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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1live in the true man, who is the image and similitude of God ; for to such it is very highly necessary to be known ; also for the lily's sake which groweth in the tree of the sour wrath towards the l north in the matrix. 14. Moses writeth, God said, Let there be lights in the firmament of heaven, which may separate and distinguish day and night, and be for signs, for times and seasons, for days and years ; and to be for lights in the firmament of heaven, to shine upon the earth ; and it ivas so. And God made two great lights, the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night : Also, he made the stars. And God set them in the firmament of heaven, that they might shine upon the earth, and rule the day and the night, and separate the light from the darkness. 15. And though Moses hath written very rightly, that they should govern the day and the night, and should separate the light from the darkness, and make times and seasons, years and days, yet it is not plain enough to be understood by the desirous Reader. For there is found a very high thing in the virtue and power of the stars ; [which is] that every life, growth, colour, and virtue, thickness and thinness, smallness and greatness, good and evil, is moved and stirred by their power. For this cause the wise heathens did rely upon them, and honoured them as god. Therefore I will write somewhat of their original, as far as is permitted to me at this

2Oh. 8] OF THE CREATION OF THE CREATURES 113 time, for their sakes that seek and desire the Pearl. But I have written nothing for the swine, and other bestial men, who trample the Pearl into the dirt, and scorn and contemn the spirit of knowledge ; such as they, may, with the first world, expect a deluge, or flood of fire ; and seeing they will bear no angelical image, therefore they must bear the images of lions, dragons, and other evil beasts, and worms [or creeping things]. And if they will not admit of good counsel that God may help them, then they must look to find by experience whether the Scriptures of prophecy lie to them or no. 16. The Evangelist St John writeth of the orioinalitv of the essence and creatures of this * world, so very highly and exactly, as may be read in no other place of Scripture in the Bible : In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and that Word was God : This was in the beginning with God, all things were made by it, and without it was nothing made that was made. In it was the life, and the life was the light of men, and the light shone in the darkness, and the darkness hath not comprehended the light. 17. Mark what John saith : In the beginning of the creation, and before the times of the world, was the Word, and the Word was God, and in the Word was the light, and it shone in the darkness, and the darkness could not compreJiend the light. Wherein may be clearly understood, that

3the eternal light is God ; and that it hath its 8 114 THE THREE PRINCIPLES [Ch. 8 eternal original in the eternal virtue or power ; and that it is the eternal Word which shone in the darkness. Seeing then that Word created all things in all places, therefore it also was in all places, for without it was nothing made. 18. Now that Word had no matter out of which it made any thing, but it created all things out of the darkness, and brought them to light, that it might shine forth, appear, and present itself. For in it was the life, and it gave the light to the creature, and the creature is out of its virtue, and the virtue became material, and the light shineth therein, and the material virtue cannot comprehend it, for that is in darkness. But seeing the material virtue cannot comprehend the light, which from eternity shineth in the darkness, therefore God hath given that [material virtue] another light, which proceedeth out of the virtue (viz. the sun), which shineth in the creature, that so the creature is manifested in the light. 19. For as the Deity is the virtue [or power] and light of paradise in the second Principle, so the sun is the virtue [or power] and light of this material world in the third Principle. And as the Deity shineth in the darkness in the first Principle, so the sun shineth in the darkness in the third Principle. And as the Deity is the eternal virtue and the spirit of the eternal life, so the sun is 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