or condition], and the fiery nature longeth after the matrix. For the spirit of God (which is a spirit of meekness) 2 beholdeth itself in the watery matrix ; - speculated, T • • mi or miagineth. and the matrix receiveth virtue from thence. Inus there is a constant will to generate and work, and the whole nature standeth in a great longing and anguish, willing continually to generate the divine virtue, God and paradise being hidden therein, but it generateth after its kind, according to its ability. 102 THE THREE PRINCIPLES [Ch. 7

228. Now when God had severed the matrix with [or from] its fiery form, and would manifest himself with this world, then he put the Fiat into the matrix, and spake out of himself, [saying], Let there be herbs, grass, trees, and beasts, every one according to its kind : This Speaking was the Heart, or the virtue [or power] of the eternal Father : But the spirit which had the Fiat, went from the eternal Father (in the virtue of the Heart of God) forth with the will (and the will was the Fiat) and l made the out-birth in the third Principle material, visible, and comprehensible, each according to its essence ; as the virtue was, so was also its body. For there the fiery matrix, or the constellation, gave its virtue to the Fiat ; and the watery matrix, with the elements, received the virtue, and so were impregnated, and each element generated its own creatures out of itself,* as also each form in the fiery and watery nature out of themselves ; and yet it became no separable essence, but only every creature was separated according to its kind, according to the eternal virtue, which arose in the longing by the lust, and became the third Principle, which was not before time [began]. 29. Thus the starry heaven ruleth in all creatures, as in its proper own ; it is the [husband or] man; and the matrix, or the watery form, is its [wife or] woman, which it continually impregnateth ; and the matrix is the genetrix, which bringeth forth the child which the heaven

3Ch. 7] THE FOUR ELEMENTS 103 1 begetteth ; and that is the created heaven in the l maketh, or third Principle, from whence the elements are proceeded ; viz. the watery matrix, out of which the visible water generated itself, and still always doth generate itself in the anguish. 30. Therefore Moses writeth, that God created the heaven out of the midst of the waters : [This you must] understand [to be] out of the eternal watery matrix, which is but a spirit, wherein the paradise is, and the holy heaven, viz. the divine virtue, which the dark matrix lusted after in its hunger, out of which the visible matrix of the four elements is proceeded ; out of which the essence of all essences, that now are, were created by the Fiat through the eternal spirit of God. 31. For every form in the matrix hath its visible creatures, and such as are invisible to human eyes ; which creatures in part as to us are as it were but mere 2 figured spirits, as the fire hath spirits and 2 shapes, and . ., . , forms of creatures that are invisible to our material eyes, appearance. and we cannot see them : There are also in the air invisible spirits, which we see not ; for the air being immaterial, so are also the spirits thereof: The water hath material creatures, which are not visible to us ; and because they are not out of the fire nor air, they are of another 3 quality, and are s property, hidden [as] to the fiery and airy [spirits], except they will manifest themselves.

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