Friday, May 23, 2014

Jacob Boehme

The Brits called him Behmen, but for Blake Jacob Boehme, the humble shoe maker was a twin soul. Both Christian of the best sort, their value structure was close to identical.

In a letter to Flaxman Blake wrote:
"Now my lot in the Heavens is this; Milton lovd me in childhood &    shewd me his face
Ezra came with Isaiah the Prophet, but Shakespeare in riper years  gave me his hand
Paracelsus & Behmen appeard to me."
(Erdman 707)

This appears also in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell:
" Have now another plain fact: Any man of mechanical talents may from the writings of Paracelsus or Jacob Behmen, produce ten thousand volumes of equal value with Swedenborg's
and from those of Dante or Shakespear, an infinite number.
 But when he has done this, let him not say that he knows
better than his master, for he only holds a candle in
sunshine."
(Erdman 43)

Look at 'The Key', translated into English by William Law, which Blake knew and loved:

On page 20 he explains a great version of the Trinity:
"God is threefold namely only one Essence...especially represented to us as Fire, Light, and Air, which are three several sorts of workings, yet but one only ground and substance…..
likewise the Eternal unity is the cause and ground and  and  cause and  ground  of  the  Eternal Trinity….
it brings forth itself;
First in Desire of Will
Secondly in Pleasure or Delight
Thirdly Proceeding or Outgrowing

The Desire is the Father
the Pleasure is the Son
the Proceeding is the Holy Ghost”

And he goes on with a valiant attempt to make some kind of sense of the Trinity.
In contrast Blake tackled the Trinity in a diabolic sense:
A Scene in the Last Judgment
 Satans' holy Trinity The Accuser The Judge & The Executioner”
(This is a good example of the freedom Blake used in dealing with the Bible.)
Jung was not happy with the Trinity and felt it should be a Quatenity, including in the Mother.
In numerology three is a number representing incompletness and four of fullness.

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Wikipedia
Jakob Böhme (probably April 24, 1575[1] – November 17, 1624) was a German Christian mystic and theologian. He is considered an original thinker within the Lutheran tradition, and his first book, commonly known as Aurora, caused a great scandal. In contemporary English, his name may be spelled Jacob Boehme; in seventeenth-century England it was also spelled Behmen, approximating the contemporary English pronunciation of the German Böhme.



Here's a good Boehme website.

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