Jacob Boehme

Jacob Boehme was born in 1575 in a village near Görlitz, in Upper Lusatia, to a Lutheran farming family, and became a shoemaker in Görlitz. He had little formal education. In 1600, according to his early biographers, he was gazing at a pewter dish reflecting the sunlight when he felt he could see into the inner ground of all things.

Years later he set down his vision in a manuscript he called Aurora (1612). Copies circulated, and the chief pastor of Görlitz denounced him; the town council forbade him to write. After several years’ silence he began again, and in the last six years of his life wrote a large body of works, including Of the Three Principles, Signatura Rerum and The Great Mystery. Only The Way to Christ, a collection of devotional treatises, was printed in his lifetime, in 1624, and it brought renewed persecution. He died in Görlitz later that year.

His writings, difficult and full of alchemical imagery, found readers across Europe. In England they were translated in the seventeenth century and later inspired William Law and William Blake. In Germany they influenced the Pietists and the Romantics; Schelling drew on him in his essay on human freedom, and Hegel called him the first German philosopher.