The Life and Doctrines of Jacob Boehme · 56 of 159 · tr. Franz Hartmann
Chapter 6 (part 9)
Thus he was in possession of divine and terrestrial essentiality; but the terrestrial one was in the divine one like consumed or impotent (latent).
The substance or the matter from which the body was made or created contained itself also the first principle within itself, but it was not stirring therein." ( Menschwerdung , i.
3, 15.) "As God resides within Himself and penetrates through all His works, incomprehensible to the latter, and without His being affected by anything, likewise His image (man) originated from the pure element.
He also was created in this world; but the kingdom of this world was not to comprehend him, but he was to rule powerfully in this world by means of the essences from the pure element." ( Three Principles , xxii.
15.) The expression that God created man from a clod of clay is not to be taken in any other sense than that God, by means of desire, drew together all the terrestrial qualities.
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139 "If Moses says that God created man out of a clod of clay, and that he breathed into him the living breath, this is not to be understood as if God had acted in a personal manner—standing there like a man and taking up a lump of earth and making a body out of it; but the Fiat , that is to say, the desire of the Word , was contained within the eternally-perceived model of man, which stood in the mirror of wisdom, and it drew the Ens (the principle) of all the qualities of the earth (matter) into a body, and this was the quintessence made out of the four elements." ( Grace , v.
27.) But the essence of the soul, being rooted in that whole, did not become manifest in man before God awakened it by the breath of His word.
1 "The sourcive spirits within the whole could not become immediately ignited by the soul, for the soul was only as a seed within the whole, hidden away with the heart of God in His heaven, until the Creator expanded the whole by His breath.
Then the sourcive spirits ignited the soul, and then body and soul were living at once.
The soul truly possessed her life before the body existed; but it was within the heart of God, hidden within the whole in heaven, and was nothing but a holy seed, a centre of power in God." ( Aurora , xxvi.
126.) Neither does at this present day the soul of man manifest divine life as long as the Spirit of God is only moving upon the surface and does not stir within the depths.
Footnotes 123:1 "Lucifer" is to be regarded not as a separate being within this world, but as a power penetrating the whole of the visible universe, in the same sense as that universe may now be regarded as being the body of universal spiritual man.
123:2 In other words, the tendency of the spiritual principle is to spiritualise and illumine everything by becoming active therein.
123:3 In the same sense the power of a seed to develop into a tree may remain latent for many years until the conditions present themselves for its manifestation.
123:4 Thus the fire of passion is subdued in man by the "water" of eternal life distilled from humility, which baptizes the soul and tranquillises the turbulent elements.
124:1 This goes to show the intimate relations existing between the spiritual and the material worlds.
There is a "spiritual" and a "material" water, both of which are merely manifestations of the one element.
125:1 The same takes place within the heart of man when his mind becomes illumined by the light of divine wisdom that arises from the divine centre in him.
125:2 The seventh "day" for our planet is always and nevertheless it has not yet arrived, because the six days belong to time and the seventh to eternity.
The transformation of base substance — outer matter or the inner soul — into a purified, perfected, or 'gold' state; the magnum opus as both laboratory practice and spiritual allegory.
The text uses alchemical imagery such as quintessence made from four elements and fire subdued by water.
Eckhart's signature doctrine that the Father eternally begets the Son in the ground of the soul; the human interior as the actual site of the divine generative act, distinct from inner_light's static indwelling.
The soul is awakened by the breath of His word and the desire of the Word was contained within the model of man.
The Hermetic axiom that the structure of the cosmos is reflected at every scale — 'as above, so below; as within, so without' — making each level a legible map of the others.
There are intimate relations between spiritual and material worlds which are merely manifestations of the one element.
Narratives or doctrines of cosmic origin — how heaven, earth, and the primordial deities first came into being. The Kojiki's deities born alone on the Plain of High Heaven, Voluspo's Ginnungagap, Genesis's tohu wa-bohu, the Timaeus's Demiurge fashioning the Receptacle, the Hesiodic Theogony, the Kalevala's egg-cosmogony, Egyptian Nun-and-Atum. Distinct from emanation_hierarchy (structural-ontological cascade), letters_of_creation (mechanism of creation), and apocatastasis/frashokereti (end-state restoration); cosmogony is temporally-narrative beginning.
The passage narrates the origin of human creation: God drew together terrestrial qualities by desire, the Fiat was contained in the model of man, and the breath of the Word awakened the soul.
The doctrine that the divine is present within all things and the universe itself, pervading creation rather than remaining solely transcendent above it. Distinct from unity_of_being (the general claim that all existence is one substance, agnostic about whether that substance indwells its parts) and from kingdom_within (the divine present specifically IN THE INDIVIDUAL human, accessible without mediation) — divine_immanence is the general pervading-presence claim applied to all of creation, not a human-specific indwelling.
God 'penetrates through all His works' and the spiritual principle is 'to spiritualise and illumine everything by becoming active therein,' affirming pervasive divine presence within creation.
A chain of divine beings or principles flowing downward from a single transcendent source (the One or the Father), each level less perfect than the one above.
A clear cascade is described: God → pure element → model of man in the mirror of wisdom → terrestrial qualities drawn together → body and soul living at once.
A non-physical dimension of reality, interpenetrating the physical world, populated by forces, beings, and forms ordinarily imperceptible to physical senses and instruments, that can affect embodied life without being seen — Dion Fortune's 'mind-side of nature,' the astral plane of Western esotericism broadly construed. Distinct from astral_light (a specific transmitting medium or fluid operating within this realm, not the realm itself), pleroma (the divine fullness at the summit of a cosmic hierarchy, not a parallel plane coextensive with ordinary life), and animism (particular indwelling spirits bound to specific natural objects, not the general unseen dimension itself).
The passage describes the spiritual and material worlds as intimately related, with the spiritual principle actively penetrating and illuminating the visible universe.
The doctrine that the cosmos unfolds as a structured descent of spirit into matter — a directional process traced stage by stage from an unconditioned principle down through successive planes to full materialization — complemented by its own eventual return ('evolution'). Distinct from emanation_hierarchy (the static structure of the resulting levels of the cascade) and cosmogony (a single originating event rather than an ongoing staged process) in naming the directional cosmic PROCESS of descent itself, paired with its own complementary ascent.
The soul possessed life before the body existed, hidden in God's heaven as a seed, then was awakened and embodied — a directional descent of spirit into matter.
The human being as a small-scale image of the entire cosmos; the body, soul, and intellect mirroring the structure of the heavens and the divine — distinct from correspondence in that it makes the human the privileged mirror.
Man is the image of God originating from the pure element and the universe is the body of universal spiritual man.
The doctrine — central to Eastern Orthodox and Maximian theology — that the human person is progressively transformed into a partaker of the divine nature by grace, not merely justified or united in passing ecstasy.
The spiritual principle tends to spiritualise and illumine everything by becoming active therein.