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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.
1also are the senses in the quality even in the place of this world; far otherwise in one country than in another. And even so God did likewise form the languages according to the property of every land and country. 74. For seeing that people were to be dispersed into every country and climate, he opened to each people a language, according as it should be in a land; which did apply itself unto the same quality [of sense], and accord therewith; so that the quality of the country did not introduce toe turba into it, if they, with the word of their voice, agreed to the sound of the formed spirit in the soul of the great world in that place.
275. For, as the manifestation of the formed word was in the spirit of the world in every place, even so the spirit of God did form, through the nature of the properties, the language and speech in every country. First the seventy-two head languages out of nature, and afterward the collateral affinities, 1 proceeding from the senses of every head language; as we plainly see, that a man doth scarce find, in any place of the world, among all the head languages, one and the same sense in any head language, within the compass of fifteen or eighteen miles: 2 they alter and change almost every fifteen or eighteen miles, all according as the properties of that pole, or elevation, are: [Look] what kind of property the lubet has in its predominant constellation, even such a property the vulgar people have in their language and speech. 1 Or dialects of language. 2 Fifteen or eighteen miles. According to the elevation of the pole, climate, or zenith and nadir. The Thirty-Sixth Chapter Of the Antichristian Babylonical Whore of all Nations, Tongues and Speeches; showing what is contained under the Languages and Tower of Babel AN OPEN GATE OF THE MYSTERY OF THE GREAT BABYLON
31. COURTEOUS reader, I desire to warn you in love, that you would not understand our sense and meaning according to partial affections, to detract, revile, or especially to contemn or despise any, as from us; much less to set upon them, in their office, function and dignities, out of passion; but we shall speak in general. Let every one prove himself; he shall indeed find the great mystery of the Babylonical tower in himself; and also the number of the false beast. Let him but read our meaning with patience, and take himself along, as to his evil innate hereditary property, under the same, as really the earthly mortal man in all men belongs unto this text. 2. We will here write what the time has brought forth and manifested, and if it were not manifest by man, yet the beasts should be driven to manifest the same; for the time is born, 1 and nothing can hinder: The Most High accomplishes his work. 1 Or fulfilled. 3. Moses says, Nimrod, Ham's [grand-] son, began his kingdom at Babel, and was the first lord upon the earth after the flood, and was the first erector of the tower, and the city Babylon (Gen. x. 8-10). Yet we are not to understand that only Ham's children would build the tower, but also Japheth's and Shem's, for they were yet all together as one people, and would build them a tower, whose top should reach even unto heaven, that they might thereby nlake themselves a great name (Gen. xi. 4).
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.
1also are the senses in the quality even in the place of this world; far otherwise in one country than in another. And even so God did likewise form the languages according to the property of every land and country. 74. For seeing that people were to be dispersed into every country and climate, he opened to each people a language, according as it should be in a land; which did apply itself unto the same quality [of sense], and accord therewith; so that the quality of the country did not introduce toe turba into it, if they, with the word of their voice, agreed to the sound of the formed spirit in the soul of the great world in that place.
275. For, as the manifestation of the formed word was in the spirit of the world in every place, even so the spirit of God did form, through the nature of the properties, the language and speech in every country. First the seventy-two head languages out of nature, and afterward the collateral affinities, 1 proceeding from the senses of every head language; as we plainly see, that a man doth scarce find, in any place of the world, among all the head languages, one and the same sense in any head language, within the compass of fifteen or eighteen miles: 2 they alter and change almost every fifteen or eighteen miles, all according as the properties of that pole, or elevation, are: [Look] what kind of property the lubet has in its predominant constellation, even such a property the vulgar people have in their language and speech. 1 Or dialects of language. 2 Fifteen or eighteen miles. According to the elevation of the pole, climate, or zenith and nadir. The Thirty-Sixth Chapter Of the Antichristian Babylonical Whore of all Nations, Tongues and Speeches; showing what is contained under the Languages and Tower of Babel AN OPEN GATE OF THE MYSTERY OF THE GREAT BABYLON
31. COURTEOUS reader, I desire to warn you in love, that you would not understand our sense and meaning according to partial affections, to detract, revile, or especially to contemn or despise any, as from us; much less to set upon them, in their office, function and dignities, out of passion; but we shall speak in general. Let every one prove himself; he shall indeed find the great mystery of the Babylonical tower in himself; and also the number of the false beast. Let him but read our meaning with patience, and take himself along, as to his evil innate hereditary property, under the same, as really the earthly mortal man in all men belongs unto this text. 2. We will here write what the time has brought forth and manifested, and if it were not manifest by man, yet the beasts should be driven to manifest the same; for the time is born, 1 and nothing can hinder: The Most High accomplishes his work. 1 Or fulfilled. 3. Moses says, Nimrod, Ham's [grand-] son, began his kingdom at Babel, and was the first lord upon the earth after the flood, and was the first erector of the tower, and the city Babylon (Gen. x. 8-10). Yet we are not to understand that only Ham's children would build the tower, but also Japheth's and Shem's, for they were yet all together as one people, and would build them a tower, whose top should reach even unto heaven, that they might thereby nlake themselves a great name (Gen. xi. 4).
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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