WILLIAM BLAKE & JACOB

BOEHME: HEAVEN, HELL & HERE

- THE LIFE OF THE THREE
PRINCIPLES
By Kevin Fischer

This essay is based on a paper presented at the conference ‘Jacob Boehme and
Continental Spiritualism in Britain,’ Coventry, 23.-25. May 2019

Kevin Fischer
kevinfischer100@gmail.com
 1

Abstract
Jacob Boehme repeatedly stresses that we must elevate our minds ‘in the spirit’ if we want to
understand the spirit that animates his work. William Blake was profoundly engaged with this
understanding, similarly distinguishing between lower and higher forms of mind, and which
he found embodied in Boehme’s three principles. This paper looks at how Blake’s reception
of Boehme was very much in this inspired, elevated sense. For both visionaries the dark
world of the first principle and the light world of the second are of necessity separate; the first
of itself shut off, self-enclosed, the second free and sacred. Perception is key. Blake found in
Boehme a creative, dynamic representation of how the mind can look – or move – into the
lower, dark world or the higher, light world – that what it sees it makes – and how the mind
shrinks or expands accordingly. At the same time it is vitally important that these principles
are interrelated and interdependent, existing within one another in an indissoluble ‘band,’ one
that is animated by a potent energy and which, transforming the lower into the higher, brings
about the marriage of darkness and light, of heaven and hell. Contrariety is essential to life.
This understanding marks out Boehme and Blake as particularly kindred spirits. For both, the
place where this dynamic, ongoing drama takes place is within the individual and in this
world. The world of the third principle is thus particularly vital in the work of both, a form of
mercy. Here again the fact that the principles are at once distinct and interdependent
highlights the sublime paradox that Blake found in Boehme’s vision. Although separate from
the created world, eternity works through time, paradise in the earth, and God through the
individual. The divine is and is not in the world. This paper shows that for Boehme and Blake
these are not abstract intellectual notions, but living realities; and as such that any study of
their work must likewise elevate itself ‘in the spirit,’ with the light of the second principle,
the higher mind, in and for which ‘The true heaven is everywhere, even in that very place
where thou standest.’ (Aur19:26)

William Blake & Jacob Boehme: Heaven, Hell & Here – the Life of the Three Principles
 2

William Blake, & Jacob Boehme: Heaven, Hell & Here - the Life of the Three
Principles – Kevin Fischer
This paper looks at Boehme’s three principles, and at how they come alive in the work of
William Blake. It focuses on the relationship between the principles, how they are separate,
within each other, and interdependent; and with this it looks at the interrelationship and
ultimate unity of the finite and eternal, the natural and the spiritual, the human and the divine.
In the process, the finite and eternal, the natural and spiritual, and the human and divine are
seen afresh.
Blake names Boehme twice in his writings1. In The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, he
states that anyone of sufficient talents ‘may from the writings of Paracelsus or Jacob Behmen,
produce ten thousand volumes of equal value with Swedenborg’s’ (MHH pl. 22 E43). In
1800, when Blake was forty three, he wrote to his friend John Flaxman, evoking those who
had figured significantly in his life:
Now my lot in the Heavens is this; Milton lovd me in childhood and shewd me his face
Ezra came with Isaiah the Prophet, but Shakespeare in riper years gave me his hand
Paracelsus and Behmen appeard to me.2
(Letters E707-8)
There is also evidence that Blake owned books by Boehme. After Blake’s death, Frederick
Tatham wrote to the book dealer Frances Harvey, ‘I have possessed books well thumbed and
dirted by his graving hands,’ including ‘a large collection of works by the mystical writers,
Jacob Behmen, Swedenborg, and others.’3 The four volumes of the ‘Law Edition’ of Boehme
were published between 1764 and 1781. As this edition is the only one to include the designs
devised by Dionysius Andreas Freher, it can quite safely be argued that Blake read and
possibly owned this version, although, as Tatham’s letter would seem to imply, he might also
have possessed other books by and about Boehme. As Henry Crabb Robinson records: ‘Blake
praised… the figures in Law’s translation as being very beautiful. Michael Angelo could not
have done better.’4 In 1825, in the poet’s last few years, Blake paid tribute to Boehme, as
Crabb Robinson records: ‘Jacob Boehme was spoken of as a divinely inspired man.’5 This is
vital, as for Boehme and Blake the divine is the ultimate source of their work, that which
gives it life, and its ultimate goal. At the same time, their understanding of the divine, of God,
is very far from conventional. The way that God is usually conceived; what we think of when
someone speaks of God; the God the Atheist objects to; these are profoundly different from
the God, the divine, the spiritual that Boehme and Blake understand. Theirs cannot be held
with any such thoughts. It can be seen that this is the great unmapped territory, that Blake
found in Boehme someone who had been there before him, and who, as with his vision of the
three principles, could be a source of guidance, insight, support and inspiration.
Throughout his writings Boehme stresses that he ‘may happen not to be understood clearly
enough by the desirous Reader,’ and that he ‘shall be as one that is altogether dumb to the
unenlightened’ (TP 5:1)6. He repeatedly states that even the most diligent reader may at times
misconceive him, for ‘in this World there is no true Understanding, either in the Stars, or in
the Elements; and also in all its Creature’ (TP 5:12). Boehme, like Blake after him,
understood that reason of itself could not penetrate the living, fecund mystery of the divine.
He wrote of his own work that ‘a Man’s own Reason, without the light of God, cannot come
into the Ground [of them,] it is impossible; let his Wit be ever so high and subtle, it
apprehendeth but as it were the Shadow of it in a Glass’ (Clavis 2). He also writes that

William Blake & Jacob Boehme: Heaven, Hell & Here – the Life of the Three Principles
 3

without this ‘light,’ ‘if the spirit were withdrawn from me, then I could neither know nor
understand my own writings’ (Aur 3:112). I could neither know nor understand my own
writings. This is key. Boehme thus distinguished between a lower form of understanding that
is bound to the ‘natural life, whose ground lies in a temporal beginning and end,’ and a
higher, living, imaginative knowledge that is able to ‘enter into the… ground wherein God is
understood’ (SP ‘Theoscopia’ 1:2). This distinction also appears in Blake in ‘the mighty
difference’ he discerned between a mental process that is limited to ‘the Vanities of Time and
Space,’ seeing only itself in the shadowy ‘Vegetable Glass of Nature,’ and the ‘Eternal…
worlds of Vision’ revealed in the creative knowledge of ‘Spiritual Mystery’ (VLJ E555).
Boehme repeatedly stresses that if we want to understand the spirit, the life that animates his
work, we ‘must elevate’ our minds ‘in the spirit.’ (Aur 8:43). Blake was profoundly engaged
with this understanding, and his reception of Boehme would have been very much in this
inspired, elevated sense.
The three principles – the dark fire-world of the first principle, the light fire-world of the
second principle, and the created outward world of the third – spring from and lead the way
back to Boehme’s profound, unconventional apprehension of the divine. They are a creation
of and give life to the higher understanding, the higher spiritual mind that is necessary to this
apprehension. Rooted in the mind, they reflect and bring to life the immense and all too often
unrealised capacities within us. Boehme wrote: ‘In Man lyes all whatsoever the Sun shines
upon, or Heaven contains, as also Hell and all the Deeps; he is an inexhaustible Fountain, that
cannot be drawn dry’ (EOG 13:79). Blake was in agreement: ‘I always thought that the
Human Mind was the most Prolific of All Things and Inexhaustible’ (Ann.Ren. E656).
The first and second principles are eternal, not fixed and finished, but present and active in
every moment, and continually proposing new possibilities. Blake’s inheritance represents a
new exploration and creation of these possibilities. The first two principles are, as Boehme
saw, ‘mutually in one another as one being’ (Ep 6:18). The ‘one holds the other hidden or
closed up in it’ (SR 2:29). In the same eternal moment, driven by the desire for manifestation,
the sharp will of the first principle and the free will of the second principle ‘dash together…
and as they enter into and feel each other a great flagrat is made, like a flash of lightning’
(MM 3:25-26) and they separate into ‘joy and sorrow, light and darkness’ (SR 12:17). Hell is
in the first principle, Heaven in the second. The first principle in itself is unconscious,
insubstantial, a source of wrathfulness and anger; and the second is a world of liberty and
loving mercy and compassion. Where the second is outgoing, generous and giving, an
affirmative will, the first is Nay-saying, a ‘Self-Will’ (EOG 9:37) that ‘draweth into itself
(MM 3:15), ‘and closeth up itself as a death’ (MM 3:26). It is, as Boehme states, ‘self-
overshadowing: and it maketh… the great darkness of the abyss’ (MM 3:9). Blake dramatizes
these movements a number of times in his works. They can be seen in the self-contemplating
shadow of the ‘solitary’ figure Urizen, who similarly draws into himself, ‘into a deep world
within:/ …wild dark and deep,/ …Where nothing was’ BU 3:21 E71; 4:15-17 E72): ‘Lo, a
shadow of horror is risen/ In Eternity! Unknown, unprolific!/ Self-closd, all-repelling’ (BU
3:1-3 E70).
The fire that arises with this separation is, as Boehme writes, ‘a two-fold fire’ (MM 4:8).
Blake places the character Los, his avatar, in the midst of this: ‘Wide apart stood the fires:
Los remain’d/ In the void between fire and fire’ (BL 3:43-44 E91). As will be seen, this
division is vital. The point of separation is, in Boehme’s words, ‘the dividing Mark or bound’
(Clavis 126): ‘the Deep of the Darkness is as great as the Habitation of the Light; and they
stand not one distant from the other, but together in one another’ (TP 14:76). They are

William Blake & Jacob Boehme: Heaven, Hell & Here – the Life of the Three Principles
 4

however separated by a ‘limit’ or ‘bar’ and the maintenance of this is an act of mercy. Los
declares
We were placed here by the Universal Brotherhood and Mercy
With Powers fitted to circumscribe this dark Satanic death
(Milton 23:50-51 E119)
Perception is key. This point between light and darkness, Heaven and Hell, is one of
transition and transformation, a centre through which the mind, divine and human, can look –
or move – ascending or descending. In Boehme’s visionary scheme, the angels are able to
look into the first and second principle. What they ‘will and desire is by their imagination
brought into shape and form’ (EOG 4:25; TQ 6:10). Blake suggests this condition in the lines
Earth was not: nor globes of attraction
The will of the immortal expanded
Or contracted his all flexible senses.
Death was not, but eternal life sprung.
(BU 3:36-39 E71)
The point of transition can be seen in the poem Milton:
Seest thou the little winged fly, smaller than a grain of sand?
It has a heart like thee; a brain open to heaven and hell,
Withinside wondrous and expansive
(20:27-29 E114)
Blake thus urges, ‘O search and see: turn your eyes inward: open O thou World/ Of Love and
Harmony in Man: expand thy ever lovely Gates’ (Jer 39:41-41 E187).
Positioned between the principles, the mind has a creative role in what it sees. Blake
understood this: ‘If Perceptive Organs vary, Objects of Perception seem to vary:/ If the
Perceptive Organs close: their Objects seem to close also’ (Jer 30:55-56 E177). ‘As a Man Is
So He Sees’ (Letters E702). At the same time, the perceiving mind can be shaped by what it
encounters, as is marked by a phrase that appears repeatedly in Blake: ‘he became what he
beheld/ He became what he was doing he was himself tranformd’ (FZ 4:86-87 E338). In
Jerusalem he writes of those in eternity who look into the enclosed world of the first
principle:
those in Great Eternity who contemplate on Death
Said thus. What seems to Be: Is: To those to whom
It seems to Be, and is productive of the most dreadful
Consequences to those to whom it seems to Be: even of
Torments, Despair, Eternal Death
(32:50-54 E179)

William Blake & Jacob Boehme: Heaven, Hell & Here – the Life of the Three Principles
 5

This echoes the fate of Boehme’s Lucifer. Rather than casting his imagination into the light,
he cast it back into himself (MM 9:7; TP 5:25). His fall is one of ‘pride and self-will’ (MM
5:8), and through it he ‘lost the light of the Heart of God’ (TLM 2:68; SR 7:16). That is, when
he turned away from the light ‘the properties of enmity instantly arose in him, for in the light
they could not be manifest; but when the light extinguished they were manifest, and he
became a devil’ (MM 17:28). At the opening of the second Night of The Four Zoas, Albion
similarly rises ‘upon his Couch of Death…/ Turning his Eyes outward to Self, losing the
Divine Vision’ (2:1-2 E313). Where Boehme’s Lucifer ‘wished with the No to rule over the
Yes’ (TQ 7:6), meaning to be ‘a very potent terrible Lord’ (TP 4:68), Blake’s Satan appears
in Milton ‘making to himself Laws from his own identity,’ compelling ‘others to serve him…
setting himself above all that is called God’ 11:10-12 E104). The first principle gives shape to
‘the Great Selfhood/ Satan: Worshipd as God by the Mighty Ones of the Earth’ (Jer 29:17-18
E175).
An essential part of the potency of Boehme’s principles lies in that the ‘one holds the
other hidden or closed up in it’ (SR 2:29) and yet each stands ‘in its order, in its own
principle’ (ToI I. 1:34); and in particular because this is not an abstract theoretical construct
or fancy, but based in living, embodied experience. Though perhaps outwardly fantastical –
and this is only outward appearance, not of the sublime spiritual core from which it springs –
it was an ongoing and everyday reality for Boehme and for Blake. Boehme saw it in the
limitations of Lucifer’s imagination. While his is a will that is ‘continually aspiring to…
destroy the Heart of God’ he ‘could never at all be able to reach it,’
‘For he is always shut up in the first Principle (as in the eternal Death,) and yet
he raises himself up continually, thinking to reach the Heart of God, and to
domineer over it… but he attains nothing…. The more he climbs up in his
Will, the greater is his Fall. (TP 4:70-71)
Although ‘the Devil should go many Millions of Miles, desiring to enter into Heaven, and to
see it, yet he would still be in Hell, and not see it’ (MM 8:28). Boehme also wrote, where
God’s ‘Love is hid in any Thing there his Anger is manifest’ (MM 8:24). Whatever ‘is a
desiring love in the light – that, in the darkness, is an enmity’ (MM 5:6). In relation to the
second principle, the first is ‘as a great fear before the light’ (MM 3:26), for if ‘a good thing is
brought within it… this will become its pain and death’ (WC ‘On True Repentance’ 2:6
[Erb]). Blake brought this to life in his own way. When Satan attempts to approach Albion in
the poem Milton, he stands
trembling round his Body, he incircled it
He trembled with exceeding great trembling and astonishment
Howling… round his Body hungring to devour
Bur fearing for the pain for if he touches a Vital
His torment is unendurable: therefore he cannot devour.
(39:16-20 E140)
In this way, the pain of the first principle arises out of that which it is not. In Boehme, the
‘holy power in the light of God’ has ‘concealed itself’ from Lucifer, and he is ‘as wood that is
burnt to a coal, which only glows, and has no more any true light in it’ (EOG 4:46 [JRE]; SR
7:10). In Blake, the separation or closing off of the dark principle from the light is marked by
William Blake & Jacob Boehme: Heaven, Hell & Here – the Life of the Three Principles
 6

a phrase that appears with some frequency in his work: ‘no light from the fires all was
Darkness’ (BL 4:1-2 E91).
As known from the perspective of the second principle, ‘the Light has shone from Eternity
in the Darkness, and the Darkness has not comprehended it’ (Clavis 52). Again, perception is
central. What is seen is dependent on the beholder and on the ‘limit,’ the ‘bar’ that separates
the light and dark worlds. Blake depicts this in Jerusalem:
There is a Grain of Sand in Lambeth that Satan cannot find
Nor can his Watch Fiends find it: tis translucent and has many Angles
But he who finds it will find Oothoons palace, for within
Opening into Beulah every angle is a lovely heaven
But should the Watch fiends find it, they would call it Sin
And lay its Heavens and their inhabitants in blood of punishment.
(Jer 37:15-20 E183)
In The Four Zoas, while Blake’s character Orc is bound down in chains, as in the first
principle, he is nonetheless open to the life and light that is hidden from the darkness. Limited
in imagination, and thus seeing only the ‘woful place’ of ‘fierce fires’ and ‘bitter anguish,’
Urizen is amazed at Orc:
Yet thou dost laugh at all these tortures and this horrible place…
With visions of sweet bliss far other than this burning clime
Sure thou art bathd in rivers of delight on verdant fields
Walking in joy in bright Expanses sleeping on bright clouds
With visions of delight so lovely
(7:44-45, 59-65 E353-54)
Urizen is thus depicted in ‘the dark deep,’
seeking for delight…
Seeking the Eternal which is always present to the wise
Seeking for pleasure which unsought falls around the
infant’s path.
(FZ 9:170-72 E390)
When Orc arises in America he declares that he will ‘renew the fiery joy,’
For every thing that lives is holy, life delights in life;
Because the soul of sweet delight can never be defil’d.
Fires inwrap the earthly globe, yet man is not consum’d;
Amidst the lustful fires he walks. (8:3, 13-16 E54)

William Blake & Jacob Boehme: Heaven, Hell & Here – the Life of the Three Principles
 7

The life that lives in the second principle ‘can never be defil’d.’ Though largely hidden it is
eternally present, guarded by the ‘limit’ or ‘bar’ that separates the first and second principles.
At the same time, there is a profound, dynamic paradox at work in Boehme’s writings, and
in Blake’s after him; one that in many respects can be seen to be particular to the two of
them. While the first and second principles are separate, the one hidden and closed up in the
other, they are, as Boehme writes in Mysterium Magnum, ‘mutually bound to each other, and
the one were a Nothing without the other’ (8:26). The dark and light worlds are interrelated
and, vitally, interdependent, bound in ‘an unbeginning and indissoluble Band,’ in which ‘the
one always generates the other’ (TP 14:62). In which the one always generates the other. As
Boehme notes, ‘the gentleness’ of the second principle ‘gives and the fire’ of the first ‘takes.’
‘It gives a substance that is like itself… and the fire swallows this up, but out of it produces
light, which receives its life and sensibility from the fire’ (SP ‘Six Theosophic Points’ 2:34).
The light in turn is also ‘a food for the fire, whence the fire draweth essence for its
sustenance, wherein it burneth’ (MM 6:20). Blake speaks in A Vision of the Last Judgment of
the ‘Eternal Fire… which is an Eternal Consummation’ (E558), and in The Marriage of
Heaven and Hell of the ‘Prolific,’ which ‘would cease to be Prolific unless the Devourer as a
sea received the excess of his delights’ (pl.16 E40). Contrariety lies at the heart of Blake’s
and Boehme’s work. For the sake of essence and life, there must be darkness as well as light,
as Boehme saw:
The reader is to know that in Yes and No consist all things, be they
divine, diabolic, terrestrial, or however they may be named… The No
is a counterstroke of the Yes or the truth, in order that the truth may be
manifest and a something. (TQ 3:2)
This lies at the core of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell: ‘Without Contraries is no
progression. Attraction and Repulsion, Reason and Energy, Love and Hate, are necessary to
Human existence.’ (pl.3 E34). The principles must stand in opposition, for ‘Nothing without
contrariety can become manifest to itself’ (SP ‘Theoscopia’ 1:8). Consciousness, awareness,
perception, and all their possibilities, are dependent on contrariety. The process may be
painful, but
in Nature there is one Thing always set opposite to another, the one to be
the Enemy to the other.
Yet not to that End to be at Enmity one against another, but that in the
Strife one should stir up the other, and manifest it… and be an Exulting
and Joyfulness in the eternal ONE. (EOG 2:69-70)
As Blake wrote,
Joy and Woe are woven fine
A Clothing for the soul divine
Under every grief and pine
Runs a joy with silken twine
(AoI ll.59-62 E491)

William Blake & Jacob Boehme: Heaven, Hell & Here – the Life of the Three Principles
 8

An immensely potent, distinctive energy thus animates Boehme’s and Blake’s vision of
contraries, an energy that is drawn in no small part from and gives voice to the dark world of
the first principle, and one that as such is profoundly necessary. Boehme writes, ‘all Prophets
speak for the Turba’ (FQ 38:3), which is
The aroused and awakened ferocity of the inner ground, where the
hellish foundation is manifest… It is also the awakened ferocity of
outward nature, as may be seen in the downpour of violent storms,
where fire is manifest in water. It is a pouring out of the anger of God.
(The Key 133)
Such an insight into man’s ‘inner ground’ cannot be seen in literal terms of the outward
‘Corporeal… Eye’ (VLJ E566), as Blake appreciated: ‘The roaring of lions, the howling of
wolves, the raging of the stormy sea, and the destructive sword, are portions of eternity too
great for the eye of man’ (MHH 8:27 E36). The first principle is a potent unconscious force
that lies behind man’s activities:
Men understand not the distress and the labour and sorrow
That in the Interior Worlds is carried on in fear and trembling.
(Jer 59:50-51 E209)
Boehme and Blake sought a way of living, a vision through which the destructive ‘portion’ of
man’s being might be ‘married’ to the creative; one that liberates rather than confines the
necessary energies of life. The three principles are such a vision. A notable characteristic of
both visionaries is the understanding that ‘Energy is Eternal Delight’ (MHH pl.4 E34), and
that the ‘ferocity of the inner ground’ can be imaginatively embraced, as Blake discovered: ‘I
was walking among the fires of hell, delighted with the enjoyments of Genius; which to
Angels look like torment or insanity’ (MHH pl.6 E35).
Everything must therefore pass through the fire. Fire purifies. Here again the ‘unbeginning
and indissoluble Band’ of giving and taking, feeding and consuming, is at work. The free will
of the second principle must pass into and through the darkness and ‘Compaction’ (EOG
9:41) of the first, ‘So that the light might be made known and manifest’ (SR 14:23). Boehme
speaks of this in terms of Christ:
Like as a candle dies in the fire, and out of that death the light and
power proceed… so out of Christ’s dying and death the eternal divine
sun should and must arise in the human property… and the image of
love must also resign and give itself in unto the wrath of death, that so
all might fall down into death, and arise in God’s will and mercy through
death
(SR 11:48)
This movement is played out repeatedly in Blake’s work, not least in the epics. At the
opening of Jerusalem, Blake writes ‘Of the Sleep of Ulro! And of the passage through/
Eternal Death! And of the awaking to Eternal Life’ (4:1-2 E146). There must be Eternal

William Blake & Jacob Boehme: Heaven, Hell & Here – the Life of the Three Principles
 9

Death – a phrase Blake possibly inherited from Boehme – as well as Eternal Life. The
‘Man… seen in the Furnaces’ in Jerusalem understands this: ‘Albion goes to Eternal Death:
In me all Eternity./ must pass thro’ condemnation, and awake beyond the Grave!’ (31:9-10
E177). The goal of the principles is the manifestation of the light of Christ. The crucifixion is
the birth of this Light through death, as Jesus tells Albion: ‘Fear not Albion unless I die thou
canst not live/ But if I die I shall arise again and thou with me’ (Jer 96:14-15 E255). In this
way, the light of the second principle becomes the allaying or mitigating, the transformation
of the No by the Yes; but can only be so because the first principle underpins the second. As
Boehme’s Christ declares:
O death, I am to thee a death; Hell! I am to thee a conqueror; thou must
serve me for the kingdom of joy: Thou shall be my servant and minister
to the kingdom of joy: thou shalt enkindle the flames of love with thy
wrath, and be a cause of spring in paradise.
(SR 11:72)
This is the marriage of Heaven and Hell. It is not surprising that Blake acknowledges
Boehme in The Marriage. Boehme understood that ‘the Will which is in Hell, and the Will
which is manifested in Heaven, both of them, in the inward Ground, without and beyond the
Manifestation, are one Thing’ (EOG 8:285). Blake’s ‘Heaven and Hell are born together’
(Ann. DLDW E609) as are Boehme’s, which are ‘verily in one another, as Day and Night: and
Hell is a Ground for Heaven’ (EOG 8:286): for the Flame of Anger is the Manifestation of
the great Love, and in the darkness the Light is made known’ (MM 8:27). Following this,
Blake saw that ‘under every Good is a hell i.e. hell is the outward or external of heaven’
(Ann. HH E602). Urizen tells Luvah, ‘thou didst keep… the living gate of heaven/ But now
thou art bound down… even to the gates of hell…… / When Thought is closd in Caves. Then
shall love shew its root in deepest Hell’ (FZ 5:232-33, 241 E344). However, with the advent
of Christ, who breaks ‘thro’ the Central Zones of Death and Hell,’ the ‘gates of hell’ are
transformed and ‘Hell is opend to Heaven….’ (Jer 75:21 E231; 77:34-35 E233). In an
inscription to The Marriage, Blake thus wrote, ‘Death and Hell/ Team with Life’ (Inscrip.
E673). For him, ‘God is within and without! He is even in the depths of Hell!’ (Jer. 12:15
E155).
The place where this dynamic, ongoing drama happens is in the individual and in the
world. The created, outward world of the third principle, this world, is thus vitally important
for both Boehme and Blake; more so than for many other mystics. When Boehme’s Lucifer
entered with his imagination into the first principle and self, and fell, there first arose ‘hard
Matter… whereupon followed the gathering of the Earth…. And the creating of the third
Principle’ (TP 5:7). When Adam falls, it is similarly through imagination and self. While ‘yet
in Paradise,’ he ‘brought his imagination into the earth’ (MM 17:39), ‘broke himself off from
God’ (TP 17:54), and the ‘heavenly part of man’ (MM 20:26) and the ‘divine light’ (SR 7:19)
disappear to him. He loses his ‘clear pure steady eyes and sight, which was from the divine
essence’ (MM 18:33); that is, ‘it remained in man, but it was as ‘twere a nothing to man… for
it stood hidden in God’ (MM 20:28). Cut off from the higher possibilities of the second
principle – those very higher faculties, the higher mind, that Boehme and Blake would
awaken us to – perception and understanding, and so that which is perceived, shrink. As
Blake writes in Jeruslaem, ‘The Visions of Eternity, by reason of narrowd perceptions,/ Are
become weak visions of Time and Space, fixd into furrows of death’ (Jer 49:21-22 E198). He
also describes this loss in the poem Europe:

William Blake & Jacob Boehme: Heaven, Hell & Here – the Life of the Three Principles
 10

when the five senses whelm’d

In deluge o’er the earth-born man; then turn’d the fluxile eyes
Into two stationary orbs’ concentrating all things.
The ever-varying spiral ascents to the heavens of heavens
Were bended downward; and the nostrils golden gates shut
Turn’d outward, barrd and petrify’d against the infinite.
(10:10-15 E63)
However, here again the profound interrelationship of the principles comes into play. As
Boehme writes, ‘there is a separation made in the creation of the world’ (SR 4:16). The third
principle is ‘created out of both inward properties’ (SR 3:31), out of Love and Wrath, Light
and Darkness. While the devil ‘would domineer in and above the whole creation,’ as he is
shut up and captive in the first principle he can only reach part of the third. (SR 3:31). As
seen, Blake’s Satan is also ‘shut up’ in his own dark, fallen world. Blake depicts him in
Jerusalem as the angry ‘God in the dreary Void’ who ‘Dwells from Eternity, wide separated
from the Human Soul’ (23:29 E168). Accordingly, ‘no mortal man can find the mill/ Of
Satan in his mortal pilgrimage of seventy years/ For Human beauty knows it not’ (Milton
35:4-6 E181). The ‘separation made in the creation’ of the third principle is thus merciful. As
Boehme saw, the third principle does not ‘stand… in such a wrathful source… the Light out
of the second Principle… doth enlighten’ and ‘tempereth’ it (TLM 2:47). The ‘third Principle
is the second’s proper own, not’ ultimately ‘separate, but one essence in it’ (TP 5:15). The
third principle stands a limit to man’s fall: ‘Adam might have been a Devil; but the outward
Looking-Glass’ of the world ‘hindered that’ (FQ 16:13). Blake similarly states that
Jesus who is the Divine Vision
Permitted all lest Man should fall into Eternal Death
…………………………………………………………..
Thus were the stars of heaven created like as golden chain
To bind the Body of Man to heaven from falling into the Abyss
(FZ 2:260-67 E321-22)
Whatever ‘is visible to the Generated Man,/ Is a Creation of mercy and love, from the Satanic
Void’ (Jer 13:44-45 E157).
This points again to the necessity of contrariety. The spiritual needs the material, and the
material the spiritual, to the point where they become as one. As Boehme puts it, ‘the
spiritual substance must needs bring itself into a material ground, where it may so figure and
form itself’ (Clavis 167), for ‘Every Spirit without a body is empty, and knows not itself’ (FQ
4:1). Again, ‘Nothing without contrariety can become manifest to itself.’ Likewise, ‘If the
natural life had no contrariety and were without a limit, it would never inquire after the
ground from which it arose; and hence the hidden God would remain unknown to the natural
life’ (SP ‘Theoscopia’ 1:8-9). Contrariety and distinction are necessary to the manifestation
of eternal unity.
As can be seen in this, there is a sublime interrelationship between the finite and the
eternal, one that is again dynamic and paradoxical. Boehme speaks of this in two passages in

William Blake & Jacob Boehme: Heaven, Hell & Here – the Life of the Three Principles
 11

The Treatise of the Incarnation: ‘God dwells not in the Outward Principle, but in the Inward;
he dwells indeed in the Place of this world, but this world apprehendeth him not’ (I. 2:43)
‘Paradise springs no more through the Earth, for it is become a Mystery, and yet it is
continually there… It is in this World, and yet it is out of this World’ (I. 6:84, 86). At the
same time, because the third principle ‘is the second’s proper own,’ and ultimately ‘not
separate but one Essence in it,’ the two remain in a potentially powerful relationship, that can
be seen as one of interdependence. Boehme saw that ‘the powers of eternity do work through
the powers of time’ (MM 12:29), and Blake that ‘Time is the mercy of Eternity’ (Milton
24:72 E121), and that ‘Eternity is in love with the productions of time’ (MHH 7:10 E36).
Once more, this is not an intellectual notion or conceit, but direct living experience, and all
the more potent for needing nothing supernatural to support it. Alive to the life of the three
principles, Boehme saw directly that ‘Without the light of Nature there is no understanding of
divine mysteries’ (Ep 4:13), and that if a man ‘be born of God, he may know in every Spire
of Grass his Creator in whom he lives’ (TP 8:9). In the same spirit, Blake understood that to
‘the Eyes of the Man of Imagination Nature is Imagination itself’ (Letters E702) and that
‘every thing on earth is the word of God and in its essence is God’ (Ann. Lav. E599); that no
one ‘can… consummate bliss without being generated on earth’ (Jer 86:42-43 E245).
Seen through the eyes of imagination, the third principle has, as Boehme perceived, a
‘Beginning, and proceeds from the Eternal; it is a manifestation of the Eternal, an awakening,
image and similitude of the Eternal’ (SP ‘’Six Theosophic Points’ 2:15). In this sense the
world may be said to be symbolic: ‘The whole outward visible world with all its being is a
signature or figure of the inward spiritual world.’ This inward world manifests itself with the
‘visible world, as a visible likeness… the internal holds the external before it as a glass,
wherein it beholds itself’ (SR 9:1-3). The natural world reflects back the divine. In a similar
vein, Blake perceived that ‘Mental Things are alone Real’ and that
This World <of Imagination> is Infinite and Eternal whereas the world
of Generation or Vegetation is Finite and [for a small moment] Temporal
There Exist in That Eternal World the Permanent Realities of Every
Thing which we see reflected in this Vegetable Glass of Nature
(VLJ E565, 555)
Again, as he wrote in Milton, ‘every Natural Effect has a Spiritual Cause’ (26:44 E124).
Boehme thus distinguished between Eternal and Temporal Nature. As Blake wrote of
‘Heavenly Canaan,’ the difference between the two is ‘As the Shadow to the Substance’ (Jer
71:1-2 E224):
The Nature of Visionary Fancy or Imagination is very little Known
and the Eternal Nature and permanence of its ever Existent Images is
considered as less permanent than the things of Vegetative and Generated
Nature yet the Oak dies as well as the Lettuce but its Eternal Image and
Individuality never dies, but renews by its seed. (VLJ E555)
While Eternal Nature is without beginning (TLM 4:18), it is in its ‘seed’ eternally present
within temporal nature as a ‘Center,’ as Boehme saw: ‘The Eternal Center, and the Birth of
Life… are every where. If you make a small Circle, as small as a little Grain, [or Kernel of

William Blake & Jacob Boehme: Heaven, Hell & Here – the Life of the Three Principles
 12

Seed,] there is the whole birth of the Eternal Nature’ (TLM 6:43). Blake speaks of this ‘seed’
or ‘Center’ in ‘Auguries of Innocence’:
To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And Heaven in a Wild Flower
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour. (AoI ll.1-4 E490)
In the poem Europe, a ‘Fairy’ evokes the living interplay of the principles. The narrator asks
‘what is the material world, and is it dead?’ Having sung of ‘the eternal world that ever
groweth’ – as Boehme’s Paradise ‘grows and buds’ through the ‘essence of time’ (EOG 4:16
[JRE]) – the ‘Fairy’ promises ‘I’ll… show you all alive/ The world, when every particle of
dust breathes forth its joy’ (3:4, 13, 17-18 E60). As Boehme perceived, the ‘true heaven is
everywhere, even in that very place where thou standest and goest’ (Aur 19:26). This is the
divine vision, the divine as Boehme and Blake knew it.
For both, the spiritual life was not isolated within the individual, separate from an external
world that remained impassive and untouched by it. Nor was it mere solipsism. It exists in the
interrelationship between the outward and inward, as seen in Boehme’s vision of the
relationship between the three principles. Boehme envisions divine potential in the
individual: ‘a Parcel of the highest Omnipotence… is understood to be in the Soul’ (EOG
6:43). The ‘inward divine man should play with the outward… and open the divine wisdom’
(MM 16:10). The ‘inward man… the inward eye’ sees ‘through the outward’ (MM 18:13).
The ‘inward eye’ looks out at the end of Blake’s A Vision of the Last Judgement: ‘I question
not my Corporeal or Vegetative Eye any more than I would Question a Window concerning a
Sight I look thro it and not with it’ (E566). As a result, the relationship with the divine is
inexhaustible, imaginative, ongoing, and always seeking new forms of understanding and
expression. This is a living apprehension, not, as Boehme wrote, ‘an outward supposition or
Conceit, whereby Men tattle of a foreign strange God who dwells somewhere above, in a
Heaven afar off’ (EOG 7:68). As Blake asks rhetorically in The Book of Ahania, ‘Shall we
worship this Demon of smoke/…. This abstract non-entity/ This cloudy God’ (2:10-12 E84).
Boehme provides the answer: ‘Where will you seek God? In the Deep above the Stars? You
will not be able to find him there. Seek him in your Heart’ (TP 4:8), ‘for He is from Eternity
in thy Soul’ (TLM 11:54). This ‘Birth must be done within you…. And then the Saviour
Christ is your faithful Shepherd, and you are in Him, and He in You’ (TP 4:8-9). Christ
declares at the beginning of Jerusalem:
Awake! Awake O sleeper of the land of shadows, wake! Expand!
I am in you and you in me, mutual in love divine:
……………………………………………………
I am not a God afar off, I am a brother and a friend;
Within your bosom I reside, and you reside in me
Lo! We are One.
(4:6-7, 18-21 E146)
‘God becomes as we are, that we may be as he is’ (NNR E3). The present tense is vital.
Through the entrance of the eternal in the temporal, the divine is incarnated in the eternal

William Blake & Jacob Boehme: Heaven, Hell & Here – the Life of the Three Principles
 13

now. As Boehme perceived, ‘none can see God, unless God become first man in him,’
revealing the imaginative bridge between the divine and the human: ‘the Outward Essence
reacheth not the inward in the Soul, but only by the imagination… For it originally proceeded
from the Imagination, and remains in it eternally’ (FQ 11:9-10). As Blake put it, the ‘Eternal
Body of Man is The IMAGINATION. That is God himself The Divine Body Jesus’ (Laocoon
E273). And Boehme:
…there is nothing that is far off, or unsearchable…
So that when the Heaven, and the Birth of the Elements are spoken of
it is not a Thing afar off, or that is distant that is spoken of; but we speak
of Things that are done in your Body and Soul; and there is nothing nearer
us than this Birth; for we live and move therein, as in the House of our
Mother; and when we speak of Heaven, we speak of our native Country.
(TP 7:6-7)
Blake wrote of this:
In your Bosom you bear your Heaven
And Earth, and all you behold, tho it appears Without it is Within
In your Imagination of which this World of Mortality is but a Shadow
(Jer 71:17-19 E225)
This is not about simply taking the God of conventional Abrahamic religious belief out of
Heaven above, and just relocating him as he is within the individual. This is something
wholly other, something that is far less of a rationalisation, that lives in and through the
individual, through the life, the interactions of the principles. And ‘there is nothing nearer us.’
This is why Boehme and Blake after him believed in the immense capacities in human
beings, and that anything that fell short of it was a tragedy. As Boehme states, all three
principles ‘lie in the Soul: All that God has, and can do, and that God is in his Ternary, that
the Soul is in its Essence’ (FQ 2:1). The soul is therefore ‘still powerful… It can by magic
alter all things whatsoever that are in the outward world’s essence, and introduce them into
another essence’ (MM 17:43). Every ‘Man is free, and is as a God to himself’ (Aur 18:47).
Blake understood this: ‘There is a Throne in every Man, it is the Throne of God’ (Jer 30:27
E176); ‘human nature is the image of God’ (Ann. Lav. E597), and ‘God only Acts and Is, in
existing beings or Men’ (MHH pl.16 E40). Boehme thus urges, ‘God must become man, man
must become God; heaven must become one thing with the earth, the earth must be turned to
heaven’ (SR 10:52). He writes of this relationship in Mysterium Magnum: ‘nothing
comprehends him but the true Understanding, which is God himself’ (1:8). This is the higher
understanding, the higher mind that Boehme and Blake would ‘elevate’ us to. This potential
is embodied in the life, the separation and interdependence of the three principles. Blake saw
it clearly: ‘man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro’ narrow chinks in his
cavern.’ But ‘If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it
is: infinite’ (MHH pl.14 E39). This clearly echoes the propositions that appear repeatedly in
Boehme’s writings; so much so as to suggest that Blake was consciously reaffirming
Boehme’s exhortations:

William Blake & Jacob Boehme: Heaven, Hell & Here – the Life of the Three Principles
 14

if….thy Eyes were opened, then in that very Place where thou standest,
sittest or liest, thou shouldst see the glorious Countenance or Face of
God, and the whole heavenly Gate. (Aur 10:98)
Paradise
Is not in this World, yet as it were swallowed up in the Mystery; but it
is not altered in itself, it is only withdrawn from our Sight and our
Source; for if our Eyes were opened, we should see it. (FQ 39:1)
Both visionaries worked through the compelling possibilities revealed in their respective use
of the word ‘If.’

Footnotes
1. For a full discussion of Blake’s relationship with Boehme, see Kevin Fischer, Converse in the Spirit: William
Blake, Jacob Boehme and the Creative Spirit (Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press,2004) .

2. All references to and quotations from Blake’s work are from The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake,
ed. David V. Erdman (New York: Anchor Books, 1965: newly revised edition, 1982). Page numbers from this
edition are preceded by the letter “E”.
3. G.E. Bentley Jr., Blake Records (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969), p.41.
4. Henry Crabb Robinson, Diaries, Reminiscences, and Correspondences of Henry Crabb Robinson, edited by
Thomas Sadler, 3 vols. (London: Macmillan, 1869), vol.2 p.305
5. Ibid. vol.2 p.305
6. References to and quotations from Boehme’s works are, for the most part, from the English translations by John
Sparrow, John Elliston and Humphrey Blunden, in particular those which make up the four volumes of The Works
of Jacob Boehme, the Teutonic Philosopher, with figures illustrating the principles, left by the Reverend William
Law, M.A., eds. George Ward and Thomas Langcake (London, 1764-8). Additional quotations appear in places
from other English translations, namely De Electione Gratiae and Questiones Theosophicae, translated by John
Rolleston Earle (London: Constable, 1930), The Key and Other Writings, translated by P. Malekin and L.
Malmberg (Durham: The New Century Press: Durham, 1988), Six Theosophic Points and Other Writings,
translated by John Rolleston Earle (Michigan: The University of Michigan Press, 1958), and The Way to Christ,
translated by Peter Erb (New York: The Paulist Press, 1978). Where necessary, the use of these translations is
made clear.

Abbreviations
Am America a Prophecy

Ann. DLDW Annotations to Swedenborg’s “Divine Love and Divine Wisdom”

Ann. HH Annotations to Swedenborg’s “Heaven and Hell”

Ann. Lav. Annotations to Lavater’s “Aphorisms on Man”

William Blake & Jacob Boehme: Heaven, Hell & Here – the Life of the Three Principles
 15

Ann. Ren. Annotations to “The Works of Sir Joshua Reynolds”

AoI Auguries of Innocence

Aur Aurora

BA The Book of Ahania

BL The Book of Los

BU The [First] Book of Urizen

Clavis The Clavis: or, An Explanation of Some Principle Points and

Expressions in His Writings

EOG Of the Election of Grace

Erb translated by Peter Erb

Ep The Epistles of Jacob Behmen

Eur Europe a Prophecy

FQ Forty Questions Concerning the Soul … Answered

F. Rev The French Revolution

FZ The Four Zoas

Inscrip. Inscriptions and Notes on and for Pictures

Jer Jerusalem: The Emanation of The Giant Albion

JRE translated by John Rolleston Earle

The Key The Key and Other Writings

Laocoön The Laocoön

Milton Milton a Poem in Two Books

MHH The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

MM Mysterium Magnum: or, An Explanation of the First Book of Moses

Called Genesis

NNR There is No Natural Religion

William Blake & Jacob Boehme: Heaven, Hell & Here – the Life of the Three Principles
 16

SP Six Theosophic Points and Other Writings

SR The Signature of All Things

TLM The Threefold Life of Man

ToI Treatise of the Incarnation

TP The Three Principles of the Divine Essence

TQ Quaestiones Theosphicae

VLJ A Vision of the Last Judgement

WC The Way to Christ

Kevin Fischer

kevinfischer100@gmail.com

William Blake & Jacob Boehme: Heaven, Hell & Here – the Life of the Three Principles