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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132. As fire, air, water, and earth, lie in one case [or chest], and they four are but one thing, and 104 THE THREE PRINCIPLES [Ch. 7 yet of four distinct differences, and none of them can comprehend, nor retain the other, and someOr predomi. what of one of the four being l fixed in every creature, that creature cannot bind itself as to that, but is manifested therein, and according to that spirit is comprehensible and perceptible, and yet is incomprehensible to the spirits 'of the other elements. 33. For all things are come to be something out of nothing : And every creature hath the centre, or the circle of the birth of life in itself ; and as the elements lie hidden in one another in one only mother, and none of them comprehendeth the other, though they are members one of another, so the created creatures are hidden and invisible to one another. For every creature looketh but into its mother that is fixed [or predominant] in it. The material creature seeth a material substance, but an immaterial substance (as the spirits in the fire and in the air) it seeth not ; as the body seeth not the soul, which yet dwelleth in it ; or as the third Principle doth not comprehend, nor apprehend the second Principle wherein God is ; though indeed

2> Prin- itself is in God, yet there is a 2 birth between : As it is with the spirit of the soul of man, and the elementary spirit in man, the one being the case [chest] or receptacle of the other ; as you shall find about the creation of man. THE EIGHTH CHAPTER Of the Creation of the Creatures, and of the Springing up of every l growing Thing ; as a vegetable, or also of the Stars and Elements, and of the Original of the 2 Substance of this World. 2 Or essence. 1. ~T~N the beginning of the last preceding chapter, -L it is mentioned that it is not strange for a man to write, speak, and teach of the creation of the world, though he was not present when it was doing, if he have but the knowledge in the spirit. For there he seeth in the mother, as in a glass, the genetrix of every thing ; for one thing always lieth in another, and the more is sought, the more is found, and there is no need to cast the mind beyond this world ; for all is to be found in this world, yea in every thing that liveth and moveth. Whatsoever any looketh upon, and searcheth into, he shall find the spirit with the Fiat therein ; and the divine virtue [or power discovereth, or] 3 beholdeth itself in all things, as it is written, The word is near thee, even in thy heart and lips. For when the light of God dawneth, or breaketh forth in the centre of the spirit of the soul, then the spirit of 105 106 THE THREE PRINCIPLES [Ch. 8

3Or creating, the soul seeth very well the l creation of this world, as in a clear glass, and nothing is afar off. 2. Therefore now I direct the Eeader to the creatures, that he may search into them, and so he shall find all things, and that more wonderfully than any man can write or speak, if we be born of Or funda- God. We must not 2 think with our understanding eive* ' and skill, of God's making or creating, as of a man that maketh somewhat, as a potter maketh a vessel of a lump of clay, or a stone-cutter or carver maketh an image after his pleasure ; and if it doth not please him, then he breaketh it again : No, the works of God, in the creation of the world, were altogether fixed and steadfast, good and perfect, as Moses writeth : And God saw all that he had made, and behold it was very good. 3. For he took not one lump after another, or many lumps together, and made beasts of them, that is not likely ; and it is much more a bestial than a human thought. But, as is mentioned before, after that the devil was fallen with his in loco. legions, (who had his throne 3 in the place of this world, standing bodily after the manner of a spirit,

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