“Adam was created out of the Element, out of the attracting of the Heart of God, which is the Will of the Father, and therein is the Virgin of the divine Virtue. … The Fierceness of the Devil would fain have dwelt in the Heart of God and have domineered over it, and have opened a Center there, which the Fierceness without the Light cannot do; for every center was generated and opened with the Kindling of the Light. …
“And when the Light of the Sun appeared in the fierce Harshness, then the Harshness became thin and sweet, even Water, and the Fierceness in the fire-flash was extinguished, …Thus the evil Child pants after the Mother, and would get to be in the Mother in the Element, and yet cannot reach her. … The Spirit of the Stars and Elements would continually get again into the Element; for in the element there is Meekness.” ~Jacob Boehme
The Element
The Element of Jacob Boehme is not earth, air, water or fire. It isn’t even the allegorical meaning of those elements on the material plane: solid, liquid, gas, energy. Adam was not a being of matter until the Great Fall. God created him as a spiritual being. Therefore, the Element Boehme speaks of is spiritual in nature. We can call it the creative force of God, the thoughts of God, or the imagination of God. The important thing to understand is that it is spiritual.
Divine Virgin
Here again Boehme is saying something that doesn’t match conventional Christian thought. The virgin here is not Mary, the mother of Jesus. It is another reference to that creative power of God. Since God creates beings without he use of sex, the creative power can be called the Divine Virgin. It can also be a reference to Sophia, the Gnostic Goddess of Wisdom which is not a separate being from God, but a part of Him.
The Fierceness and Harshness
The Fierceness of Boehme might be called the ego of the Devil. The Devil was Jealous of God’s creative power and wanted to be able to use it. He wanted to get into the Heart of God. But he really couldn’t He didn’t have the most important ingredient for creation: the Light. So without light, what he created became the Harshness, the realm of matter.
Matter is harsh because in it things, suffer, grow old, and die. In the realm of matter, beings must kill and eat other beings to survive. That is about as much harshness as possible. That is the realm of Satan. Continue reading “Element of Spirit in a World of Matter”