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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11 Or transi- spirit and the virtue in the l corruptible life. 20. So now a spirit is nothing else but a springCh. 8] OF THE CREATION OP THE CREATURES 115 ing will, and in the will there is the anguish to the birth, and in the anguish the fire generateth itself, and in the fire the light, and from the light the will becometh friendly, pleasant, mild and sweet, and in the sweet will the kingdom and the glory generate themselves. Thus the light keepeth the might [or power] ; and if that be put out, then the virtue [or power] and glory cease, and the kingdom also. 21. God, who is the eternal light, he is the eternal will ; he shineth in the darkness, and the darkness hath comprehended the will : And in that will (which hath comprehended the darkness) the anguish riseth up, and in the sour [harsh] anguish the fire, and in the fire the light, and out of the light [cometh] the virtue [or power], and out of the virtue the kingdom. So now out of the fire [came] the constellations, and moreover the sun, and out of the virtue came the heaven ; and the kingdom is God's. All this was in the first will in the creation, one with another ; wherein God severed the fiery will from the mild will of the light, and called the fiery [will] stars, and the mild [will] heaven, in respect of the virtue of each of them.

222. The sun is the l goddess in the third Prin- ' petty god. ciple ; in the created world (understand, in the material virtue) it went forth out of the darkness in the anguish of the will, in the way and manner of the eternal birth. For when God set the Fiat in the darkness, then the darkness received the will of God, and was impregnated 2 for the birth. The * to. 116 THE THREE PRINCIPLES [Ch. 8

3will causeth the [sour] harshness, the harshness causeth the attracting, and the stirring of the attracting to mobility causeth the bitterness, which is the woe, and the woe causeth the anguish, and the anguish causeth the moving, breaking, and rising up. Now the sour harshness cannot endure the jerking, and therefore attractetjh the harder to itself; and the bitterness or the attracting will not endure to be stayed, but breaketh and stingeth so very hard in the attracting, that it stirreth up the heat, wherein the flash springeth up, and the dark [sourness or] harshness is affrighted by the flash, and in the shriek the fire kindleth, and in the fire the light. Now there would be no light if the shriek in the harshness had not been, but there would have remained nothing but fire ; yet the shriek in the harshness of the fire killeth the hard harshness, so that it sinketh down as it were to the ground, and becometh as it were dead and soft ; and when the flash perceiveth itself in the harshness, then it is affrighted much more, because it findeth the mother so very mild, and half dead in weakness ; and so in this shriek its fiery property becometh white, soft, and mild, and it is the kindling of the light, wherein the fire is changed into a white clarity [glance, lustre, or brightness].

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