A semi-biographical novel on the life and works of Jacob Boehme (Preview)

Chapter 1: 

The Stranger

I was fourteen when I first glimpsed the divine.

Summer air hung thick with pollen as I drove cattle across the hillside southwest of Gorlitz. Father had assigned me this task after deeming me too slight for the heavier farm labour my brothers performed with ease. The beasts grazed peaceful, tails swishing at flies, while I sat upon the highest point of the Landeskrone watching clouds merge and dissolve like phosphenes across the sky. My mind wandered untethered from mundane concerns that occupied the adults in our village. Father was a deacon at the parish church and spoke often of proper Lutheran doctrine and responsibilities of community leadership. I thought instead of patterns in nature—how leaf veins mirrored river branches, how snail shells spiralled like the stars at night.

It happened in the space between breaths.

The hillside before me—so familiar I could navigate blindfolded—revealed what had never been there before. An arched opening appeared amid anemone and liverwort, formed of basalt and rose quartz cut with impossible precision. No mason in any village could have managed such work, yet there it stood, tangible as soil beneath my feet.

I glanced back at the cattle, wondering if they too saw this marvel. They continued their placid grazing, unconcerned. When I turned again toward the arch, it remained, shadows pooling in its depths like invitation.

A will not of my desiring pulled me forward. Not curiosity alone but a sense of appointment kept. As if I had agreed long ago to this meeting and only now remembered.

The air cooled as I stepped beneath the arch. Giant black stone surrounded me, forming a descending passage that spiralled downward by gradual degrees. I should have been afraid. A vault appearing from nowhere, leading into earth's dark void—what rational mind wouldn't recoil? Yet fear found no purchase in me that day. I felt instead an overwhelming recognition, as if walking a path I had travelled many times before.

The passage opened into a chamber that defied my understanding of what lay beneath Lusatia's hills. Vaulted ceilings arched high above. Walls of perfectly cut red stone rose in graceful curves. No torch illuminated this space, yet I saw with perfect clarity by diffuse light that seemed to emanate from the stones themselves.

In the chamber's centre stood a vessel of beaten copper or perhaps bronze, its surface etched with symbols I could not read yet somehow understood. The vessel brimmed with coins of gold and silver, a fortune beyond imagining for a peasant's son.

I approached slow, drawn not by greed but by strange sensation that this treasure possessed purpose beyond wealth. The coins gleamed with inner light that pulsed in rhythm with my heartbeat. As my hand hovered above them, I felt heat radiating upward, not the temperature of metal tinctured by flame, but something more vital—like sap coursing beneath bark.

It was then that I knew. This was not meant for me. Not as possession, not as salvation from worldly concerns. The treasure existed as message rather than material offering. All that glitters... I thought though no voice spoke the words. Seek the true gold.

The devil imposed anxiety upon me in that moment. Not of the strange vault or its mysterious contents, but of what the experience signified about me. About my perception of a world others insisted was material and known. I fled, scrambling back up the passage and into daylight's embrace, heart thundering against ribs.

When I looked back, the arch had vanished. Only liverwort and anemone remained. The cattle grazed on, unmoved. I returned home that evening saying nothing of what I'd witnessed. Who would believe a herd boy who claimed to have found and then abandoned a fortune? But more than fear of ridicule, I kept silent because I lacked words adequate to describe what had truly transpired—not just the physical manifestation but the understanding that had accompanied it.

This was my first divine revelation. It would not be my last.

It was the third day of spring in my nineteenth year when the stranger entered my master's shop in Seidenberg.

I remember the quality of light that afternoon—how it slanted through diamond-paned windows, dust motes suspended in golden beams that pooled upon the oak planks. The leather-scented air lingered in the workshop, broken only by the rhythmic tap of my wooden mallet and the distant calls of market vendors from the street. Master Bartsch had departed not an hour before, his bulky frame stooping through the low doorway as he'd muttered about the tanner's rising prices and the need to secure better hides before week's end. I'd scarcely noticed the time passing as I worked, my fingers pressing the dampened calfskin over a nobleman's wooden last, feeling for imperfections that might later cause discomfort to feet accustomed to comfort.

The copper bell above the door gave its three-noted jangle—high, medium, low—a sound I could identify even in deepest sleep after four years of service in this shop. I looked up, expecting perhaps the butcher's wife come for her mended slippers or the blacksmith's apprentice sent to collect his master's new boots.

The man who entered seemed unremarkable at first assessment. His woollen coat was neither threadbare nor fine, the sort any tradesman might wear on market day. Average in height and build, perhaps five-and-thirty years of age, with hair the colour of autumn wheat beneath a simple felt cap. Had he passed me in the street, I would have taken no particular notice. Yet something in his bearing caused the mallet to still in my hand, the leather forgotten beneath my fingers. His eyes perhaps—the deepest blue I'd ever witnessed, like the twilight sky in that perfect moment before stars pierce the darkening canopy. Within those eyes lived something ancient, as if they had witnessed the very formation of mountains and the first flowing of rivers. Or perhaps it was the peculiar stillness that surrounded him, a pocket of absolute calm amid life's constant movement. He stood just inside our threshold, making no move toward the display of finished shoes or the bench where customers usually sat for fittings. Instead, his gaze fixed upon me with such knowing certainty that I felt my innermost thoughts exposed, like ore revealed when earth is stripped away.

Good day, I said, setting aside my work. How may I assist you?

The stranger regarded me silent, his gaze so direct and penetrating I felt he was reading the contents of my sins. When he finally spoke, his voice carried an accent I couldn't place.

You are Jakob Böhme.

Not a question but a statement of recognition. I nodded, unsettled by his certainty.

I would speak with you, he continued. Outside, if you please.

Caution suggested refusal. Bartsch would return soon and expect to find me working. Yet the same inexplicable certainty that had drawn me into the hillside vault now propelled me toward the door.

We stepped into the sunlight. The street bustled with the usual commerce—a cart laden with vegetables rattling past, women carrying baskets from market, children darting between adults on mysterious errands of their own. The stranger led me a short distance from the shop entrance, then turned to face me.

He studied my features with such intensity I nearly stepped back. Then he reached forward and, with startling familiarity, placed his palm against my chest, directly over my heart.

Jakob, he said, his voice softening. You are now little, but you will become a great man, and the world will wonder about you.

A chill raced along my spine despite the warm Easter air. The stranger continued, his words carrying the weight of prophecy.

Be pious, live in the fear of God, and honour His word. Especially do I admonish you to read the word of the Lord; herein you will find comfort and consolation; for you will have to suffer a great deal of trouble, poverty, and persecution. Nevertheless, do not fear, but remain firm; for God loves you, and is gracious to you.

As he spoke, the street around us seemed to fade from my periphery. His blue eyes held mine, and within their depths I glimpsed swirling galaxies and the birth of stars. For a moment, I understood the stranger was not simply a man but a messenger—perhaps an angel clothed in human form or something even beyond such categories.

Who are you? I managed to ask.

He smiled then, an expression of such profound compassion that tears sprang to my eyes uninvited.

A fellow traveller, he replied. One who has walked the path you now begin. When God chooses His vessel, the vessel rarely understands why. It need only be willing to be filled and to pour forth what is given.

My throat constricted with sudden dread and wonder. Vessel? Chosen? I was nothing. A journeyman shoemaker. Barely literate despite my hunger for books. What could such as I possibly be chosen for?

Seeing my confusion, the stranger's expression softened further. His hand still rested upon my chest, and now I felt warmth spreading outward from that point of contact, as if something were being transferred from his flesh to mine.

The unopened eye will open, he said. You will see what others cannot. You will know what the learned have sought for centuries. The signatures of creation will reveal themselves to you, and through you to others. The devil's work in the world will become visible to your sight. You will doubt your senses. You will question your sanity. But know this—it is not madness but vision that will possess you.

He removed his hand then, and I swayed slightly, feeling strangely bereft. Before I could question him further, he stepped backward, and the sounds of the street rushed back into my awareness.

I have said what I came to say, he told me. The rest will unfold as it must.

Then he turned and walked away, his form blending with other pedestrians until I could no longer distinguish him in the crowd.

I stood frozen, the echo of his words reverberating through my mind. His prophecy collided with my humble circumstances—a cobbler with threadbare ambitions that extended no further than perhaps owning a shop of my own. How could I, with my limited learning and common birth, become anything worthy of the world's wonder?

When I returned inside, the master had not yet returned. My tools waited where I'd left them, leather still stretched over the wooden last. I resumed my work with hands that trembled slight, wondering if the encounter had been real or merely another of the strange perceptions that occasionally overtook me.

Yet the stranger's words had left their mark, embedding themselves in my soul like seeds planted in fertile soil. They would germinate in the coming years, taking root alongside the mysteries I had glimpsed but not yet understood. The treasure in the hidden vault. The patterns behind creation's veil. The signatures written into the fabric of existence itself.

I did not know then that these experiences would set the wheel of anguish in motion.

Four years passed like water flowing beneath a bridge. I completed my apprenticeship in Seidenberg, the leather-cutting knife becoming an extension of my hand, the awl a natural companion to my fingers. Sundays remained my anchor through those years—the wooden pews of father's church where I'd sat since boyhood, wedged between my younger brothers with our freshly-slicked hair and scrubbed faces. Even as apprentice, I never missed a service, though my Jewish master grumbled that I might better use the day for rest. The harmony of scripture and hymn had been etched into me alongside the dissonance of hammer and thread.

Then came the journeyman years—three more years of wandering that carried me farther than most village boys ever dreamed of venturing. Each Sunday found me in a different church, the words familiar but the voices strange. I followed roads that disappeared into forests and emerged in villages I'd never heard named in fireside tales back home. The dust of those paths clung to my boots and to my soul. How strange to worship without my brothers' elbows jostling mine, without father's voice from the pulpit carrying above the congregation.

Görlitz rose at the end of those wandering years, its spires and stone houses making Seidenberg seem like a child's play village by comparison. The cobbled streets echoed with a dozen languages from the mouths of merchants and travellers. By my twenty-fourth year, in that last gasp of the fading sixteenth century, I purchased my very own little shop in the lower market and had soon earned the title of master craftsman. The coins I'd saved—counted by candlelight after days of stooping over the cobbler's bench—three hundred marks' worth of timber and stone: a dwelling of my own on a modest street on the banks of the River Neisse.

That same year, Katharina's eyes met mine across the Sunday service. Her father, Hans Kuntzschmann, sliced the town's meat with the precision and authority that had earned him respect among Görlitz's tradesmen. The courtship was brief but proper. We were married beneath autumn leaves, my calloused hands trembling slightly as they held hers, still soft despite her years of helping in her father's shop, a job that I wouldn't have the stomach for.

In truth, I had not been deemed strong enough for husbandry, which had led father to send me to learn shoemaking. Simple folk, my master had said of us cobblers, but necessary. I found satisfaction in this work, in creating something both humble and essential. Though my formal schooling ended almost before it began, I built my vocabulary through dogged nightly studies. My teacher, Herr Leder, frequented my father's church and agreed with him to patiently correct my pronunciation of Latin terms and guide me through texts far beyond what most craftsmen would attempt to comprehend.

The Bible lay open beside my workbench each day, its pages marked with leather scraps and worn smooth at the corners from my seeking fingers, but when darkness fell and the shop grew quiet, I sometimes unfolded carefully wrapped parcels from Abraham Behem—the forbidden works of Paracelsus, the wandering physician-philosopher who claimed nature itself was God's living scripture, his ideas on the cosmic sympathies between plants, metals and human organs making the church fathers bristle even as they made my heart race with recognition of truths I somehow already sensed.

I first met Behem on a cold autumn evening. The candlelight threw strange shadows across his weathered face as he hunched over a letter, quill scratching steadily across parchment. He wrote to Valentin Weigel that night—I would learn later—that mystical pastor from Zschopau whose works were whispered about rather than openly discussed. Behem's eyes carried the weight of secrets when he looked up and measured me, this cobbler who asked questions no tradesman should think to ask.

Come back tomorrow, he'd said. And I did.

In his cramped study with its peculiar smell of herbs and ink, Behem guided me through texts that made the church fathers seem like children splashing in the shallows of a vast ocean. He'd travelled widely before settling in Görlitz, had spoken with men who'd claimed to have glimpsed a realm beyond our own. His correspondence with Weigel opened doors in my mind I hadn't known existed. When he spoke of the divine spark dwelling within each soul, his voice dropped to near whisper, as if the walls themselves might report such teachings to authorities.

Through Behem I found my way to Pastor Martin Moller's circle. Pastor Martin, with his sonorous voice and gentle manner, had gathered together those who hungered for deeper spiritual nourishment than his Sunday sermons provided. The Conventicle of God's Real Servants, we called ourselves—not from pride but from desperate yearning to move beyond mere observance into true service.

We met in the back room of the Pastor's house near St Peter's Church. Fifteen souls gathered around a scarred oak table, our breath visible in winter air as we pored over texts and debated interpretations far into the night. Pastor Martin, whose published works on practical piety had already drawn scrutiny from more orthodox quarters who suspected him of crypto-Calvinism, would pose questions that lingered for days afterward. What does it mean that God dwells within? How might we distinguish between true illumination and self-deception? What transformation occurs when spirit penetrates matter?

Most townsfolk spent their evenings discussing grain prices or town politics. We dissected visions of Ezekiel and pondered the mystical marriage described in Song of Songs. Craftsmen and merchants side by side, our hands still bearing the day's labour—sawdust, ink, flour, leather—all forgotten as we circled ineffable questions. The authorities watched such gatherings with suspicion, but Pastor Martin's standing within the Church provided some protection. For now.

Books won't make better boots, other craftsmen said.

I never told them how sometimes the patterns in leather grain shifted before my eyes, revealing diagrams of divine structure I could barely comprehend. How when measuring a customer's foot, I'd occasionally see not just their physical form but overlapping auras of light and dark. These perceptions came unbidden and departed without warning, leaving me disoriented and questioning my sanity.

I prayed for understanding or, failing that, for these experiences to cease. God remained silent on both counts.