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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.
161. And the whole history of all the five books of Moses is even this in the figure: the exit out of Canaan, and the going into Canaan again, is only this; representing how the right Adamical man should with great hosts and armies, and much purchased goods effected in the divine operation, enter again into the eternal promised land; and how in this lifetime he must be a bondservant of God's anger in this Egypt, which would, through its ministers and servants, afflict, persecute and torment him in his office of anger, and continually keep him for a bondslave, till the right Joseph shall bring him through the temporal death, again into Paradise into rest. The Seventy-Fifth Chapter How Jacob, before his End, blessed the two sons of Joseph, and preferred the Youngest before the Eldest. And what thereby to be understood!
21. MOSES says, Afterwards it was told Joseph, Behold, your father is sick: and he took with him both his sons, Manasseh and Ephraim. And then it was told Jacob, Behold your son Joseph comes to you: and Israel strengthened himself and sat up in the bed, and said to Joseph, The Almighty God appeared to me at Luz in the land of Canaan, and blessed me. And said to me, Behold, I will cause you to increase and multiply, and will make you a multitude of people; and will give this land for a possession to your seed after you for ever. And now your two sons, Ephraim and Manasseh, which were born unto you in the land of Egypt before I came in hither to you, shall be mine, as Reuben and Simeon. But those which you shall beget after them, shall he thine, and shall be named according to their brethren in their inheritance (Gen. xlviii. 1-6). 2. In this figure now the patriarch Jacob stands again in the
3limit of the Covenant, whereto God had ordained him in the mother's womb. When he had finished his course in the world with the figure of the kingdom of Christ and his Christendom, then his spirit figures itself again in the limit of the Covenant, and through the limit of the Covenant blesses his children and his children's children, and points at the future time, how it would go with them. That is, he speaks from the root, and intimates concerning the branches and twigs of this tree, which God in Paradise planted again after the defection and fall, and had made it manifest in Abraham: and so Jacob stood in the same stock, and intimates from the spirit of this tree concerning his branches and twigs, but especially in both Joseph's sons, both which he grafted back again into his root, that they should be his sons, as Reuben and Simeon. This figure stands thus:
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.
161. And the whole history of all the five books of Moses is even this in the figure: the exit out of Canaan, and the going into Canaan again, is only this; representing how the right Adamical man should with great hosts and armies, and much purchased goods effected in the divine operation, enter again into the eternal promised land; and how in this lifetime he must be a bondservant of God's anger in this Egypt, which would, through its ministers and servants, afflict, persecute and torment him in his office of anger, and continually keep him for a bondslave, till the right Joseph shall bring him through the temporal death, again into Paradise into rest. The Seventy-Fifth Chapter How Jacob, before his End, blessed the two sons of Joseph, and preferred the Youngest before the Eldest. And what thereby to be understood!
21. MOSES says, Afterwards it was told Joseph, Behold, your father is sick: and he took with him both his sons, Manasseh and Ephraim. And then it was told Jacob, Behold your son Joseph comes to you: and Israel strengthened himself and sat up in the bed, and said to Joseph, The Almighty God appeared to me at Luz in the land of Canaan, and blessed me. And said to me, Behold, I will cause you to increase and multiply, and will make you a multitude of people; and will give this land for a possession to your seed after you for ever. And now your two sons, Ephraim and Manasseh, which were born unto you in the land of Egypt before I came in hither to you, shall be mine, as Reuben and Simeon. But those which you shall beget after them, shall he thine, and shall be named according to their brethren in their inheritance (Gen. xlviii. 1-6). 2. In this figure now the patriarch Jacob stands again in the
3limit of the Covenant, whereto God had ordained him in the mother's womb. When he had finished his course in the world with the figure of the kingdom of Christ and his Christendom, then his spirit figures itself again in the limit of the Covenant, and through the limit of the Covenant blesses his children and his children's children, and points at the future time, how it would go with them. That is, he speaks from the root, and intimates concerning the branches and twigs of this tree, which God in Paradise planted again after the defection and fall, and had made it manifest in Abraham: and so Jacob stood in the same stock, and intimates from the spirit of this tree concerning his branches and twigs, but especially in both Joseph's sons, both which he grafted back again into his root, that they should be his sons, as Reuben and Simeon. This figure stands thus:
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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