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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.
112. Mars ( ). The third Property is the Anguish [distress], or Source, or rising Spring, which the two first Principles make. When the Compunction, viz. the Stirring, strives and moves with Rage in the Hardness, or Impression, and bruises the Hardness, then in the Contrition [brokenness] of the Hardness the first Sense of Feeling arises, and is the Beginning of the Essences; for first it is the Severation, whereby each Power becomes sensible [Feeling or distinct] and separable in itself in the free Lubet, in the Word of the Powers; it is the Original of Distinction, (or different Variety) whereby the Powers are mutually manifest, each in itself; also the Original of the Thoughts and Mind. 13. For the Eternal Mind is the All-Essential Power of the Deity: But the Senses arise through Nature with the Motion in the Division of the Powers, where each Power perceives, and feels itself in itself; it is also the Original of Taste and Smell: When the Perception of the Powers in the Distinction has mutual Intercourse, and Entrance into each other, then they feel, taste, smell, hear, and see one another; and herein arises the Source of Life, which could not be in the Liberty in the Stillness of the Power of God: Therefore the Divine Understanding brings itself into spiritual Properties, that it might be manifest to itself, and be a Working Life.
214. Now we are to consider of the Anguish in its own Generation and peculiar Property. For like as there is a Mind, viz. an Understanding in the Liberty, in the Word of the Power of God, so likewise the first Will to the Desire brings itself in the Desire of the Darkness into a Mind, which Mind is the Anguish Source, viz. a Sulphureous Source; and yet here [the] Spirit is only to be understood. 15. The Anguish-Source is thus to be understood. The Astringent Desire conceives itself, and draws [contracts] itself into itself, and makes itself full, hard, and rough; now the Attraction is an Enemy of the Hardness; the Hardness is retentive; the Attraction is fugitive; the one will have it into itself, and the other will out of itself. But seeing they cannot separate, and part asunder one from the other, they remain in each other as a rolling Wheel; the one will ascend, the other descend.
316. For the Hardness Causes Substance and Weight; and the Compunction gives Spirit and the Active Life: These both mutually circulate in themselves and out of themselves and yet cannot go any where [parted]. What the Desire, viz. the Magnet, makes hard, that the Attraction again breaks in Pieces; and it is the greatest Unquietness in itself; like a raging Madness; and it is in itself an horrible Anguish; and yet no right feeling is perceived [to be understood] till the Fire (kindling of the Fire in Nature, which is the fourth Form, wherein the Manifestation of each Life appears). And I leave it to the Consideration of the true understanding Searcher of Nature, what this is, or means; let him search and bethink himself; he shall find it in his own natural, and paternal Knowledge.
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.
112. Mars ( ). The third Property is the Anguish [distress], or Source, or rising Spring, which the two first Principles make. When the Compunction, viz. the Stirring, strives and moves with Rage in the Hardness, or Impression, and bruises the Hardness, then in the Contrition [brokenness] of the Hardness the first Sense of Feeling arises, and is the Beginning of the Essences; for first it is the Severation, whereby each Power becomes sensible [Feeling or distinct] and separable in itself in the free Lubet, in the Word of the Powers; it is the Original of Distinction, (or different Variety) whereby the Powers are mutually manifest, each in itself; also the Original of the Thoughts and Mind. 13. For the Eternal Mind is the All-Essential Power of the Deity: But the Senses arise through Nature with the Motion in the Division of the Powers, where each Power perceives, and feels itself in itself; it is also the Original of Taste and Smell: When the Perception of the Powers in the Distinction has mutual Intercourse, and Entrance into each other, then they feel, taste, smell, hear, and see one another; and herein arises the Source of Life, which could not be in the Liberty in the Stillness of the Power of God: Therefore the Divine Understanding brings itself into spiritual Properties, that it might be manifest to itself, and be a Working Life.
214. Now we are to consider of the Anguish in its own Generation and peculiar Property. For like as there is a Mind, viz. an Understanding in the Liberty, in the Word of the Power of God, so likewise the first Will to the Desire brings itself in the Desire of the Darkness into a Mind, which Mind is the Anguish Source, viz. a Sulphureous Source; and yet here [the] Spirit is only to be understood. 15. The Anguish-Source is thus to be understood. The Astringent Desire conceives itself, and draws [contracts] itself into itself, and makes itself full, hard, and rough; now the Attraction is an Enemy of the Hardness; the Hardness is retentive; the Attraction is fugitive; the one will have it into itself, and the other will out of itself. But seeing they cannot separate, and part asunder one from the other, they remain in each other as a rolling Wheel; the one will ascend, the other descend.
316. For the Hardness Causes Substance and Weight; and the Compunction gives Spirit and the Active Life: These both mutually circulate in themselves and out of themselves and yet cannot go any where [parted]. What the Desire, viz. the Magnet, makes hard, that the Attraction again breaks in Pieces; and it is the greatest Unquietness in itself; like a raging Madness; and it is in itself an horrible Anguish; and yet no right feeling is perceived [to be understood] till the Fire (kindling of the Fire in Nature, which is the fourth Form, wherein the Manifestation of each Life appears). And I leave it to the Consideration of the true understanding Searcher of Nature, what this is, or means; let him search and bethink himself; he shall find it in his own natural, and paternal Knowledge.
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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