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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. So it is also with human life. As long as it imaginates after God's Spirit, it receives God's power and light, and knows God. But when it imaginates after earthliness or after the dark world's property, it receives the essence of earthliness and of the dark world, and becomes filled with the same. Then is life's mirror shut up in darkness, and loses the mirror of God, and must be born anew. 17. As we know that Adam thus made the pure mirror earthly, and lost God's power and light, which Christ, God's Son, restored again, and broke open the earthly darkness, and forcibly introduced the mirror of God. 18. Thus we recognize how the holy tree grows through all things, and out of all beings; but is apprehended by no being, save only in the mirror of purity, as in the pure life of man; which life desires that tree, and it can be apprehended in no dark life. This then is the fourth point. THE FIFTH POINT How A LIFE MAY PERISH IN THE TREE OF LIFE. How IT PASSES OUT OF THE SOURCE OF LOVE AND JOY INTO A SOURCE OF MISERY, WHICH IS CONTRARY TO ALL OTHER LIVES. CHAPTER VII 1. Every life is a clear gleam and mirror, and appears like a flash of a terrible aspect. But if this flash catch the light, it is transformed into gentleness and drops the terror, for then the terror unites itself to the light. And thus the light shines from the terrible flash; for the flash is the light's essence, it is its fire.
22. The flash contains the centrum naturae, being the fourth form of Nature where life rises, which in the steady fire, as in the principle, attains to perfection, but in the light is brought into another quality. 3. Now, the origin of the imagination [magical attraction] is in the first form of Nature, viz. in the desiring sourness, which carries its form through the dark world unto fire; for the first desire goes through all forms, makes also all the forms, and is carried as far as to fire. There is the dividing bound-mark of spirit, there it is born. It is now free. It may by its imagination go back again 76 THE FIFTH POINT 77 into its mother the dark world, or, going forward, sink down through the anguish of fire into death, and bud forth in the light. That depends on its choice. Where it yields up itself, there it must be; for its fire must have substance, that it may have something to feed upon. 4. Will the spirit eat of its first mother the sourness, that is, will it give to its fire for food the fierce essentiality in the centre, or the light's essentiality in the hght -world, that is all in its own power; whatever its fire receives, in the property thereof does it burn.
35. In the dark property it burns in the dark, harsh, stern source, and sees in itself as a flash; it has only the mirror of darkness, and sees in the darkness. In the light's property it catches the gentleness of the light, in which the light-fire burns, and sees in the light-world. All is nigh unto spirit, and yet it can see in no other world or property save in that wherein its fire burns; of that world is the spirit only susceptible, it sees nothing in the other world; it has no eyes for that. It remains to it an eternal hiddenness, unless it has been in another world and gone out from thence, and given itself to another fire, f.s the devils did, who have indeed a knowledge of the light-world, but no feeling or seeing thereof ; the light-world is nigh to them, but they know it not. 6. And now we are to recognize life's perdition, which comes about in the first Principle. There is the hinge, there the will may plunge whither it will, If it set its desire upon plurality and will 78 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.
116. So it is also with human life. As long as it imaginates after God's Spirit, it receives God's power and light, and knows God. But when it imaginates after earthliness or after the dark world's property, it receives the essence of earthliness and of the dark world, and becomes filled with the same. Then is life's mirror shut up in darkness, and loses the mirror of God, and must be born anew. 17. As we know that Adam thus made the pure mirror earthly, and lost God's power and light, which Christ, God's Son, restored again, and broke open the earthly darkness, and forcibly introduced the mirror of God. 18. Thus we recognize how the holy tree grows through all things, and out of all beings; but is apprehended by no being, save only in the mirror of purity, as in the pure life of man; which life desires that tree, and it can be apprehended in no dark life. This then is the fourth point. THE FIFTH POINT How A LIFE MAY PERISH IN THE TREE OF LIFE. How IT PASSES OUT OF THE SOURCE OF LOVE AND JOY INTO A SOURCE OF MISERY, WHICH IS CONTRARY TO ALL OTHER LIVES. CHAPTER VII 1. Every life is a clear gleam and mirror, and appears like a flash of a terrible aspect. But if this flash catch the light, it is transformed into gentleness and drops the terror, for then the terror unites itself to the light. And thus the light shines from the terrible flash; for the flash is the light's essence, it is its fire.
22. The flash contains the centrum naturae, being the fourth form of Nature where life rises, which in the steady fire, as in the principle, attains to perfection, but in the light is brought into another quality. 3. Now, the origin of the imagination [magical attraction] is in the first form of Nature, viz. in the desiring sourness, which carries its form through the dark world unto fire; for the first desire goes through all forms, makes also all the forms, and is carried as far as to fire. There is the dividing bound-mark of spirit, there it is born. It is now free. It may by its imagination go back again 76 THE FIFTH POINT 77 into its mother the dark world, or, going forward, sink down through the anguish of fire into death, and bud forth in the light. That depends on its choice. Where it yields up itself, there it must be; for its fire must have substance, that it may have something to feed upon. 4. Will the spirit eat of its first mother the sourness, that is, will it give to its fire for food the fierce essentiality in the centre, or the light's essentiality in the hght -world, that is all in its own power; whatever its fire receives, in the property thereof does it burn.
35. In the dark property it burns in the dark, harsh, stern source, and sees in itself as a flash; it has only the mirror of darkness, and sees in the darkness. In the light's property it catches the gentleness of the light, in which the light-fire burns, and sees in the light-world. All is nigh unto spirit, and yet it can see in no other world or property save in that wherein its fire burns; of that world is the spirit only susceptible, it sees nothing in the other world; it has no eyes for that. It remains to it an eternal hiddenness, unless it has been in another world and gone out from thence, and given itself to another fire, f.s the devils did, who have indeed a knowledge of the light-world, but no feeling or seeing thereof ; the light-world is nigh to them, but they know it not. 6. And now we are to recognize life's perdition, which comes about in the first Principle. There is the hinge, there the will may plunge whither it will, If it set its desire upon plurality and will 78 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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