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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.
1nothing else but the form of some such earthly creature: except the soulish spirit 3 be concomitant in the working of the astral spirit, then is it premodelled in a human form, and in a true, natural way and manner of figure. For the soul alone has true, human eyes, but the astral spirit has only a bestial appearance, and sees after the manner of a beast. 5. Yet seeing there is a great difference between a false and wicked soul (which daily imagines in a bestial manner of figure, and wills and desires bestial things) and a pious divine soul, wherein the spirit of God is manifest; so also are the magical imaginations and representations in the astral spirit different. For a beast dreams according to phansie [fancy] ,4 and so does a bestial or animal man: though indeed the image or idea 5 of the constellation does certainly co-modellise itself, whether in evil or in good, according as the astral spirit eagerly longs or lusts in itself when it so views what stands naturally as a working in it. But seeing it is a beast, therefore it introduces in its image with its desire, commonly, the model of 6 a phantastic image; and turns it from joy to sorrow, from sorrow to joy; but the soul is faint and sick in such a spectacle or glass and prefiguration, whence oftentimes there arises great unquietness to the body.
26. But where a true vision is seen in man, that is done by the soul's modellising, when it co-images or co-models itself in the figure through its imagination; then the image or representation stands in the right human understanding, though indeed the astral spirit continually images or frames itself in earthly forms, so that very seldom an entire perfect vision appears as the work or effect in itself shall be; also man's own imagination itself does often alter it: what a man thinks or imagines in the day, viz. that magic form, makes it so, that the figure is according to his imagination. 1 Inanimate. 2 Animal body. 3 Or, spirit of the soul. 4 Or, from phansie. 5 Or, figure, the schema coeli (of heaven). 6 Or, in.
37. Yet the right visions are when man's will rests in God, and then is God's will manifest in man's will, and then the soul sees with God's eyes from its most inward ground, where it stands in the Word of God. And then the speaking Word goes with the soul's [word] into the magic image of the constellation, and then the astral spirit cannot image or fashion itself in the phansie, but must stand in the image in the figure as the constellation is; and then the soul sees what the Most High has prefigured, and what shall come to pass. And then the Word of God, viz. the ground of the soul, expresses the figure in the soul, so that the soul understands it; as here Joseph and also Daniel expressed and expounded. As soon, now, as the figure of the vision was told before Joseph, the spirit of God was together in the voice of the relator, and in Joseph expounded the vision: for so also are the magic visions of all the prophets. 8. For after God has once appeared to a prophet in an audible voice, and called them to be prophets (as to Samuel) (I Sam. iii. 4, 6, 8, 10), then afterwards he appeared to them in magic visions, and answered them upon their questions.
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.
1nothing else but the form of some such earthly creature: except the soulish spirit 3 be concomitant in the working of the astral spirit, then is it premodelled in a human form, and in a true, natural way and manner of figure. For the soul alone has true, human eyes, but the astral spirit has only a bestial appearance, and sees after the manner of a beast. 5. Yet seeing there is a great difference between a false and wicked soul (which daily imagines in a bestial manner of figure, and wills and desires bestial things) and a pious divine soul, wherein the spirit of God is manifest; so also are the magical imaginations and representations in the astral spirit different. For a beast dreams according to phansie [fancy] ,4 and so does a bestial or animal man: though indeed the image or idea 5 of the constellation does certainly co-modellise itself, whether in evil or in good, according as the astral spirit eagerly longs or lusts in itself when it so views what stands naturally as a working in it. But seeing it is a beast, therefore it introduces in its image with its desire, commonly, the model of 6 a phantastic image; and turns it from joy to sorrow, from sorrow to joy; but the soul is faint and sick in such a spectacle or glass and prefiguration, whence oftentimes there arises great unquietness to the body.
26. But where a true vision is seen in man, that is done by the soul's modellising, when it co-images or co-models itself in the figure through its imagination; then the image or representation stands in the right human understanding, though indeed the astral spirit continually images or frames itself in earthly forms, so that very seldom an entire perfect vision appears as the work or effect in itself shall be; also man's own imagination itself does often alter it: what a man thinks or imagines in the day, viz. that magic form, makes it so, that the figure is according to his imagination. 1 Inanimate. 2 Animal body. 3 Or, spirit of the soul. 4 Or, from phansie. 5 Or, figure, the schema coeli (of heaven). 6 Or, in.
37. Yet the right visions are when man's will rests in God, and then is God's will manifest in man's will, and then the soul sees with God's eyes from its most inward ground, where it stands in the Word of God. And then the speaking Word goes with the soul's [word] into the magic image of the constellation, and then the astral spirit cannot image or fashion itself in the phansie, but must stand in the image in the figure as the constellation is; and then the soul sees what the Most High has prefigured, and what shall come to pass. And then the Word of God, viz. the ground of the soul, expresses the figure in the soul, so that the soul understands it; as here Joseph and also Daniel expressed and expounded. As soon, now, as the figure of the vision was told before Joseph, the spirit of God was together in the voice of the relator, and in Joseph expounded the vision: for so also are the magic visions of all the prophets. 8. For after God has once appeared to a prophet in an audible voice, and called them to be prophets (as to Samuel) (I Sam. iii. 4, 6, 8, 10), then afterwards he appeared to them in magic visions, and answered them upon their questions.
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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