Novalis wrote in a letter to Ludwig Tieck in 1800: "Man sieht durchaus in ihm [Jakob Böhme] den gewaltigen Frühling mit seinen quellenden, treibenden, bildenden, und mischenden Kräften, die von innen heraus die Welt gebären. Ein echtes Chaos voll dunkler Begier und wunderbarem Leben—einen wahren auseinandergehenden Mikrokosmos."—Quoted from Edgar Ederheimer's Jakob Boehme und die Romantiker (1904), p. 57.
[11] His English translators in the seventeenth century variously spelled his name Behm, Behme, and Behmen. This latter spelling was adopted in the so-called Law Edition of 1764, and has thus come into common use in England and America.
[12] Boehme refers frequently to "the writings of high masters," whom he says he read (Aurora, x. 45), and he often names Schwenckfeld and Weigel in particular. See especially The Second Epistle, sec. 54-62
[13] Memoirs of the Life, Death and Burial, and Wonderful Writings of Jacob Behmen, translated by Francis Okeley (1780), p. 22.
[14] Memoirs, p. 2.
[15] Memoirs, p. 6. Von Franckenberg says that Boehme himself told him this incident.
[16] Ibid. pp. 4-5. The reader will have noted the long history of this phrase, "Sabbath of the soul."
[17] Ibid. p. 7.
[18] Memoirs, p. 8. Paracelsus taught that the inner nature of things might be seen by one who has become an organ of the Universal Mind. He says: "Hidden things which cannot be perceived by the physical senses may be found through the sidereal body, through whose organism we may look into nature in the same way as the sun shines through a glass. The inner nature of everything may be known through Magic [The Divine Magia] and the power of inner sight."—Hartmann's Life of Paracelsus (1896), p. 53.
[19] He uses this word Seeker hundreds of times in his writings.