Jakob Böhme

Jakob Böhme (also spelled Jacob Boehme or Behmen) was born in April (probably the 24th), 1575 and died in November 17, 1624. He was a German Christian mystic and theosopher. His first book, commonly known as Aurora, caused a great scandal.

H. P. Blavatsky wrote that he was "the nursling of the genii (Nirmânakâyas) who watched over and guided him". In her Theosophical Glossary, she added:

Boehme (Jacob). A great mystic philosopher, one of the most prominent Theosophists of the mediaeval ages. He was born about 1575 at Old Seidenburg, some two miles from Görlitz (Silesia), and died in 1624, at nearly fifty years of age. In his boyhood he was a common shepherd, and, after learning to read and write in a village school, became an apprentice to a poor shoemaker at Görlitz. He was a natural clairvoyant of most wonderful powers. With no education or acquaintance with science he wrote works which are now proved to be full of scientific truths; but then, as he says himself, what he wrote upon, he “saw it as in a great Deep in the Eternal”. He had “a thorough view of the universe, as in a chaos”, which yet “opened itself in him, from time to time, as in a young plant”. He was a thorough born Mystic, and evidently of a constitution which is most rare; one of those fine natures whose material envelope impedes in no way the direct, even if only occasional, intercommunion between the intellectual and the spiritual Ego. It is this Ego which Jacob Boehme, like so many other untrained mystics, mistook for God; “Man must acknowledge,” he writes, “that his knowledge is not his own, but from God, who manifests the Ideas of Wisdom to the Soul of Man, in what measure he pleases.” Had this great Theosophist mastered Eastern Occultism he might have expressed it otherwise. He would have known then that the “god” who spoke through his poor uncultured and untrained brain, was his own divine Ego, the omniscient Deity within himself, and that what that Deity gave out was not in “what measure he pleased,” but in the measure of the capacities of the mortal and temporary dwelling IT informed.

Additional Resources

Articles

• Jacob Boehme at Theosopedia
• Jacob Boehme and the Secret Doctrine by William Q. Judge
• The Life of a Christian Philosopher by Franz Hartmann
• Within, Not Without by Grace F. Knoche
• Jacob Boehme at WisdomWorld.org
• Jacob Boehme Online
• Hall, Manly P. "Mystical Figures of Jakob Boehme, The." Collected Writings of Manly P. Hall Volume 2: Sages and Seers (Los Angeles: Philosophical Research Society, Inc., 1959), 128-187.