[25] Ibid. part i. chaps. xii. and xiii.

[26] Quoted from Tauler by Weigel, ibid. chap. vii. See also part iii. chap. i.

[27] Ibid. part ii. chap. ii.

[28] Op. cit. chap. xx.

[29] Christ. Gespräch, chap. ii.

[30] In his Der güldene Griff, he tells of a personal spiritual "opening" which is very similar to the one which occurred later in the life of Boehme. He found himself astray in "a wilderness of darkness" and he cried to God for Light to enlighten his soul. "Suddenly," he says, "the Light came and my eyes were opened so that I saw more clearly than all the teachers in all the world with all their books could teach me." Chap. xxiv.

[31] Astrologie Theologized, p. 8.

[32] Ibid. pp. 16-17.

[33] This little book refers with much appreciation to Theophrastus Paracelsus. It uses his theory of "first matter" and his doctrine of "the seven governours of the world," which we shall meet in a new form in Boehme. Another book which carried astrological ideas into religious thought in a much cruder way was Andreas Tentzel's De ratione naturali arboris vitae et scientiae boni et mali, etc., which was Pars Secunda of his Medicinii diastatica (Jena, 1629). It was translated into English in 1657 by N. Turner with the title: "The Mumial Treatise of Tentzelius, being a natural account of the Tree of Life and of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, with a mystical interpretation of that great Secret, to wit, the Cabalistical Concordance of the Tree of Life and Death, of Christ and Adam." Tentzel was a famous doctor and disciple of Paracelsus and "flourished" in Germany during the first half of the seventeenth century.

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