Suppose you wanted to Scry something. Suppose you wanted to do a Scrying. You could gaze into a reflecting pond, or into a crystal. The French physician Nostradamus used a bowl of water on a brass tripod when he scryed his prophecies. Edward Kelly, the assistant to Queen Elizabeth I’s notorious magician John Dee, used a shiny black stone cut in the shape of a diamond.
Sometimes Scying is used for less than ethical purposes. It used to be tremendously popular for young American women to gaze into a mirror, looking for a glimpse of their future husband. And then, of course, there was the mountebank Joseph Smith. He unsuccessfully used his seer stones, his ‘peep stones’ as he called them, to defraud gullible farmers. For someone like Joseph Smith, Scrying was a means to wealth and power. But for the mystic Jakob Boehme Scrying was much, much more. For Jakob, Scrying brought him closer to a union with God.
” …the Being of God, is like a Wheel, wherein many wheeles are made one in another, upward, downward, crosse-ways, and yet continually turn all of them together …” from AURORA
Jakob Boehme’s method of Scrying was quite simple. In the fifteenth century the use of a mirror as an Ars Speculum was uncommon; it would be another hundred years before mirrors could be produced that were both inexpensive and highly reflective. Instead Jakob would situate a water-filled pewter dish in a beam of light and turn it until the light ray was reflected back into his eye. Then he would quiet himself and meditate, letting the visions arise from the brilliance. He let the visions mature while he married and lived in Goerlitz as a humble shoemaker.
By 1612 Boehme had almost completed a small hand-written folio of philosophical reflections called Aurora, the Dawn of the Day in the East, which he passed around amongst friends. Unfortunately, someone else also passed it on to the Lutheran church authorities, and that is when his troubles began.
The early 16th Century was not an easy time to be a free thinker. As the Thirty Years War approached political and religious differences reached a fever pitch. One could be gruesomely executed and one’s village burned due to a seemingly minor doctrinal deviation. So it was not surprising that Jakob was accused by the Senior Pastor of St. Peter and Paul Church, Gregorious Richter, of heresy. “There are as many blasphemies in this shoemaker’s book as there are lines; it smells of shoemaker’s pitch and filthy blacking!”
One apocryphal story has it that when Gregorious Richter interviewed Jakob the pastor became so enraged at Boehme that he took off his shoe and threw it at him! Undetered, the humble shoemaking picked it up (and possibly recognizing fine leather!) carried it back and replaced it on the pastor’s foot.
But the pressure on Jakob was great. He possessed a shoemaker’s shop, a wife and a house. Faced with exile he accepted the best of all possible alternatives. After the City Council confiscated his work he vowed to Richter and the civil authorities that he would never write again.
The Goerlitz of 1600 was far different than the Goerlitz of today. Open sewage flowed down the streets. Armed rebellion, plagues, religious fanaticism, all contributed to an atmosphere where demons and witches were perceived to be everywhere, lurking in the woods outside a fragile Christianity. But Goerlitz had something in its favor: the King of Bohemia had granted Goerlitz the exclusive right to possess, store and sell Woad.
Woad was a blue plant dye used – before Indigo – in all aspects of linen and woolen manufacture. And then from the weavers of Goerlitz cloth was exported on the Via Regia, the Royal Road, which stretched from the ports of Atlantic Ocean, through Spain, Paris and Goerlitz, all the way to Warsaw and beyond. The Woad Haus, where the dried balls of Woad, Isatis tinctoria L were stored, stands directly beside the St. Peter and Paul Church.
A late medieval basilica stood at the church’s spot since at least 1290. But as the town’s power and wealth grew with trade along the Via Regia the church itself, always eager for power and wealth, likewise grew. The reconstruction of the original parish church of Goerlitz, the St Nikolai, had stagnated during the 1400’s during the Hussite Rebellion. Today the desecrated St. Nikolai lies down the hill from the St. Peter and Paul Church within a pleasant cemetery. Unfortunately it lacked the dominating view of the Neisse River shared by the larger church, a view which takes in the Via Regia winding through the forests towards Breslau.
The St. Peter and Paul Church of the late 15th Century was built atop the Georgen Chapel of 1378. Two mis-matched truncated towers rose above the late Romanesque western facade. The church survived the upheavals of the Reformation and the Peasants Revolt largely intact. But sadly, in the closing days of WW II the Nazi’s blew up the Alstadtbrucke (the Alstadt bridge) which crossed the Neisse directly below the church. All of the splendid glass painted windows, along with the roof, were destroyed by the resultant pressure wave.
The organ in Jakob Boehme’s time was powered by two men behind the choir, standing on treadles and pumping constantly to maintain pressure in the bellows. Eventually this gave way to the magnificent Sun Organ, built in 1703. 17 suns are scattered across the prospectus of the organ, and I fondly believe they were inspired by the celestial theories of Jakob Boehme.
A curious feature of Lutheran Churches of the Jakob Boehme era were the Confessionals. If one wanted to “Eat”, ie receive Holy Communion, one had to kneel in front of the haughty Gregorious Richter, in full view of the parish, and reveal one’s sins. What a splendid form of social control! As we shall see, as a Mystic determined to follow his personal Divine Revelation, Boehme scorned all social convention and control.
Children’s toys in a Late Gothic vestibule, a grieving 15th century St. Peter, with the key to the Church on his shoulder, a map of the Stations of the Cross, all point towards Boehme’s multi-faceted understanding of God. “If one now wants to see God’s Son, one must look at natural things again, otherwise I cannot write about him: For the Divine Being is in force, it does not allow itself to be written or talked about. Therefore, we must take parables before us if we want to speak of God: for we live in this world in pieces, and have been made of pieces.”
Strolling around the church at dawn, deep in thought, Jakob saw part of the structure, not the whole. Likewise from a part of God we try to surmise the whole.
Jakob’s words sound very much like those of Paracelsus, the great 15th century physician-philosopher. Both Boehme and Paracelsus considered themselves Alchemists, but here the word denotes a philosopher who sought knowledge of the Divine through the natural world. “Wherein then I found to be in things Evil and Good, Love and Anger, in the inanimate creatures, viz in Wood, Stones, Earth, and the elements, as also in Men and Beasts.” In nature Jakob found the ‘qualities’, the mixing of light and dark, from which all things that exist flow.
Like Paracelsus, Boehme believed that all things, and even life itself, sprang from Sulphur, Mercurius and Salt. And like Paracelsus Bohme believed in the Hermetic maxim “As above so below.” The Macrocosm of the stars and the planets moving in their spheres, and even God itself, affected the Microcosm of the natural world and the workings in the mind of Man.
After the confiscation of his works in 1613 Jakob Boehme remained in silence another six years. He sold his shoemaking shop and became a merchant. He traveled to Prague and talked to Natural Philosophers. He walked through the Nikolai Church cemetery and touched the gravestones, always thinking about God. Then, in 1618, the Thirty Years war began… It became too dangerous to travel. Confined to Goerlitz, the voice of God welled up in Jakob again, telling him to write. Write! And so he did. “You won’t find any book in which you could better discover and investigate the Divine Wisdom than when you walk on a green and blooming meadow.”
The Nikolai Church is a desecrated Gothic hall church that had been built long before the time of Jakob Boehme. Unfortunately, its history of war, tragedy and repeated fires ultimately led to its profanation and removal from service.
The Altfriedhof (the old cemetery) has always been a popular resting place for the nobility of Gorlitz. It is here, amongst the crypts of the powerful that surround the church, that the humble shoemaker Jacob Boehme is buried.
Following the conclusion of the First World War the Nicholai Church was redesigned as a war memorial, with painted fluted pillars replacing the original Gothic columns. The church today, with the names of local deceased emblazoned on the walls, is poignant and deeply moving. Perhaps it is for this reason that on the 400th anniversary of Jakob Bohme’s death the Nicholai Church was chosen as a venue to display the front pieces from the 1682 collection of his work.
Once Bohme began writing again he was tireless. He hand wrote over thirty titles, self-publishing, as it were, at such a furious pace that he was frequently called “the fanatical cobbler”! Yet his profundity attracted legions of followers, mostly outside of Germany, by the time of his death. “Darkness is the greatest enemy of light, and yet it is the cause for the Revelation of light. Indeed, if there were no black, the white could not reveal itself.” from Mysterium Magnum. God itself rose from the dark.
The Friedhof that surrounds the Nicholai Church in Jakob Boehme’s day was hard against the city wall, the Dark Gate, and the executioner’s house. A pariah within his own town, the executioner was forced to live outside the city walls. The Friedhof of today is quiet and atmospheric; the nobles who rule the deteriorating crypts are long gone.
“The Philosophical Sphere” is perhaps one of Jakob Boehme’s most well know illustrations of God’s relation to the universe. The entire sphere is understood to be three dimensional, with the left sphere (Darkness, the uncreated) and the right sphere (the Divine Creator) as mixing and intermingling. These are the first Two Principles. The Third Principle (or synthesis, to use a very German term) is God’s revelation in the world. In The Philosophical Sphere the Third Principle, encompassing all elements and phenomena, is the heart at the center of the illustration. Boehme was deeply interested in the scientific advances of the day – he was contemporaneous with Johannes Kepler. To Boehme, “God is the eternal Sun, that is to say the eternal one Good” from On the Election of Grace. In the universe of Copernicus, which Jakob intuited with a minimum of book learning, the Godly Sun illuminated the planets in their orbits, as well the lowliest creatures on earth.
Just like the blind man (in the fable) seeks out the trunk, the tusks and the tail of an elephant in a failed attempt to ascertain the shape of the beast, so too have we been examining photographic fragments of Goerlitz in an attempt to understand the work of Jakob Boehme. This is doubly difficult. Not only are his books rare in translation but he willfully couched his philosophy in invented words and obscure allusions. Moreover Goerlitz itself is a moving target, with it’s architecture veering through numerous eras. First the Renaissance, then the Baroque, the Romantic, and the Neo-classical. Finally after surviving World War Two largely unscathed Goerlitz endured another forty years of indignity under the German Democratic Republic. At one point the Communists were so frustrated with repairing post-war buildings that they simply suggested blowing up the old town of Goerlitz and replacing it with Soviet style apartment blocks! Fortunately that plan never saw the light of day.
In early fourteenth century most houses were simple one story affairs built of brick and wood. But with the growth of the Woad industry and trade along the Via Regia wealthy merchant-princes arose. Their simple houses steadily grew piece by piece through the years into large multistory palaces. Many of them featured showrooms for textile display and a central atrium-airshaft (a light house) for hanging long bolts of cloth. Again many wealthy merchants also possessed a license to brew beer, which they likewise sold through the first floor showroom and stored in wooden casks underground
In 1570 a pious Woad merchant from Weimar, Hans Heinze, moved to Gorlitz and purchased his citizenship. Like all cities and towns of late Medieval Europe Gorlitz was periodically ravaged by fires. The fire of 1525 left the lower Untermarkt and Neissestrasse a ruin. Herr Heinze quickly bought the lot at 29 Neissestrasse and erected an imposing sandstone structure with two alternate bands of bas-reliefs above the second and third floors. The upper band (not seen here) are tableaus from the New Testament, while the lower band illustrates the Old Testament. Of particular interest is the bas-relief above the door, with the Iron Snake of Moses draped around the Cross.
The Alte Ratsapotheke was originally in the Rathaus– the old city hall- below the city council chambers. Above the ornate High Renaissance portal are two 1550 sundials created by Zacharias Scultetus. Until the 1830’s, this was the only pharmacy in Goerlitz.
The pharmacies of Boehme’s time were dangerous places (if you wanted to live!). Dried mint, garlic, lavender, and stinging nettles stocked the shelves. Under the counter, of course, was Black Hellebore to induce abortion. Under the influence of Paracelsus, inorganic salts, metals and minerals were present in abundance. Paracelsus asked, “What is there that is not poison? All things are poison, and nothing is without poison. Solely the dose determines that a thing is not a poison.” Sadly, Paracelsus died at 47 after allegedly overdosing on mercury, the cure he recommended for syphilis.
Just as the alchemists believed one could purify lead into gold through the Alchemical Retort – or rather – distill the essence of a substance, Jakob Bohme believed that inner or “magical” seeing could purify oneself spiritually. The ‘retort’ was simultaneously a specially shaped vessel called a “Pelican” and also the body. In Christian symbology, the Pelican was a bird, who, like Christ, shed his blood for his children.
When Jakob climbed past the Angel of Justice to plead his case before the City Council in 1612 he had no idea of the spiritual journey that awaited. Today in Germany there are many who still look towards Boehme’s works, particularly Aurora, for guidance.
The Renaissance seems like a charming time to us sophisticates of the Twenty-first Century; there was so much optimism, so much hope. But it wasn’t long after Jakob’s death in 1624 that the bloom began to fade in Goerlitz. Indigo – Indigofera tinctorial – was introduced into Europe from India and the Woad trade collapsed. Manufacturing began to move away from the Untermarkt and into a more central area of Goerlitz. Needless to say this process continues to this day. A fascinating display of this transformation is the merchant palace, a Hallenhaus (hall house), directly across from the old Rathaus. Bruderstrasse 9 rose and fell with the fortunes of Goerlitz; first as a one room dwelling, then as an impressive merchant showroom. In German Democratic Republic times it was subdivided into apartment cubicles. Today it is gutted. But the ruins have been filled with photographs by Ulrich Schwarz depicting different Hall Houses along the VIA REGIA in Poland. It gives one a chance to use the principles of Jakob Böhme, to really look, to see the past and the present together as one, and behind that, Divinity.
Today Goerlitz is a pretty little town divided by history. The west side of the Neisse River is still called Goerlitz, while the east side of the river is now Zgorzelec – Polish for Gorlitz. For the past fifty years the border between Germany and Poland has been the Neisse. But regardless of where the border is few people in Germany, Poland or even Europe as a whole have ever heard of Jacob Boehme. Perhaps that’s why less than eighty years after the horrors of the Holocaust no one is particularly concerned about the possibility of it happening again.
In Aurora Bohme said, “Truly there is only one God… Be it equally Christians, Jews, Turks or Heathens, or do you think that God is only the God of Christians?” I want to believe that. I want to see God in a mote of dust, drifting lazily in a sunbeam, or God in an autumn leaf, racing madly down a stream. And if I look really hard, I want to see God in the colored lights of the Alstadtfest and in the excited cries of the children.