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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.
14. Would you fain find the Noble Stone? Behold we will shew it you plain enough, if you be a Magus, and worthy, else you shall remain blind still: therefore fall to work thus; for it hath no more but three numbers. First, tell from one till you come to the Cross, which is ten, and is a cross number, (from one to ten is one number): but you have power only over the number nine, you must stay at the tenth, for it is the end of nature, which the creature ought not to search into: If the creature stay under the cross, it remaineth in the conceived will of God, and then it hath ten times ten, that is a hundred, and ten times a hundred is a thousand: and there lieth the Stone without any great painstaking, for it is pure, and is not defiled with any earthly nature: Make it thus, as I have written above [in the ninth Chapter] concerning the centre: Transpose the planets that are about the wheel; and take always one masculine, and then one feminine, one for the spirit of the soul, and the other for the air-spirit; you need not take care for the body, for each planet maketh a body to itself well enough, according as its desire is: Begin with Saturn, (for he
2is the first to the fire-life to the noble tincture); and then go about the wheel to Luna; for you must always take one planet for the life of the tincture, and then one for the spirit of the air, for the one subsisteth not without the other, or else you get a spirit without a body, a fire-spirit, which burneth in a lantern like a kindled fire, but it yieldeth nothing, it is only a mere pride, willing to be without a body. 5. Go thus about in the wheel to Sol, which is the seventh number in the first number [or account] : and when you get into that, you suppose you have the Stone: but it doth not prove fixed, Mars destroyeth it: go on further through the sun's fire, which is the eighth number, and when you come through it, lay hold through the tincture, on the eternity [which] is the ninth number, and; bring that upon the cross upon the tenth number, which is the end of nature; here handle the Stone, and take as much of it as you will, no fire will destroy i t: It is free from the wrath and out-birth: Its splendour and light stand in the power of the Majesty. Its body is out of the eternal substantiality, its number upon the cross is a hundred, and in the Majesty a thousand. 6. We give this to the seeker: for none findeth the Stone in Luna, unless he come upon the cross into the tenth number: and then, if he longs further to seek this world, and would fain have the splendour of this world, and desireth the Stone of
3this world, viz. in metals, let him go thus from the inward into the outward; let him go into Luna, and divide or break it into a thousand parts, and give it a little of Sol; but if its covetousness [hunger and thirst] be great, then give it a seventh part of Sol, and then it is complete. 7. For all the planets and stars run after the heart, every one of them taketh strength and virtue from the heart, and maketh to itself its own body; for Luna is out of all the six planets, and hath even Sol, but not the heart; for it hath Sol only in desire: as you see that it shineth with Sol, and not with a splendour of its own: and therefore the spirit of the heart must be added to it, which was pure before, and then all the planets resort to it, each of them desireth the pure child, and each buildeth its house therein: But look to it, have a care of Venus, that it may not by tattling bring its feminine tincture into it: for it appeareth bright and fair: but it is a woman, and maketh a dark body, and quickly devoureth Sol: Keep black Saturn in Mars' s heat, and so at length bounteous Jupiter will appear, who is courteous and kind, and hath the superior house, the house of the spirit of the tincture; when it is come out from black Saturn, then that is the Metalline Stone. 8. Trouble not yourself so very much and long with fire, it affordeth no more than it is able; or else you number back again into loss; indeed not
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.
14. Would you fain find the Noble Stone? Behold we will shew it you plain enough, if you be a Magus, and worthy, else you shall remain blind still: therefore fall to work thus; for it hath no more but three numbers. First, tell from one till you come to the Cross, which is ten, and is a cross number, (from one to ten is one number): but you have power only over the number nine, you must stay at the tenth, for it is the end of nature, which the creature ought not to search into: If the creature stay under the cross, it remaineth in the conceived will of God, and then it hath ten times ten, that is a hundred, and ten times a hundred is a thousand: and there lieth the Stone without any great painstaking, for it is pure, and is not defiled with any earthly nature: Make it thus, as I have written above [in the ninth Chapter] concerning the centre: Transpose the planets that are about the wheel; and take always one masculine, and then one feminine, one for the spirit of the soul, and the other for the air-spirit; you need not take care for the body, for each planet maketh a body to itself well enough, according as its desire is: Begin with Saturn, (for he
2is the first to the fire-life to the noble tincture); and then go about the wheel to Luna; for you must always take one planet for the life of the tincture, and then one for the spirit of the air, for the one subsisteth not without the other, or else you get a spirit without a body, a fire-spirit, which burneth in a lantern like a kindled fire, but it yieldeth nothing, it is only a mere pride, willing to be without a body. 5. Go thus about in the wheel to Sol, which is the seventh number in the first number [or account] : and when you get into that, you suppose you have the Stone: but it doth not prove fixed, Mars destroyeth it: go on further through the sun's fire, which is the eighth number, and when you come through it, lay hold through the tincture, on the eternity [which] is the ninth number, and; bring that upon the cross upon the tenth number, which is the end of nature; here handle the Stone, and take as much of it as you will, no fire will destroy i t: It is free from the wrath and out-birth: Its splendour and light stand in the power of the Majesty. Its body is out of the eternal substantiality, its number upon the cross is a hundred, and in the Majesty a thousand. 6. We give this to the seeker: for none findeth the Stone in Luna, unless he come upon the cross into the tenth number: and then, if he longs further to seek this world, and would fain have the splendour of this world, and desireth the Stone of
3this world, viz. in metals, let him go thus from the inward into the outward; let him go into Luna, and divide or break it into a thousand parts, and give it a little of Sol; but if its covetousness [hunger and thirst] be great, then give it a seventh part of Sol, and then it is complete. 7. For all the planets and stars run after the heart, every one of them taketh strength and virtue from the heart, and maketh to itself its own body; for Luna is out of all the six planets, and hath even Sol, but not the heart; for it hath Sol only in desire: as you see that it shineth with Sol, and not with a splendour of its own: and therefore the spirit of the heart must be added to it, which was pure before, and then all the planets resort to it, each of them desireth the pure child, and each buildeth its house therein: But look to it, have a care of Venus, that it may not by tattling bring its feminine tincture into it: for it appeareth bright and fair: but it is a woman, and maketh a dark body, and quickly devoureth Sol: Keep black Saturn in Mars' s heat, and so at length bounteous Jupiter will appear, who is courteous and kind, and hath the superior house, the house of the spirit of the tincture; when it is come out from black Saturn, then that is the Metalline Stone. 8. Trouble not yourself so very much and long with fire, it affordeth no more than it is able; or else you number back again into loss; indeed not
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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