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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.
136. Yet this beast does somewhat put forth its signature externally in everyone; if one do but heed and well mind the same, he may find it. Hence Christ called the Pharisees a generation of vipers, and the seed of serpents; also others he called wolves, ravening wolves, foxes, dogs and the like; for they were such in the earthly essence. And he taught us, that we must be born anew, and forsake this bestial property, and become as children, or we should notpossess the kingdom of God. 37. For as the essence is, in the body, even so the spirit doth figure and form itself internally, and the poor soul stands in this prison, bound and married to such a beast, unless that a man be born anew: for which ground [and end] God ordained the Circumcision in the Old Testament; and in the New the Baptism in the spirit of Christ.
238. Here we are highly to consider, what horror, lamentation and misery, anguish, fear and distress, did arise and awake in man; and was manifest as a false life and will in man. of which we have a type in the death of Christ, when he, upon the cross, destroyed the death in our human awakened property, and overcame [it] with the great love in his heavenly blood, which he introduced thereinto; that even then the earth, viz. the limus of the earth, whence Adam's outward essence was extracted, did tremble and shake at it. Now, when the great love forced [itself] into the human earth, wherein the anger of God, in the curse, was living and effectually working, [I say] when it now was to die, and to be changed into another source, it did tremble before this great love-fire; like as the love-fire in Adam and Eve did tremble in the awakening of the anger in them; whereby they were astonished, and crept behind the trees in the garden, and were afraid. For the dread and horror of God's anger was awakened in their essence, and they knew their bestial properties. The Twenty-First Chapter Of the Impression and Original of the Bestial Man; and of the Beginning and Ground of his Sickness and Mortality 1. WHEN Adam and Eve were become monstrous, the Holy Spirit, proceeding from the part of the heavenly limbus, departed; for the part of the heavenly property disappeared in the soul, in which [part] the divine light shone, and in which the divine
3power of the holy tincture dwelt. 2. Understand, the power of the light departed from him into the centre, in manner as a shining light which flames forth from a candle, extinguisheth, and only the fire-source of the light remains; even so likewise only the magical fire-source of the soul's property remained, viz. the centre of the eternal nature, viz. the fire-world, and darkness. 3. And on the outward part of the soul the air-spirit, with its astrum, remained, wherein the light of the outward nature shone, which now the fire- soul must make use of ; for the Fiat was enraged in the wrath of God, viz. in the fiery property of the soul, and also of the body; and in a fiery hunger, in the awakened flagrat of God's anger, had entered into and taken possession of the essence in soul and body, and with hard attraction did impress itself in the essence of the substance, in the limbus [limus] of the body; whereupon the flesh became gross, hard, thick and corruptible. 4. For in the flagrat of the wrath all the properties of each astrum, according to the property of all the creatures, did awake in the essence, whence the enmity, antipathy and contrariety did arise in the essence of the body and soul, so that one property is against another, one taste against another's, for all departed out of the temperament; thence arose in them pain, tormenting malady, and sickness.
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.
136. Yet this beast does somewhat put forth its signature externally in everyone; if one do but heed and well mind the same, he may find it. Hence Christ called the Pharisees a generation of vipers, and the seed of serpents; also others he called wolves, ravening wolves, foxes, dogs and the like; for they were such in the earthly essence. And he taught us, that we must be born anew, and forsake this bestial property, and become as children, or we should notpossess the kingdom of God. 37. For as the essence is, in the body, even so the spirit doth figure and form itself internally, and the poor soul stands in this prison, bound and married to such a beast, unless that a man be born anew: for which ground [and end] God ordained the Circumcision in the Old Testament; and in the New the Baptism in the spirit of Christ.
238. Here we are highly to consider, what horror, lamentation and misery, anguish, fear and distress, did arise and awake in man; and was manifest as a false life and will in man. of which we have a type in the death of Christ, when he, upon the cross, destroyed the death in our human awakened property, and overcame [it] with the great love in his heavenly blood, which he introduced thereinto; that even then the earth, viz. the limus of the earth, whence Adam's outward essence was extracted, did tremble and shake at it. Now, when the great love forced [itself] into the human earth, wherein the anger of God, in the curse, was living and effectually working, [I say] when it now was to die, and to be changed into another source, it did tremble before this great love-fire; like as the love-fire in Adam and Eve did tremble in the awakening of the anger in them; whereby they were astonished, and crept behind the trees in the garden, and were afraid. For the dread and horror of God's anger was awakened in their essence, and they knew their bestial properties. The Twenty-First Chapter Of the Impression and Original of the Bestial Man; and of the Beginning and Ground of his Sickness and Mortality 1. WHEN Adam and Eve were become monstrous, the Holy Spirit, proceeding from the part of the heavenly limbus, departed; for the part of the heavenly property disappeared in the soul, in which [part] the divine light shone, and in which the divine
3power of the holy tincture dwelt. 2. Understand, the power of the light departed from him into the centre, in manner as a shining light which flames forth from a candle, extinguisheth, and only the fire-source of the light remains; even so likewise only the magical fire-source of the soul's property remained, viz. the centre of the eternal nature, viz. the fire-world, and darkness. 3. And on the outward part of the soul the air-spirit, with its astrum, remained, wherein the light of the outward nature shone, which now the fire- soul must make use of ; for the Fiat was enraged in the wrath of God, viz. in the fiery property of the soul, and also of the body; and in a fiery hunger, in the awakened flagrat of God's anger, had entered into and taken possession of the essence in soul and body, and with hard attraction did impress itself in the essence of the substance, in the limbus [limus] of the body; whereupon the flesh became gross, hard, thick and corruptible. 4. For in the flagrat of the wrath all the properties of each astrum, according to the property of all the creatures, did awake in the essence, whence the enmity, antipathy and contrariety did arise in the essence of the body and soul, so that one property is against another, one taste against another's, for all departed out of the temperament; thence arose in them pain, tormenting malady, and sickness.
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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