Above: from the papers of Elias Ashmole, translation of epistle on the “work of tinctures” by “Jacob Bohmen, a Dutch

alchemist,” superimposed on a photo of mine from Zuni Nation, NM.

“A Perfect Ten” and How to Attain It According to Jacob Boehme: by Russell R. Yoder
The way to access your “Noble Stone” has already been indicated clearly enough in several of
the selections or contributions here on my Academia Page. But I would like to emphasize, as a
Universalist who’s been engaged for most of my adult life in the pragmatic application of
Boehme’s Wisdom-teachings, that despite his reputation of being too “difficult” to understand,
he actually provides in the vast array of his writings a number of very direct paradigms for both
prayer and esoteric practice, which anyone serious about “trying them on for size” will surely
discover afford a “snug-enough” fit. As he plainly states in Chapter 9 of Threefold Life of Man:
“he that rightly understandeth our writings concerning the center of nature, may well find it:
it is not difficult; if he learn but the right entrance, he hath the end at hand!”
My own “entrance” has always been found just one chapter further on from this (Chapter 10 of
the same work). The Number X denoting it is a symbolic compaction of the whole; taking us to
the Cross-point of cardio-pulminary awareness, as the very place where we are able to “fix” the
filament of our own life-flame. Called the “Electrum Magicum” in a later commentarial work
(Metallurgia Boehmiana), it actually does most closely resemble the tungsten-filament of a
classic light bulb, although wholly crystalline in nature, and apprehensible for those of us familiar
with Eastern modalities, as a palpable ens of the Clear-Light.
“Laying hold on it” by sustaining it as the conscious axis of our prolonged deep state breathing,
we naturally and spiritually “intensify and multiply” this lustrous Stone of glowing ambience,
from the center of our heart: “10” becoming “100” at each rotation of the cross, and “1000”
through all of the physical and subtle properties or planets of our lunar being (this is, of course,
also alchemical projection onto the “metals”): “Luna (body) hath Sol, but not the heart.
Therefore the spirit of the heart must be added to it, and then all the planets resort to it….Its
splendor and light stand in the power of the Majesty; its body is out of the eternal Substantiality:
its number upon the cross is a hundred, and in the Majesty a thousand.”
A final point, so often missed in exegesis of Boehme, is that “Dubble Mercurie” alluded to in the
excerpt of the Ashmolean letter translated above. Regarding this, I would especially refer the
reader to my “Primordial White Lions and Gold (Enlarged Version)” on this Page, as well as my
“Alchemy for the Behmenist Adept” in an earlier publication (“Three Treatises of Art”). When
the four-elemental properties or planets are absorbed in transmuted Luna, a second “sun” is
projected upward from our heart-orb, as a perfect reflection or mirror-image of gleaming white
and yellow Majesty.