Jacob Boehme — Aurora, or the Day-Spring (Free Electronic Text Edition)

AURORA. That is, the Day-Spring. Or Dawning of the Day in the Orient Or Morning-Redness in the Rising of the SUN. That is The Root or Mother of Philosophy, Astrology & Theology from the true Ground. Or a Description of Nature.

I. How All was, and came to be in the Beginning. II. How Nature and the Elements are become Creaturely. III. Also of the Two Qualities Evil and Good. IV. From whence all things had their Original. V. And how all stand and work at present. VI. Also how all will be at the End of this Time. VII. Also what is the Condition of the Kingdom of God, and of the Kingdom of Hell. VIII. And how men work and act creaturely in Each of them.

Aurora reads the whole of nature as a living work of God, unfolding through a seven-fold order of what Boehme calls "qualities" or source-spirits (Quellgeister) — the powers by which anything comes to be and holds together. Everything that arises does so from the strife and the reconciling of two contrary qualities: a fierce, astringent, wrathful power and a gentle, sweet, light-giving power — the "Evil and Good" that the eight-fold scheme names at its third head. Where the two turn against each other there is darkness; where the harsh quality is kindled and yields to the light, the day-spring breaks and the divine Wisdom shines through the creature. This is the book's contemplative claim: that the same qualities work in the stars, in the elements, and in the human heart, so that to read nature rightly is already a kind of prayer.

Aurora was Boehme's first book, written in 1612 at Goerlitz and left unfinished. A manuscript copy circulated among friends and reached Gregorius Richter, the town's chief pastor, who denounced it from the pulpit; the town council warned Boehme to write no more, and for years he kept that silence before resuming. The free text preserved here is the English translation made by John Sparrow, printed at London in 1656 — which is why these pages carry seventeenth-century spelling and the long descriptive title on the leaf before. The work is valued not as a system to be believed but as an early, unguarded record of one man trying to say how nature and the divine are one motion.