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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1and therefore he would give to the place of this world an angelical 1host again, which should 'Or company. continue to stand for ever. And now he having created the creatures, whose shadows after the changing of the world should continue for ever, yet there was no creature found that could have any joy therein [in the shadows], neither was there any creature found that might manage the beasts in this world ; therefore God said, Let us make man an image like unto us, which may rule over all the beasts, and creatures upon the earth; and God created man to be his image, after the image of God created he him. 9. Now the question is : What is God's image ? Behold, and consider the Deity, and then you will light upon it. For God is not a bestial man ; but man should be the image and similitude of God, wherein God should dwell. Now God is a spirit, and all the three Principles are in him : And he would make such an image, as should have all the three Principles in him, and that is rightly a similitude of God ; And he created him, etc. Whereby Moses may be rightly understood, that God created him, and not made him of a lump of earth. 10. But the limbus out of which he created him is the matrix of the earth ; and the earth was generated out of it ; yet the materia [or matter] out of which he created him was a massa, a quinta 156 THE THREE PRINCIPLES [Ch. 10 1 Or progeneration. 2 stedfaat, chief, master, or predominant. 3 working property.

24 Or qualify. 6 Or breath of life. 6 substantiality, or nature. essentia, out of the stars and elements ; which instantly became earthly, when man awakened the earthly centre, and did instantly belong to the earth and corruptibility. 11. But yet this massa was out of the heavenly matrix, which is the root of the l out-birth, or [the root] of the earth. The heavenly jcentre ought to remain 2 fixed ; and the earthly ought not to be awakened. And in this virtue [and power] he was lord and ruler over the stars and elements ; and all creatures should have stood in awe of him, and he should have been incorruptible ; he had the virtue and properties of all manner of creatures in him, for his virtue was out of the virtue [or power] of the understanding. Now then he ought to have all the three Principles, if he were to be the similitude of God, \viz.~\ the 3 source of the darkness, and also of the light, and also the 8 source of this world : And yet he should not live and 4 act in all three, but in one of them only, and that in the paradisical [property], in which his life [quickened] arose, [or did exist].

312. Now that this is demonstratively and certainly thus, [appeareth] in that it is written, And God breathed into him, the 6 living breath, whereby man became a living soul. All other creatures which were produced out of the corruptible 6 limbus by the Fiat, in all those the will in the Fiat had awakened the spirit in their centre, and every creature's spirit went forth out of the essence and Ch. 10] THE CREATION OP MAN, AND HIS SOUL 157 property of its own self, and mixed afterwards with the spirit of the great world of the stars and elements, and that ought not to have been in man ; his spirit ought not to have mixed itself [or been united] with the spirit of the stars and elements. The two Principles (viz. the darkness and the spirit of the air) ought to have stood still in such a substance [as should be the image of God] ; and therefore he breathed into him the 1 living breath ; understand God's breath, that is, J Or breath of life the paradisical breath or spirit, [vizJ] the Holy Ghost ; that should be the breath of the soul, in the centre of the soul. And the spirit which went forth out of the limbus, or out of the quinta essentia (which is of the 2 condition of the stars) 2 kind, or r> e- ft- property, or

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