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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.
125. For all that becomes not or is not as fire, light and water, cannot subsist in freedom, but remains in the source of that which it has awakened or made in itself, — understand, from the centrum naturae. Whatever it has introduced into the will of freedom will thus be for it a torment and gnawing, or contrary opposite will, which it has generated from its own nature, by which it has made freedom dark for itself, so that the light cannot shine through. That will be its darkness. 26. For where the will is dark, there also the being 38 SIX THEOSOPHIC POINTS of the will, or its body, is dark ; and where the will is in torment, there also the body is in torment. For wliich cause the children of the light of freedom will be separated in the source of anguish from the cliildren of darkness, each into its principle. 27. Further, we give you to understand that each principle generates its own life according to its property. But fire is the bound of separation which satisfies the two eternal principles, darkness and hght. To the darkness it gives its sting and the pang, and to the hght its sensibihty and life.
228. So also the third Principle has two properties, viz. heat and cold. Heat is the principle, and gives its sting and pang to the cold; and to the light it gives life and sensibility. The hght in its turn gives its substantiahty to the fire, so that it is united amicably with it. The cold gives also its property and substantiality to the fire, and the fire breaks this, and makes from its substantiality death and a dying. There is always, therefore, an enmity between heat and cold, and they are never at one. 29. But this they attain in their enmity, that life buds through death; for from heat and cold arises the growth of the third principle (in which we live outwardly). From cold there comes fruit out of the earth, as well as the body of all creatures, and, in the elements, substance. From heat there comes in its contention life into the body of all creatures and plants; as also in the deep of the elements it gives the spirit of the great world in diversity of figures. That is to say, where THE FIRST POINT 39 cold makes substance, there heat makes a spirit.
330. Thus is the Essence all in wrestling combat, that the wonders of the eternal world may become manifest in fragility, and that the eternal exemplar in the wisdom of God may be brought into figures. And that these models in the eternal Magic, in INIystery, may stand eternally to God's glory, and for the joy of angels and men; not indeed in being, but in Mystery, in Magic, as a shadow of being, that it may be eternally known what God has wrought, and what he can and is able to do. 31. For, after the dissolution of this world, there remains in existence only what is eternal, as eternal spirits with the eternal substantiahty of their bodies, together with the wonders wrought here, which stand in figure magically, by which the spirits will recognize the might and marvels of God. 32. We are now to consider the principles with their wonders. These are all three none else than the one God in his wonderful works, who has manifested himself by this world according to the property of his nature. And we are thus to understand a threefold Being, or three worlds in one another. 33. The first is the fire-world, which takes its rise from the centrum naturae, and Nature from the desiring will, which in eternal freedom has its origin in the unground, whereof we have not nor support any knowledge. 34. And the second is the hght-world which dwells in freedom in the unground, out of Nature, but proceeds from the fire-world. It receives its 40 SIX THEOSOPHIC POINTS
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.
125. For all that becomes not or is not as fire, light and water, cannot subsist in freedom, but remains in the source of that which it has awakened or made in itself, — understand, from the centrum naturae. Whatever it has introduced into the will of freedom will thus be for it a torment and gnawing, or contrary opposite will, which it has generated from its own nature, by which it has made freedom dark for itself, so that the light cannot shine through. That will be its darkness. 26. For where the will is dark, there also the being 38 SIX THEOSOPHIC POINTS of the will, or its body, is dark ; and where the will is in torment, there also the body is in torment. For wliich cause the children of the light of freedom will be separated in the source of anguish from the cliildren of darkness, each into its principle. 27. Further, we give you to understand that each principle generates its own life according to its property. But fire is the bound of separation which satisfies the two eternal principles, darkness and hght. To the darkness it gives its sting and the pang, and to the hght its sensibihty and life.
228. So also the third Principle has two properties, viz. heat and cold. Heat is the principle, and gives its sting and pang to the cold; and to the light it gives life and sensibility. The hght in its turn gives its substantiahty to the fire, so that it is united amicably with it. The cold gives also its property and substantiality to the fire, and the fire breaks this, and makes from its substantiality death and a dying. There is always, therefore, an enmity between heat and cold, and they are never at one. 29. But this they attain in their enmity, that life buds through death; for from heat and cold arises the growth of the third principle (in which we live outwardly). From cold there comes fruit out of the earth, as well as the body of all creatures, and, in the elements, substance. From heat there comes in its contention life into the body of all creatures and plants; as also in the deep of the elements it gives the spirit of the great world in diversity of figures. That is to say, where THE FIRST POINT 39 cold makes substance, there heat makes a spirit.
330. Thus is the Essence all in wrestling combat, that the wonders of the eternal world may become manifest in fragility, and that the eternal exemplar in the wisdom of God may be brought into figures. And that these models in the eternal Magic, in INIystery, may stand eternally to God's glory, and for the joy of angels and men; not indeed in being, but in Mystery, in Magic, as a shadow of being, that it may be eternally known what God has wrought, and what he can and is able to do. 31. For, after the dissolution of this world, there remains in existence only what is eternal, as eternal spirits with the eternal substantiahty of their bodies, together with the wonders wrought here, which stand in figure magically, by which the spirits will recognize the might and marvels of God. 32. We are now to consider the principles with their wonders. These are all three none else than the one God in his wonderful works, who has manifested himself by this world according to the property of his nature. And we are thus to understand a threefold Being, or three worlds in one another. 33. The first is the fire-world, which takes its rise from the centrum naturae, and Nature from the desiring will, which in eternal freedom has its origin in the unground, whereof we have not nor support any knowledge. 34. And the second is the hght-world which dwells in freedom in the unground, out of Nature, but proceeds from the fire-world. It receives its 40 SIX THEOSOPHIC POINTS
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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