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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.
15. For if an opposite essence enters into another, it makes an enmity, and a hateful overmastering and destroying, each the other. One property annoys, weakens and destroys another, whence the death and dissolution of the body is arisen. 6. For whatsoever stands not in the temperature cannot subsist eternally; but whatsoever stands in the temperature, that has no destroyer; for all properties do [there] mutually love one another: and in the love is the growth and preservation of the life. 7. And we are here fundamentally to understand how the gross properties in the wrath of the Fiat in the essence of the body have obscured and wholly shut up the heavenly essentiality in the Sulphur, so that the heavenly man was no longer known; as lead does hold the gold's-spirit availed in itself; that it is not known [or discerned]. 8. For the desire, viz. the first form of nature, which is the Fiat, has swallowed, in the grossness, the heavenly part both in man and metals, as also in all herbs, and all other fruits. All the sovereign power of [or from] the holy world's essence lies shut up in the wrath and curse of God, in the dark world's property in the earth; and springs forth by the strength of the sun, and the light of the outward nature, in the essence, through the curse and wrath;
2which budding or pullulation gives a sovereign power and healing virtue for the malignant essence in the living bodies, whence the physician is arisen, who seeks and learns to know the virtue [and temperature thereof], that he may resist and remedy the opposite essence in the body; which, notwithstanding, is only a lukewarm and faint sparkle thereof; if he be not able and skilful first to separate the gross raw wildness (which is from the dark world's property) from his cure. 9. For if the captivated essence of the heavenly world's property may be redeemed from the curse and wrath of nature, then it stands in the temperature; and if it then so comes into a living body it does awaken also the shut-up [or imprisoned] life of the heavenly world's ens [Essence or substance], if that likewise be in the body; and expels the wrath, whereby the sickness is destroyed, and the essence enters into the temperature. 10. That this is certainly thus, we may see by Adam and Eve, when the wrath did awaken in their essence, and the Fiat did impress the bestial properties, and formed (them) in the essence, that when the soul, viz. the image of God, did experimentally know this, it was ashamed of the bestial deformity, and of its being in a bestial vessel, viz. in another Principle.
311. For the outward part of the soul, viz. the air with its astrum, did arise and obtain the upperhand; as we may plainly see that amongst the greatest part of men the outward part of the soul bears the sway and domination over the whole body, in that the bestial man does seek and labour only after the pleasure of this world, viz. after external honours, authority and beauty, and also how to pamper, fill and gluttonise the beast; and so to vapour and proudly prank with the beast, as with a god, and yet it is only a corruptible, evil beast, in which the real true man lies shut up, without life. 12. Also this gross beast shall not possess the kingdom of God; and also it profits not at all (John vi. 63). But [the kingdom of God profits] the hidden man [alone], which lies shut up in this beast, as the gold in the gross ore. Which [hidden inward] man the gross beast scarce regards or gives any respect unto, save only that it does sometimes a little play the hypocrite with it, and comforts it with devout words, but exalts itself in its place, as a proud peacock; and bravely trims, adorns and fattens his beast, that the devil may have a horse to ride upon, and thereby mock God: and he rides thereupon in the vanity [of this world], in the kingdom of God's anger, as upon a false whore which desires to live in its own self-full might and wit.
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.
15. For if an opposite essence enters into another, it makes an enmity, and a hateful overmastering and destroying, each the other. One property annoys, weakens and destroys another, whence the death and dissolution of the body is arisen. 6. For whatsoever stands not in the temperature cannot subsist eternally; but whatsoever stands in the temperature, that has no destroyer; for all properties do [there] mutually love one another: and in the love is the growth and preservation of the life. 7. And we are here fundamentally to understand how the gross properties in the wrath of the Fiat in the essence of the body have obscured and wholly shut up the heavenly essentiality in the Sulphur, so that the heavenly man was no longer known; as lead does hold the gold's-spirit availed in itself; that it is not known [or discerned]. 8. For the desire, viz. the first form of nature, which is the Fiat, has swallowed, in the grossness, the heavenly part both in man and metals, as also in all herbs, and all other fruits. All the sovereign power of [or from] the holy world's essence lies shut up in the wrath and curse of God, in the dark world's property in the earth; and springs forth by the strength of the sun, and the light of the outward nature, in the essence, through the curse and wrath;
2which budding or pullulation gives a sovereign power and healing virtue for the malignant essence in the living bodies, whence the physician is arisen, who seeks and learns to know the virtue [and temperature thereof], that he may resist and remedy the opposite essence in the body; which, notwithstanding, is only a lukewarm and faint sparkle thereof; if he be not able and skilful first to separate the gross raw wildness (which is from the dark world's property) from his cure. 9. For if the captivated essence of the heavenly world's property may be redeemed from the curse and wrath of nature, then it stands in the temperature; and if it then so comes into a living body it does awaken also the shut-up [or imprisoned] life of the heavenly world's ens [Essence or substance], if that likewise be in the body; and expels the wrath, whereby the sickness is destroyed, and the essence enters into the temperature. 10. That this is certainly thus, we may see by Adam and Eve, when the wrath did awaken in their essence, and the Fiat did impress the bestial properties, and formed (them) in the essence, that when the soul, viz. the image of God, did experimentally know this, it was ashamed of the bestial deformity, and of its being in a bestial vessel, viz. in another Principle.
311. For the outward part of the soul, viz. the air with its astrum, did arise and obtain the upperhand; as we may plainly see that amongst the greatest part of men the outward part of the soul bears the sway and domination over the whole body, in that the bestial man does seek and labour only after the pleasure of this world, viz. after external honours, authority and beauty, and also how to pamper, fill and gluttonise the beast; and so to vapour and proudly prank with the beast, as with a god, and yet it is only a corruptible, evil beast, in which the real true man lies shut up, without life. 12. Also this gross beast shall not possess the kingdom of God; and also it profits not at all (John vi. 63). But [the kingdom of God profits] the hidden man [alone], which lies shut up in this beast, as the gold in the gross ore. Which [hidden inward] man the gross beast scarce regards or gives any respect unto, save only that it does sometimes a little play the hypocrite with it, and comforts it with devout words, but exalts itself in its place, as a proud peacock; and bravely trims, adorns and fattens his beast, that the devil may have a horse to ride upon, and thereby mock God: and he rides thereupon in the vanity [of this world], in the kingdom of God's anger, as upon a false whore which desires to live in its own self-full might and wit.
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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