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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12. Indeed Moses writeth, That God made man of the dust of the earth. And that is the opinion of very many : And I should also not have known how that was to be understood, and I should not have learned it out of Moses, nor out of the 1 expositions, * glosses which are made upon it ; and the veil or interpreta- . tions of it. would have continued still before my eyes, yet in great trouble. But when I found the Pearl, then I looked Moses in the face, and found that Moses had written very rightly, and that I had not rightly understood it. 3. For after the fall God said also to Adam and Eve, Earth thou art, and to earth thou shall return again : And if I had not considered the 2 the power, 2 limbus (out of which the earth was), 1 should or the eternal , . ... mi _.. _ n . substantiality. nave been so blind still: inat \_hmous] shewed me the ground of what Adam was before and after the fall. 4. For no such earth or flesh as we carry about Oh. 10] THE CREATION OF MAN, AND HIS SOUL 153 us can subsist in the light of God : Therefore also Christ said, None goeth to heaven, but the Son of Man who is come from heaven, and who is in heaven. Thus our flesh before the fall was heavenly, out of the heavenly limbus. But when disobedience came, in the lust of this world, to generate itself in another centre, then it [the flesh] became earthly ; for by the biting of the earthly apple in the Garden of Eden, the earthly

2dominion [or kingdom] took its beginning : And the mother of the great world instantly took the 1 little world into its power [or virtue], and made l man. it to be of a bestial 2kind, both in 3form and 2 Or property. in substance. 'shape. 5. And if the soul had not been * within it, then 4 Or in the Adam would have continued to be an unreasonable centre of it. beast ; but being the soul out of the limbus had been breathed into Adam by the Holy Ghost, therefore now the 5 mercifulness (viz. the Heart of 5 Bannhcrtn j\ 1-1 • ii« • i zigkcit. broct) must do its nest again, and bring again the centre out of the heavenly limbus, and himself become flesh, and by the Fiat generate the new man in the soul, which is hidden in the old. For the old belongeth only to the corruptibility, and goeth into its ether, and the new remaineth for ever. But how this came to pass, you have the following fundamental information of it, wherein, if you be regenerated from God, you may see the old and new man into the very heart, because you have the Pearl ; but if not, then you shall scarce see 154 THE THREE PRINCIPLES [Ch. 10 here the old Adam, and you shall not so much as look upon the new.

36. The veil of Moses must be done away, and you must look Moses in the face, if you will behold the new man ; and without the Pearl, you shall not be able to take away the veil, nor know [what] Adam [was] before his fall. For Adam himself after the fall did no more know the first man ; and therefore he was ashamed of his monstrous form [or shape], and hid himself behind the trees in the garden ; for he looked on himself, and saw that he had a bestial form, and thereupon he gat instantly bestial members for propagation, which the Fiat in the third Principle created on him, through the spirit of the great world. 7. Men must not think, that man before his fall had bestial members to propagate with, but 1 Or guts. heavenly [members], nor any Entrails ; for such a stink, and [filthy] source [or property], as man hath in his body, doth not belong to the Holy Trinity in paradise, but to the earth ; it must go again into its ether. But man was created immortal, and also holy, like the angels ; and being he was created out of the limbus, therefore he was pure. Now in what manner he is, and out of what he was made, it followeth further : 8. Behold, when God had created the third Principle, after the fall of the devils, when they fell from their glory (for they had been angels, standing in the place of this world) yet nevertheless Ch. 10] THE CREATION OF MAN, AND HIS SOUL 155 he would that his will and purpose should stand ;

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