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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.
116. We have told you before, how the wheel of the outward nature windeth itself inwards, even to the sun, and further through the fire into the liberty of God, where then it keepeth its station: and the inward longing of the eternal centre presseth with the spirit of God forth into the heart of the sun, which is the great life and fire, which melteth away stone and earth, wherein the eternal tincture is known within, in the ninth number. 17. You must also understand the breathing-in thus: The outward dominion of the spirit of this world, which reacheth even into the sun, was breathed into him from without, as an outward life; and the inward dominion out of the inward fire in the eighth number was from within breathed into the heart; for that was out of the eternal fire, which reacheth into the ninth number, towards the cross, after its own tincture which goeth towards the Number Three, viz. into the eternal liberty; and there man became a living soul, with spirit and soul; for the soul hath its original a degree deeper than the sun, out of the eternal fire which burneth in the eternal willing, which willing is, to generate the Heart of God, and to exalt the Majesty in the wonders.
218. Understand us rightly, thus: God's Holy Spirit hath awakened the living soul, out of the centre of the eternal nature upon the cross, as a peculiar centre of its own; not out of the Number Three, but out of the eternal nature, out of the fire of the centre of nature, in the fifth form of the centre, where the two kingdoms, viz. God's love and anger, part: There hath the spirit of God awakened the soul, and brought it forth from within, outwards into the tincture of the outward spirit, into the blood of the heart, through himself, and this is the soul: Master doctor, understand it aright, and do not vaunt so proudly, stately, and insultingly; for the soul is the child of God: Its will should always be inclined into the will of God in the tenth number, and then it is an angel, and liveth in God, and eateth of the word of God, of the virtue and life of God: It should not turn back into the spirit of this world, into the fire of the out-birth, but into the fire of the Number Three, in Ternarium Sanctum, into the Holy Ternary.
319. And thus thou mayest understand what thou art, and what thou wast before the Fall, for thou couldst rule over the sun and the stars, all was in thy power; the fire, the air, and the water, together with the earth, could not compel thee: no outward fire could burn thee, no water could drown thee, no air could suffocate or stifle thee, every living thing feared before thee, thou hadst thy own food of the paradisical fruit to give to the outward life, and the Verbum Domini to the inward life of the soul: thou hadst lived eternally without woe, or feeling of any sickness or disease, in mere joy and delight, and besides, without care and toil: Thy mind was as the mind of a child that playeth with his father's wonders [or workmanship], no knowledge of any evil will was in thee: No covetousness, no pride, no envy, no anger, but all a sport of love. 20. Now behold, that you may once apprehend this: God took to himself a particular day's work about man; if he would have had him to have been earthly, bestial, and mortal, he would have created him on the Fifth Day with the other beasts: And that yet you may well apprehend this, he created but one man, with the whole cross in the brainpan, which signifieth the Number Three: He was both man and woman, yet you are not to understand any woman, but a virgin wholly pure and chaste: he had in him the spirit of 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.
116. We have told you before, how the wheel of the outward nature windeth itself inwards, even to the sun, and further through the fire into the liberty of God, where then it keepeth its station: and the inward longing of the eternal centre presseth with the spirit of God forth into the heart of the sun, which is the great life and fire, which melteth away stone and earth, wherein the eternal tincture is known within, in the ninth number. 17. You must also understand the breathing-in thus: The outward dominion of the spirit of this world, which reacheth even into the sun, was breathed into him from without, as an outward life; and the inward dominion out of the inward fire in the eighth number was from within breathed into the heart; for that was out of the eternal fire, which reacheth into the ninth number, towards the cross, after its own tincture which goeth towards the Number Three, viz. into the eternal liberty; and there man became a living soul, with spirit and soul; for the soul hath its original a degree deeper than the sun, out of the eternal fire which burneth in the eternal willing, which willing is, to generate the Heart of God, and to exalt the Majesty in the wonders.
218. Understand us rightly, thus: God's Holy Spirit hath awakened the living soul, out of the centre of the eternal nature upon the cross, as a peculiar centre of its own; not out of the Number Three, but out of the eternal nature, out of the fire of the centre of nature, in the fifth form of the centre, where the two kingdoms, viz. God's love and anger, part: There hath the spirit of God awakened the soul, and brought it forth from within, outwards into the tincture of the outward spirit, into the blood of the heart, through himself, and this is the soul: Master doctor, understand it aright, and do not vaunt so proudly, stately, and insultingly; for the soul is the child of God: Its will should always be inclined into the will of God in the tenth number, and then it is an angel, and liveth in God, and eateth of the word of God, of the virtue and life of God: It should not turn back into the spirit of this world, into the fire of the out-birth, but into the fire of the Number Three, in Ternarium Sanctum, into the Holy Ternary.
319. And thus thou mayest understand what thou art, and what thou wast before the Fall, for thou couldst rule over the sun and the stars, all was in thy power; the fire, the air, and the water, together with the earth, could not compel thee: no outward fire could burn thee, no water could drown thee, no air could suffocate or stifle thee, every living thing feared before thee, thou hadst thy own food of the paradisical fruit to give to the outward life, and the Verbum Domini to the inward life of the soul: thou hadst lived eternally without woe, or feeling of any sickness or disease, in mere joy and delight, and besides, without care and toil: Thy mind was as the mind of a child that playeth with his father's wonders [or workmanship], no knowledge of any evil will was in thee: No covetousness, no pride, no envy, no anger, but all a sport of love. 20. Now behold, that you may once apprehend this: God took to himself a particular day's work about man; if he would have had him to have been earthly, bestial, and mortal, he would have created him on the Fifth Day with the other beasts: And that yet you may well apprehend this, he created but one man, with the whole cross in the brainpan, which signifieth the Number Three: He was both man and woman, yet you are not to understand any woman, but a virgin wholly pure and chaste: he had in him the spirit of 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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