Aurora

by Jakob Böhme

JACOB BOEHME (1575-1624) was the son of peasant farmers, a shoemaker by trade, and had only a rudimentary education. One morning, watching the sunlight play on a pewter bowl, he experienced an extraordinary spiritual illumination, and started writing books. Amazing books. Scholars at the great German Universities were astounded that an unlearned craftsman could produce works like The Three Principles of the Divine Essence and The Threefold Life of Man. But Jacob Boehme explains: I never desired to know anything of the Divine Mystery, much less understood I the way how to seek or find it. I sought only after the heart of Jesus Christ... In this my earnest Christian seeking and desire, the gate was opened unto me, so that in one quarter of an hour I saw and knew more than if I had been many years together at an University... For I saw and knew the Being of all Beings, the Byss and Abyss; also the eternal generation of the Holy Trinity; the descent, and origin of this world, and of all creatures, through the divine Wisdom; I knew and saw in myself all the three Worlds; namely, the Divine, Angelical, and Paradisical World and then the Dark World, the original of the Nature to the Fire; and then thirdly, the external, visible World, being a Procreation, or External Birth, from the two internal and spiritual Worlds; and I saw, and knew the whole working Essence in the evil, and in the good; and the mutual origin, and existence of each of them; and likewise how the fruitful bearing Womb of Eternity brought forth... And presently it came powerfully into my mind to set the same down in writing... Thus now I have written, not from the instruction or knowledge received from men, not from the learning or reading of books; but I have written out of my own book which was opened in me, being the noble similitude of God, the book of the noble and precious image (understand God's own similitude or likeness) was bestowed upon me to read; and therein I have studied, as a child in the house of its mother, which beholdeth what the father doth, and in his child-like play doth imitate his father; I have no need of any other book.

Genres: Philosophy, Religion, Mysticism, Spirituality, Occult, Christianity, Esoterica

311 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1612

About the author

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.

Reviews

[Patrick\ · Rating 3 out of 5]

I give it three as it is important to the records we have on the mystical experience. Jacob was an angry, firey spirit, and should probably not have stared into that plate.

[Steve · Rating 3 out of 5]

if anything, a testament to the true "insight" of properly channeled schizophrenia.

[Humilis Memoriam · Rating 5 out of 5]

A cobbler in Görlitz, 1612. No university education. A vision that convinced him he was seeing the signature of all things — a direct perception of how reality was structured from within. And then he sat down and wrote what he saw, in language that was either visionary or deranged depending on what you brought to it.

I came to Boehme through a note about his influence on Schelling, Hegel, and Blake, expecting something roughly comprehensible. Aurora is not roughly comprehensible on a first reading. It requires that you suspend the expectation of systematic argument and allow yourself to track something more like a sustained metaphor that keeps deepening as you follow it.

The Ungrund — the groundless ground — is the concept I find most useful. Prior to any divine self-manifestation, prior to any division between being and non-being, there is this: pure potentiality that is identical with freedom, that "precedes" creation not temporally but ontologically. Darkness is not evil. Light is not its opposite. Both are phases of a single self-disclosure — the Ungrund expressing itself through the play of contraction and expansion, will and counter-will, depth and height.

What strikes me, having read Eckhart's Grunt (the groundless ground beneath all names), is that Boehme is taking that concept from the Rhineland mystic and transforming it into something more dynamic — a process, not just a ground. The Ungrund becomes the engine of creation. Reading them alongside each other, across three centuries, you see a tradition developing, modifying, deepening. Someone was paying attention.

This text is Book 22 in The Mysterious Thread curriculum. The complete architecture can be found via The Collective Press.

[Bookvoyid Zyma · Rating 5 out of 5]

Где грань между мистицизмом и философией? Как личные личные переживания отделить от божественного проведения? Не стоит ждать ответа от Якоба! Только поэзия, добротная поэзия духа!

[Bruce Macdonald · Rating 5 out of 5]

I must read if you want to understand the flowering of the Protestant movement in Europe.

[Lieutenant · Rating 2 out of 5]

Jacob Boehme, the Aurora, this was his first written work and the one that marveled everyone. Also was the first book of his that I read completely.