The "Key" of Jacob Boehme

Book excerpt: Phanes (fa-nays) means "manifester" or "revealer", and is related to the Greek words "light" and "to shine forth". Phanes Press was founded in 1985 to publish quality books on the spiritual, philosophical, and cosmological traditions of the Western world. Since that time, we have published 45 books, including five volumes of Alexandria, a book-length journal of cosmology, philosophy, myth, and culture. The year 2000 marks our fifteen-year anniversary, and we are working to bring out more interdisciplinary works, including books on creativity, psychology, literature, and the intersections between science, spirituality, and culture. The second edition of a volume in the Magnum Opus Hermetic Sourceworks series introducing the ideas and spiritual philosophy of a seventeenth-century Christian mystic. As a young man, Boehme, an unschooled shoemaker, experienced an intense vision of the origin of the universe, the struggle of polarities in creation, and the role of Sophia or Divine Wisdom in the world. In trying to find a language to communicate his mystical perceptions, he turned to alchemical ideas and Hermetic imagery. This condensation is taken from William Law's translation of Boehme's complete works, and includes Law's "Illustration of the Deep Principles of Jacob Boehme", with thirteen emblematic figures designed by Dionysius Freher.