BOEHME'S UNIVERSE
Project Gutenberg EPUB edition
Jones, Rufus M. (Rufus Matthew)
[3] See Fifteenth Epistle, 25.
[4] Fifth Epistle, 50.
[5] Like Paracelsus, he uses "sulphur" in a symbolic way to represent an active energy of the universe and a form of will in man. In a similar way, "mercury" stands for intelligence and spirit, and "salt" is the symbol for substance. No one could find in a chemist's shop the salt or sulphur that Boehme talks about!
[6] There is a fine saying about Dante in the Ottimo Commento: "I, the writer, heard Dante say that never a rhyme had led him to say other than he would, but that many a time and oft he had made words say for him what they were not wont to say for other poets."
[7] Sig. re. ix. 1-3. Paracelsus said, "Everything is the product of one creative effort," and, "There is nothing corporeal that does not possess a soul."
[8] The Supersensual Life, p. 44.
[9] Paracelsus and others used the term Mysterium magnum to denote the original, but unoriginated, matter out of which all things were made. "Mysterium" is anything out of which something germinally contained in it can be developed.
[10] Mysterium magnum, xxix. 1-2.
[11] Forty Questions, i. 57.
[12] Sig. re. ii. 4-15, and iii. 1-10.
[13] The Threefold Life of Man, iii. 2.
[14] Aurora, iii. 35-39.
[15] Ibid. vi. 6-8; Clavis, 18-29.
[16] Sig. re. xvi. i.
[17] Aurora, xiii. 48-57; Myst. mag. viii. 31; The Three Principles, iv. 66.
[18] Sig. re. xv. 38.
[19] Myst. mag. viii. 27.
[20] Myst. mag. xxix. 1-10.
[21] The Three Principles, iv. 68-74; The Threefold Life, iv. 33.
[22] Myst. mag. ix. 3-8.
[23] Aurora, Preface 84.
[24] Christopher Walton, Notes and Materials for a Biography of Wm. Law (London, 1854), 55.
[25] The great passages in which Boehme expounds the seven qualities are found in the Aurora, chaps. viii.-xi.; Sig. re. chap. xiv.; The Clavis, 54-132; though they are more or less definitely stated or implied in nearly everything he wrote. Seven "qualities" or "principles" or "sources" appear and reappear in ever shifting forms throughout the entire literature of Gnosticism, alchemy, and nature-mysticism.
[26] Aurora, viii. 32-35.
[27] Some of Boehme's enthusiastic friends insist that Sir Isaac Newton, who was an admirer of Boehme, "ploughed with Boehme's heifer," i.e. got his suggestion of the law of universal gravitation from the philosopher of Goerlitz. See Walton, Notes, p. 46 and passim.
[28] Sig. re. iv. passim.
[29] Sig. re. xiii.
[30] For fuller treatment of this point see Boutroux, Historical Studies in Philosophy, chapter on "Jacob Boehme, the German Philosopher," pp. 199-201.
[31] Third Epistle, 33.
[32] Twenty-fourth Epistle, 7; Sig. re. i.
[33] The Threefold Life, vi. 47.
[34] The Three Princ. xiv. 89; First Epistle, 42.
[35] The Three Princ. x. 26; xvi. 50.
[36] Ibid. x. 13.
[37] Aurora, xviii. 49.
[38] Myst. mag. xxii. 41.
[39] Ibid. xviii. 31-43, given in substance.
[40] Ibid. xxvi. 19. The place of Christ in Boehme's system will be given in the next chapter.
[41] Myst. mag. xxvi. 5.
[42] Incarnation, part ii. ix. 12-14.