Jacob Boehme
Berlin, 3rd May 1906
Jacob Boehme (1575-1624) is probably one of the strangest
personalities of the last centuries. In the aurora of a quite
new time, in the turn of the 16th to the 17th centuries, he
stands there with a knowledge and a wisdom, with a worldview
which appears like a completion of many centuries. He stands
there as a person who was understood a little in the following
time up to this day, even if he was called Philosophus
Teutonicus and societies existed in Holland, in England, in
Germany which tried to make Jacob Boehme's views popular. There
have been always persons who occupied themselves with Jacob
Boehme.
About 1600, when Giordano Bruno died a martyr's death, Jacob
Boehme's soul was penetrated by great, immense ideas for the
first time. Who starts devoting himself to Jacob Boehme and,
besides, goes out from the views of the present time finds his
way in him a little. Hence, one can read in the modern books
about Jacob Boehme that he showed his view in images which are
incomprehensible and dark. If one reads the stuff that has been
said about him in newer handbooks, one may say, it is
completely comprehensible that one finds Jacob Boehme
incomprehensible. What one can read in the handbooks of history
of philosophy about him, however, is the most incomprehensible
stuff of the world. This is the peculiar phenomenon which one
experiences with Jacob Boehme.
If
one knows the spiritual life of the 19th century exactly, in
particular that German spiritual life, which especially
philosophical circles influence, one can understand that Jacob
Boehme was understood so little. There are hardly bigger
contrasts than Jacob Boehme and Immanuel Kant. Whatever the
education of the 19th century produced is far away from the
spirit of this strange man. All who try to approach Jacob
Boehme from the theosophical worldview are surprised that one
still needed a theosophical deepening with that nation that had
Jacob Boehme. One needs only to know Paracelsus and Jacob
Boehme to know theosophy. Everything that they wrote is given
from a deep spring, with immense deepness and magic power.
Jacob Boehme was one of the greatest magicians of all times, of
a greatness that has not yet been reached up to now.
In
1575, Jacob Boehme was born as a child of poor people. He was
first a herd boy and could hardly read and write. While he
tended livestock, already some strange flashes of inspiration
lighted up in him. Sometimes it seemed to him, as if any leaf
in the trees, as if the animals of the wood had something to
say to him, as if all beings of nature spoke to him. Then he
was apprenticed to a shoemaker. During his apprenticeship, he
had a strange experience that cannot be discussed in the
general public concerning its real basis. Jacob Boehme had to
look after the shop once when his master and wife stepped out.
However, he should sell nothing. A person entered whose eyes
made a particular impression on him. This person wanted to buy
something. Jacob said to him, he was not allowed to sell
anything. The look of the stranger was something quite
extraordinary to him. Then the stranger went out. After a few
minutes, Jacob heard calling his name. The stranger said to
him, Jacob, you are still small now, but you are destined to
something great! — Jacob Boehme knew that these words
transferred anything remaining to him.
Jacob Boehme tells another experience, about a mountain. Once
he saw into a cave where something like gold shone to him.
Again, it seemed to him like a revelation, like something that
would tell about the concealed forces of nature to him. If one
touched that all, it would lose its magic, which one can only
understand by occult means.
Like all young craftsmen of the past, Jacob Boehme started
wanderings after his apprenticeship and then settled down as
master of his craft in his hometown Görlitz. He began soon
to write down what lived in his soul. It is important to
illuminate the sensations somewhat that were in this
personality. He felt raised above himself if he put pen to
paper to write down what was revealed to him. Something was in
him like a higher nature. This was so strong in him that
— if he was back again in the everyday life and if he
wanted to read the written down — he could not understand
it. He could not follow that spirit. What he wrote down were
words from the beginning, which were taken only from the centre
of wisdom. Aurora or the Rising of the Dawn was the
first book he wrote. Aurora or the Rising of the Dawn
was always a symbol of the birth of the higher self to the
mystics if the soul rises above the lower existence. The
spiritualisation of the human being was always symbolised by
the dawn. At that time, Jacob Boehme wrote words, which sound
quite naturally with him because they carry the stamp, the seal
of truth. Thus, he said once that he knows that “the
sophist reproves him” if he speaks of the beginning of
the world and its creation, “because I was not present
and did not see it. I say to him that I was present in the
essence of my soul and, when I was not yet a self, but because
I was Adam's essence I was present and forfeited my glory in
Adam.”
This simple man, who probably only read Paracelsus if any, had
the consciousness that the everlasting soul that lives in the
human being is not bound to space and time that there is an
expansion of consciousness of this soul by which the human
being is able to rise above space and time. Thus, the unity was
clear to him, which lives in everything, which lives in every
human soul, so that one needs only to remove the narrow borders
in order to get a picture, a face that shows everything to us
that goes back to the beginning of the creation of the human
being. All that was founded on deep devoutness with Jacob
Boehme.
He
says about his soul condition: “When I struggled with
God's assistance, a strange light emerged to my soul that was
quite foreign to the wild nature. I only recognised in it what
God and the human being is, and what God deals with the human
being.”
It
was an immediate experience of Jacob Boehme, the emergence of
the divine soul in the usual human soul. This experience that
was detached in a completely elementary way from the soul
founded his enthusiasm. Thus, we see him grasping the human
nature, the historical evolution of the whole humanity in a
way, which — if one cannot penetrate to the springs
— gives him a hard fight to understand this spirit.
What we find with Paracelsus faces us in a spiritualised and
transfigured form with Jacob Boehme. It already faces us in his
first work, in the Aurora. This work was not printed
first, but circulated only as a manuscript among his friends.
It fell into the hands of a zealotic preacher. He preached
against it and was successful that the City Council of
Görlitz forbade Jacob Boehme to write anything in future.
One regarded him as such a dangerous person already in those
days. However, Jacob Boehme wrote nothing for years. All his
other writings date from the last five to six years of his
life, that life which one made to him continuously rather hard
because one understood nothing of that which lived in this man,
For the fanatical priesthood was fulfilled by zealotic hatred
for anything that it had not written itself. His works were
translated, before they were printed in Germany, into English,
into Dutch and other languages. Jacob Boehme's destiny and
works are an example of how little the ways of true spiritual
life depend on the official education and how difficult it is
to overcome the obstacles that are put in the way of the
spiritual life by all possible powers.
Already in the Aurora, that faces us which lived in
Jacob Boehme. At first, he said that something lives in the
human being that can outgrow itself, a divine spark of life.
This remained nothing abstract to him, but took shape of a big
world building and human building in his thoughts, in his world
of sensations. Someone who wants to understand Jacob Boehme has
to recognise that only a profound spiritual-scientific
education can penetrate into that which lived in Jacob Boehme.
He knew of the human being that the physical human being has
another, more spiritual, finer nature as its basis. Something
is between the physical human being and the mental one that
Jacob Boehme called “tinctura.” This is an often
misunderstood word. At that time, there were also great spirits
like for example Newton, who endeavoured for years to become
clear in their mind about what Jacob Boehme means speaking of
the tinctura.
If
we look back at former times of the distant past, we find that
there the world was still completely different from now. Jacob
Boehme was completely filled with an immense doctrine of
evolution. As extensive, splendid, and applicable to everything
spiritual and sensuous at the same time as Jacob Boehme's view
of world evolution understands it, no scientific view has shown
it. He looks back at far distant periods when the earth still
looked completely different from now. Jacob Boehme understood
in a strange way what some naturalists have said in an
amateurish way about the primeval condition of the earth. The
modern naturalist pursues the living beings back to more
imperfect forms. He still says then at best, everything on
earth developed from a universal nebula. The forms emerged from
the principles inherent in a universal nebula.
Jacob Boehme considers this development in much bigger style.
He turns his look at all mental beings, at all animal beings,
at all minerals, plants, and animals. He is able to behold the
former conditions, the forms, which the human being had in
former times when these beings were not yet such beings as they
are today. In those days, they were included in a kind of
original matter from which only the later world has arisen. He
sees the world of appearance and the beings as they existed as
rudiments at that time. He beholds an earth that is not solid,
not air, not water, not fire on which neither animals nor
plants do exist, but which contains everything that appeared
then. Boehme does not speak of a fantastic primeval nebula, but
about the tinctura that was real once when it formed our globe
and that rests in secrecy on the basis of the beings today.
This tinctura exists in the human being as a spiritual-mental
organism behind the physical being. It is also in all other
things. From the tinctura, Jacob Boehme derives the creation of
all living beings with which he distinguishes seven basic
qualities. With it, one comes to a very deep basis of his
worldview. Equipped with it, one has a means to solve countless
riddles of the world. Besides, Jacob Boehme has a wonderful
language, compared with it, our modern language appears grey
and lifeless with its concepts.
We
have to imagine that the tinctura lives in the world like the
primeval matter, that in it everything rests like in a maternal
womb, that then the forms come out. He calls a type of the
forms the acerbic ones. The human forefather was a being with a
cartilaginous scaffolding, as well as the cartilaginous fishes
have it today. The skeleton crystallised then from the original
tinctura; with acerbity the skeleton of the earth crystallised
from the original tinctura. Jacob Boehme calls this the salty
in the world. One must not imagine that the original acerbic
also had the form of a skeleton. However, everything that
tended to become solid and earthy, that crystallised from the
original spiritual matter was for Jacob Boehme the acerbic, the
salty.
The
second form of nature is that which preserves the internal
mobility, so that the parts can perpetually interact with each
other. Jacob Boehme calls this the mercurial.
The
third is the sulfuric, containing the power of fire in itself
like a concealed force. What one sees as fire originating from
the matter is the one side, and the human and animal passions
are the other one. Now they are separated from each other like
North Pole and South Pole. The intuition of the folk, as well
as Jacob Boehme looked back at a time of the earliest
development. There was something that was not a material fire
and also not passion from which, however, the fire
differentiated on one side, on the other side the passion. At
that time, they had a common basis. Jacob Boehme finds the same
spiritual basis in the material fire as in the human passion.
There is a relationship between that which slumbers in the
matter and the human passion. There is something in it that is
related to the spiritual side of the fire.
The
sulphur contains the fire in itself concealed as the body
contains the animal passion. Thus, Jacob Boehme distinguishes
this four at first, tinctura, salt, sulphur, fire.
In
the same way as the old German folk intuition looked back at a
time when there was neither fire nor passion, Jacob Boehme
looks back at such a condition, at such a thing, which becomes
the fifth original form of nature if it spiritualises itself.
He calls it water. It is water in the sense as we find the
water in the Bible, as an external symbol of the soul. The
spirit of God hovered over the surface of the water, over the
soul forces slumbering in the matter, so that they can be
raised.
The
sixth form of nature originates if the inside penetrates
outwardly if the inner life comes to life in such a way that it
can be perceived. Jacob Boehme calls it sound. This is any soul
expression that the inside of the being has in itself in such a
way as the bell the peal. The sound can also express the
uniform divine nature. The seventh form then originates, the
wisdom, the divine force contained in the world. In these seven
forms, Jacob Boehme sees the whole nature included.
The
lowest member of the human nature has to do something with the
salt-like acerbity; then it rises higher and higher up to
wisdom. Furthermore, the forces of nature and the human being
are related to the solar system. The relationship of all beings
expresses itself everywhere. Jacob Boehme also calls tinctura
everything that moves like the spiritual life blood through all
beings. It is between the world thought and any matter. Jacob
Boehme imagines the great master builder of the world as an
artist who organised the world sensuous-physically. He calls
the connection between the sensuous-physical and the creator of
the world tinctura again. He searches it in any single
being.
This is the difficult in his writings that we have to come to
grips with his ideas. The human being is normally glad if he
has established a few concepts to himself. Jacob Boehme does
not form single abstractions that stand side by side like
soldiers. He creeps as it were into all beings. He regards all
beings as related, as connected with each other. In order to
understand Jacob Boehme you have to make your mind flexible as
nature is flexible, so that the concepts can also change as the
things in nature change. Theosophists also often establish
narrow concepts. However, it does not matter to have a concept,
but that you are able to dissolve the concept immediately
again. If you have a concept, you must be able to transform it
as the things change. Nothing is more obstructive than
abstract, carefully weighed concepts. Therefore, those cannot
understand Jacob Boehme who read him because they form solid
concepts first; however, he follows the living life of the
things. The concepts must change, as well as the things change.
However, people feel hovering as it were. One has really lost
ground if one wants to understand the world. You have to keep
the centre in yourselves only.
Jacob Boehme's soul painting is a reproduction of nature. He
finds in the human mind what is related to the tinctura, the
imagination. Imagination is a soul force that is in the middle
between the force of thinking and the force of willing. Someone
who is able to understand his concepts pictorially and to
visualise them in his mind, so that not an abstract picture of
the plant faces him, but a plant like of sensuous appearance.
That viewable concept is impregnated as it were with real life
from within. Someone who is able to do this has imagination. It
can be increased in such a way that the human being works
creatively and gains influence on that which lives as tinctura
in the things.
Here begins for Jacob Boehme that alchemy which is able to
react on the matter, the tinctura, and from there also on the
sensuous things. Thus, the imaginative human being is able to
become a magician. Because Jacob Boehme understood this, we are
allowed to call him the greatest magician of the new time.
Jacob Boehme calls imagination the great virgin of nature, the
virgin wisdom. Now, he goes back to the creation of Adam and
further on to the original divine imagination. He says, the
divine imagination imprinted the original spiritual human being
in the matter according to its likeness. He calls this spirit
man the original Adam.
While this spiritual human being is there from the outset, he
shows how the spiritual human being already existed in the
original tinctura, how then, however, an entire spiritual
change took place in the world creation. He places this change
on the fourth day of creation. He did not see this original
human being whom he calls the tinctura man with eyes, but
inside he was clairvoyant, so that he could clairvoyantly
perceive everything that took place in him. Then selfhood,
independence appeared in this human being. That came during the
fourth day, and the clairvoyant human being became aware of
himself, started looking his own being. Spiritual-divine
creation was originally all around. The primeval man beheld
this clairvoyantly. He saw himself now. This was his
renunciation of God. This human being would completely have
solidified unless anything else were possible. The human being
did no longer behold the world clairvoyantly. The point in time
happened when the clairvoyant human being could perceive
externally what is divine. At first, sun, moon, and stars are
pictures of the divine he had seen once in himself.
Thus, the human being had seceded divinity, but due to the
senses the world had become perceptible to him. It is the idea
of the sensuous perception, which made the ancient tinctura man
the material man. He becomes a material human being by his own
idea taken from the material world, so that he himself became a
sensuous human being from within due to his own imagination of
the sensuous.
Jacob Boehme saw a deep relationship of all beings, of the
animals, plants, and minerals. He said, everything that lives
in the world in skin and bone, in flesh and blood and so on is
related to something on earth. Jacob Boehme relates the whole
social and artistic structure also to the constellations of the
planets. He shows the connection of the planets with the human
life. All that is so clear to someone who wants to understand
him, but so big that a small-minded time cannot understand
him.
Another question still entered his scope of view, the question
of the origin of the evil, the evil in the world, the question,
how does the evil come into the world? Is the evil contained in
the primal ground of the world? The primal ground is then not a
good one.
He
finds an answer comparing the original good to the light, the
pure light. No darkness is included in it. While the light
appears, becomes discernible, it appears by the objects with
the shadow. Are we allowed to say that darkness is included in
the light? Certainly not. Pure light only goes out from the
source of the light. However, from the objects the opposite of
the light goes out. The light faces us in the world as the
primal ground ... (gap in the text). As it is true that
the shadow must be present with the light, it is true that the
bad must be in the good. We can compare the divine harmony to
the human soul. It penetrates the organism. The soul puts the
limbs of the human in motion. The world harmony of the divinity
enjoys life in the soul in such a way that the limbs have
independence. Although the harmony of the soul forms the basis,
the limbs can turn against each other. If freedom should be in
the world, the limbs must be able to turn against each other.
Freedom and the possibility of the bad belong together, harmony
and the possibility of disharmony. Just this thought of Jacob
Boehme inspired Schelling (Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Sch.,
1775-1854, philosopher), and you find a wonderful
representation of that which lives in the freedom of the human
being (Philosophical Inquiries into the Essence of Human
Freedom, 1809).
This writing by Schelling about the freedom of the human being
is like an offering to Jacob Boehme. Schelling understood
something of Jacob Boehme. Boehme lived on with Goethe and
other great spirits of the 19th century. Only when materialism
arose, the spiritual life was alienated from Jacob Boehme. Then
one understood him less and less. A time comes again in which
one will not only understand him but in which one wants to
learn from him. A new era approaches for theosophy. A time
comes then, when one understands such great spiritual deeds
like Jacob Boehme's writings, like the Germanic mythology again
when they progress towards a new glorification. A
spiritualisation of all wisdom, all human energy can then be
caused. If the age comes to an end, which has the task of the
external control of all natural forces, then Jacob Boehme will
also be understood again. Copernicus, Galilei, and Giordano
Bruno also belonged to the same age to which Jacob Boehme
belongs. They have the world led to the observation of the
sensuous world, the external world.
Jacob Boehme appeared just in that age, and his works are like
a big summary of all mental achievements of humanity. He
arranges all that for the world in the dawn of an age that
introduces the materialistic epoch. When the materialistic age
has topped out, Jacob Boehme is also found again and everything
that is contained in his works. Everything is contained in his
works that the world has collected as spiritual treasures.
We
must not consider the achievements of theosophy as something
particular. The theosophical world movement must be something
that is alive, that signifies life and growth. If the
theosophical society represents this, it understands how to
work in the sense of the great spirits of former times, in the
sense of Jacob Boehme, it becomes theosophical work in the true
sense of the word.
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