# World Mysteries and Theosophy

## GA 54 — 3 May 1906, Berlin

### Jakob Böhme

Jakob Böhme is probably one of the most remarkable personalities of the last few centuries. At the dawn of a whole new era, at the turn of the 16th to the 17th century, he stands there with a knowledge and wisdom, with a worldview that seems like the culmination of many centuries. He stands there as a personality who has been little understood in the period since then, even though he has been called a philosopher of the Teutonic tradition and there have been societies in Holland, England, and Germany that have sought to popularize Jakob Böhme's views. There have always been people who have studied Jakob Böhme.

In the year that Giordano Bruno died a martyr's death, 1600, Jakob Böhme's great, powerful ideas first passed through his soul. Anyone who begins to study Jakob Böhme from the perspective of contemporary views will find it difficult to understand him. That is why modern books about Jakob Böhme say that he expressed his views in images that are incomprehensible and obscure. When one reads what has been said about Jakob Böhme in recent handbooks, it is completely understandable that one finds Jakob Böhme incomprehensible. What is written about him in the handbooks of the history of philosophy is indeed the most incomprehensible stuff in the world. This is the peculiar phenomenon one experiences with Jakob Böhme.

If one is familiar with the intellectual life of the 19th century, particularly German intellectual life, which was influenced by specific philosophical circles, then one can understand why Jakob Böhme was so little understood. There are hardly any greater contrasts than Jakob Böhme and Immanuel Kant. Everything else that 19th-century education produced is quite far removed from the spirit of this remarkable man. Anyone who tries to approach Jakob Böhme from the standpoint of theosophical worldview will be surprised that the people who knew Jakob Böhme still needed a deeper understanding of theosophy. To know theosophy, one need only know Paracelsus and Jakob Böhme. Everything they wrote comes from a deep source, with tremendous profundity and magical power. Jakob Böhme was one of the greatest magicians of all time, with a greatness that has not yet been equaled today.

Jakob Böhme was born in 1575 to poor parents. He was initially a herdsman and could barely read or write. While tending the cattle, he had many strange flashes of inspiration. It sometimes seemed to him as if every leaf on the trees, every animal in the forest, every creature in nature was trying to tell him something. He then became an apprentice to a shoemaker. During his apprenticeship, he had a strange experience, the actual nature of which cannot be discussed in public. Jakob Böhme was once asked by his master and mistress to look after the shop while they were out. However, he was not to sell anything. Then a person entered the shop whose eyes made a very special impression on him. This person apparently wanted to buy something. Jakob told him that he was not allowed to sell anything. The stranger's gaze was something quite extraordinary for him. The stranger then left. After a few minutes, Jakob heard his name being called. The stranger said to him: Jakob, you are still small, but you are called to something great! Jakob Böhme knew that something in these words had a lasting effect on him. Jakob Böhme then recounts another experience, on a mountain. There he once looked into a cave where something flashed at him like gold. Again, it seemed to him like a revelation, like something that would tell him something about the hidden powers of nature. If one were to touch all this, it would lose that magic which can only be understood by occult means.

Like all young craftsmen of that time, Jakob Böhme went on a journey after his apprenticeship and then settled in his hometown of Görlitz as a master shoemaker. He soon began to write down what was in his soul. It is important to shed some light on the feelings that were within this personality. When he took up his pen to write down what had been revealed to him, he felt elevated above himself. There was something in him like a higher nature. This was so strong in him that when he returned to everyday life and wanted to read what he had written, he could not understand it. He could not follow that spirit. From the beginning, what he wrote were words drawn only from the center of wisdom. “Aurora or the Dawn Rising” was the first book he wrote. Aurora, or the dawn, has always been a symbol for mystics of the birth of the higher self, of the soul rising above the lower existence. The spiritualization of man has always been symbolized as the dawn. Jakob Böhme wrote words that, because they bear the stamp, the seal of truth, sound natural to him. He once said that he knew that “the sophist would reproach him” when he spoke of the beginning of the world and its creation, “because I was not there and did not see it myself. To that I say that in the essence of my soul and body, when I was not yet myself, but was the essence of Adam, I was indeed there and squandered my glory in Adam himself.”

This simple man, who had probably never practiced what is called reading with any other writer than Paracelsus, was aware that the eternal soul that lives in man is not bound by space and time, that there is an expansion of the consciousness of this soul through which man is able to rise above space and time. Thus, he clearly understood the unity that lives in everything, that lives in every human soul, so that one need only cast off the narrow boundaries to obtain an image, a face that shows us everything that goes back to the beginning of human creation. All of this is based on Jakob Böhme's deep piety. He says the following about his state of mind: “As I struggled and fought with God's help, a wonderful light dawned on my soul, which was completely foreign to wild nature, in which I first recognized what God and man would be, and what God had to do with mankind.”

For Jakob Böhme, it was a direct experience, the resurrection of the soul of God in the ordinary human soul. It was this experience that gave rise to his enthusiasm, which detached itself from his soul in a very elementary way. Thus we see him grasping human nature, the historical development of the whole of humanity, in a way that makes it quite difficult to understand this spirit unless one can penetrate to the very sources themselves.

What we find in Paracelsus appears to us in a spiritualized and transfigured form in Jakob Böhme. We encounter it already in his first work, the “Aurora.” This work was not initially printed, but circulated among his friends only as a manuscript. Then it fell into the hands of a zealous preacher. He preached against it and succeeded in getting the magistrate of the city of Görlitz to forbid Jakob Böhme from writing anything in the future. That is how dangerous he was considered at the time. Jakob Böhme did indeed write nothing for years. All his other writings stem from the last five to six years of his life, a life that had been made very difficult for him because people did not understand what lived within this man and because the fanatical clergy was filled with zealous hatred for everything that they themselves had not written. Before they were printed in Germany, his works were translated into English, Dutch, and so on. The fate of Jakob Böhme and his works is an example of how the paths of true spiritual life depend little on official education and how difficult it is to overcome the obstacles that all kinds of powers place in the way of spiritual life.

Already in the “Aurora” we encounter what lived in Jakob Böhme. Jakob Böhme first spoke of the fact that something lives in human beings that can grow beyond itself, a divine spark of life. For him, this remained nothing abstract, but took shape in his thoughts and in his world of feelings as a great edifice of the world and of human beings. Anyone who wants to understand Jakob Böhme must recognize that only a profound education in Spiritual Science can penetrate what lived in Jakob Böhme. He knew from human beings themselves that the physical human being has a different, more spiritual, finer essence as its foundation. Between the physical human being and the soul is something that Jakob Böhme called the “tinctura.” This is a word that is often misunderstood. At that time, there were also great minds, such as Newton, who spent years trying to understand what Jakob Böhme meant when he spoke of the tinctura.

If we look back to earlier times in the distant past, we will find that the world was very different then than it is now. Jakob Böhme was completely imbued with a powerful theory of development. No scientific view of the world has ever presented the theory of world development in such a comprehensive, magnificent way, applicable to both the spiritual and the sensual, as Jakob Böhme's understanding of it. He looks back to times long past, when the earth looked very different from how it does now. What some natural scientists have said in a rather amateurish way about the original state of the earth, Jakob Böhme understood in a remarkable way. When we go back to the dawn of time, today's natural scientists trace living beings back to increasingly imperfect forms. Then they say, at best, that everything on Earth has developed from a world nebula. The forms emerged through the laws inherent in the world nebula. In Jakob Böhme, we see this development conceived on a much larger scale. His gaze extends to all spiritual beings, to all animal beings, to all plant beings, to all mineral beings. He is able to see the earlier states, the forms that human beings had in earlier times, when these beings did not yet exist as they are today, but were contained in a kind of primordial matter from which the later world emerged. He sees the world of phenomena and the beings as they existed at that time, as they existed in their potential. He sees an earth that is not solid, not air, not water, not fire, on which there were no animals and no plants, but which contains everything that has since come into being. Jakob Böhme does not speak of a fantastical primordial nebula, but of the tincture that once really existed, that formed our globe as such, and that today rests hidden at the foundation of beings. This Tinctura is present in humans as a spiritual-soul organism behind the physical being. It is also present in all other things. From the Tinctura, Jakob Böhme derives the formation of all living beings, in which he distinguishes seven basic characteristics. This brings us to a very deep foundation of his worldview. Equipped with this, we can find a thread through the world that can solve countless mysteries of the universe. Jakob Böhme has a wonderful language, which makes our language today seem gray and lifeless with its concepts.

We must form the mental image that the tincture lives in the world like primordial matter, that everything rests in it as in a mother's womb, and that then the forms emerge. He calls one type of form “herbaceousness.” The human ancestor was a creature with a cartilaginous skeleton, as cartilaginous fish have today. Then the skeleton crystallized out of the original tincture; with tartness, the skeleton of the earth crystallized out of the original tincture. Jakob Böhme calls this everything salty in the world. One must not form a mental image of the original tartness also having the form of a skeleton. But everything that crystallized out of the original spirit matter with the tendency to become solid and earthy was, for Jakob Böhme, this tartness, this saltiness.

The second form of nature is that which preserves inner mobility, so that the parts can enter into constant interaction with one another. Jakob Böhme calls this the mercurial.

The third is the sulfurous, that which contains the power of fire within itself like a hidden force.

Jakob Böhme combines deeply fundamental mental images with wonderfully wise language in German folklore. It is precisely here that we can recognize Jakob Böhme's connection with the original German folk-souls. In mid-June, there is the St. John's Fire Festival. Something significant in nature is presupposed here. Scholarly speculation speaks of the summer solstice and astronomical connections. But that is not what we are concerned with here. In the original folk belief of the Germans, fire that could be awakened from nature meant something very special. The St. John's Fire had to be lit by rubbing pieces of wood together. One had the mental image that once such a St. John's Fire had been lit and a plague was approaching, this St. John's Fire had healing powers. All deep folk beliefs are based on the idea of the relationship between fire and what are called human drives and instincts. This was not thought of as a symbol, because the people never devised such symbols. Something else lies at the root of it. This comes to light in the legends of the St. John's Fire and also in Jakob Böhme. What we see today as fire is one thing, and human and animal passions are another. Now they are as far apart as the North and South Poles. Now the folk intuition, like Jakob Böhme, looked back to a time of earliest development. There was something there that was not material fire and not passion, but from which fire on the one hand and passion on the other differentiated themselves. At that time, they had a common basis. Jakob Böhme finds the same spiritual basis in material fire as in human passion. For him, there is a connection between what lies dormant in matter, what can be drawn out of matter, and human passion. There is something in this that is related to the spiritual side of fire.

Sulfur contains fire hidden within it, just as the body contains animal passion. Jakob Böhme thus initially distinguishes between these four: tincture, salt, sulfur, and fire.

Just as the old German folk intuition looked back to a time when there was neither fire nor passion, Jakob Böhme looks back to such a state, to something that, when spiritualized, becomes the fifth archetype of nature, which he calls water. It is water in the sense that we find water in the Bible as an outward sign of the soul. The Spirit of God brooded over the water, over the soul forces slumbering in matter, so that they could be awakened.

The sixth form of nature arises when the inner penetrates the outer, when the inner life becomes so alive that it can be perceived. Jakob Böhme calls this echo or sound. This is any spiritual expression that carries within it the inner being, just as a bell carries the sound of the bell. The echo or sound can also emerge in such a way that it expresses the unified nature of God. Then the seventh power arises, wisdom, the divine power contained in the world. Jakob Böhme sees the whole of nature contained in these seven forms.

The lowest link in human nature has something to do with salty tartness; then it rises higher and higher to wisdom. Furthermore, the forces of nature and human beings are related to the solar system. The kinship of all beings is expressed everywhere. Jakob Böhme also calls the Tinctura everything that flows through all beings like the spiritual lifeblood. It lies between the world thought and all matter. Jakob Böhme mentally imagines the great architect of the world as an artist who has designed the world in a sensual-physical way. He again calls the link between the sensual-physical and the creator of the world the Tinctura. He seeks it out in all individual beings. What makes his writings difficult is that we have to work our way into his mental images. People are usually happy when they have nailed down a few concepts. Jakob Böhme does not create individual abstract concepts that stand side by side like soldiers. He crawls, as it were, into all beings. He sees all beings as related, as interconnected. To understand Jakob Böhme, one must make the mind itself as flexible as nature itself, so that concepts can transform just as things in nature transform. Theosophists also often present narrow concepts. But it is not a matter of having a concept, but of being able to dissolve the concept again immediately. Once you have a concept, you must be able to transform it as things transform. Nothing is more obstructive than abstract, rigidly defined concepts. That is why those who read Jakob Böhme cannot understand him, because they first form fixed concepts; but he pursues the living life of things. Concepts must also change as things themselves change. But then people feel as if they are floating in the air. One has indeed lost one's footing when one wants to understand the world. One must only keep one's center within oneself.

Jakob Böhme's soul painting is a reproduction of nature itself. In the human spirit, Jakob Böhme finds what is related to the tincture, the imagination. Imagination is a power of the soul that stands midway between the power of thought and the power of will. Those who first learn to visualize their concepts and then illustrate them in their minds, so that they are faced not with an abstract image of the plant, but with a plant that is sensually visible, will find that such a vivid concept is imbued with real life from within. Those who can do this have imagination. This can be heightened to such an extent that people become creative and gain influence over what lives in things as tincture.

This is where alchemy begins for Jakob Böhme, which is able to react back on matter, the tincture, and from there also on sensory things. In this way, the imaginative person can become a magician. Because Jakob Böhme understood this, we can call him the greatest magician of modern times. Jakob Böhme calls imagination the great virgin of nature, the virgin wisdom. Now he goes back to the creation of Adam and further up to the original divine imagination. He says that divine imagination formed the original spiritual human being in matter according to its mirror image. He calls this spiritual human being the original Adam. By showing that this spiritual human being has been there from the beginning, he shows how the spiritual human being was already present in the original tinctura, but how a complete spiritual transformation actually took place in the creation of the world. He places this transformation on the fourth day of creation. This original human being, whom he calls the tincture human, did not see with actual eyes, but was clairvoyant within, so that he could clairvoyantly perceive everything that was going on within him. Then selfhood, independence, came to this human being on the fourth day, and the clairvoyant human being became aware of himself and began to see his own essence. Originally, spiritual-divine creation was all around. The primordial human being saw this clairvoyantly. Now he saw himself. That was his fall from God. Now this human being would have become completely hardened, lost in harshness, if something else had not been possible. The human being no longer saw the world clairvoyantly. The moment came when the clairvoyant human being could perceive externally what is divine. The sun, moon, and stars are first and foremost images of the divine, which he had previously seen within himself. Thus, man had fallen away from the divine, but through the senses, the world had become perceptible to him. It is the mental image of sensory perception that transformed man from the old tincture man into the material man. He becomes a material man through his own mental image, taken from the material world, so that man has become a sensual man from within through his own imagination of the sensual.

Jakob Böhme saw a deep kinship in all beings, in animals, plants, and minerals. He said that everything that lives in the world in flesh and blood, in flesh and bone, and so on, is related to something on earth. Jakob Böhme also relates the entire social, artistic, and societal structure to the constellations of the planets. He shows the connection between the planets and human life. All this is so clear to him for those who want to understand him, but so great that a short time cannot understand him.

Another question came into his field of vision, the question of the origin of evil in the world, the question: How does evil come into the world? Is evil contained in the primordial ground of the world? Then the primordial ground is not a good one. — He finds the answer by comparing the original good with light, pure, clear light. There is no darkness in it. But when light appears, becomes perceptible, it appears through objects with shadows. Can we say that darkness is contained in light? Certainly not. Only pure, clear light emanates from the source of light. But the opposite of light emanates from objects. Light confronts us in the world as the origin ... not to be derived from the origin. Just as shadows must be present with light, so evil must also be present within good. We can compare divine harmony with the human soul. It radiates through the organism. The limbs of the human organism are set in motion by the soul. The world harmony of the deity lives out in the soul in such a way that the limbs have independence. Nevertheless, even though the harmony of the soul is fundamental, the limbs can turn against each other. If there is to be freedom in the world, then the limbs must be able to turn against each other. Freedom and the possibility of evil belong together, as do harmony and the possibility of disharmony. It was precisely this idea of Jakob Böhme that inspired Schelling, and in his work we find a wonderful description of what lives in human freedom. Schelling's writing on human freedom is like an offering to Jakob Böhme. Schelling understood something of Jakob Böhme. He also lived on in Goethe and other great minds of the 19th century. It was only when materialism arose that spiritual life became alienated from Jakob Böhme. Then he was understood less and less. A time will come again when people will not only understand him, but will want to learn from him. Then a new era will dawn for what is today called theosophy. There will come a time when such profound spiritual works as the writings of Jakob Böhme and Germanic mythology will be understood again, when they will undergo a new transfiguration. Then it will be possible to bring about a spiritualization of all wisdom, of all human energy. When the age that has its task in the external domination of all natural forces comes to an end, Jakob Böhme will also be understood again. Copernicus, Galileo, and Giordano Bruno also belonged to the same age as Jakob Böhme. They led the world to contemplate the sensory world, the outer world. Jakob Böhme appeared precisely in that age, and his works are like a great summary of all the spiritual achievements of humanity. He presents all this to the world at the dawn of an age that heralds the materialistic epoch. Once the materialistic age has been transcended, Jakob Böhme will be rediscovered, along with everything contained in his works. Everything that the world has brought together in terms of spiritual treasures is contained in his works.

We must not regard what theosophy has achieved so far as something special. The theosophical world movement must be something that is alive, that means life and growth. If it becomes that, if the Theosophical Society represents that, then it will understand how to work in the spirit of the great minds of earlier times, in the spirit of Jakob Böhme, and only then will it work in the true sense of the word theosophical.