Martinism: Alexandre Saint-Yves d'Alveydre, Gérard Encausse, Ivan Lopukhin, Jakob Böhme, Jean-Baptiste Willermoz, Jean Bricaud, Louis Claude de ... Novikov, Ordre Reaux Croix, Valentin Tomberg

Please note that the content of this book primarily consists of articles available from Wikipedia or other free sources online. Pages: 20. Chapters: Alexandre Saint-Yves d'Alveydre, Gérard Encausse, Ivan Lopukhin, Jakob Böhme, Jean-Baptiste Willermoz, Jean Bricaud, Louis Claude de Saint-Martin, Martinez de Pasqually, Nikolay Novikov, Ordre Reaux Croix, Valentin Tomberg. Excerpt: Jakob Böhme (probably April 24, 1575 November 17, 1624) was a German Christian mystic and theologian. He is considered an original thinker within the Lutheran tradition. In contemporary English his name may be spelled Jacob Boehme; in seventeenth-century England it was also spelled Behmen, approximating the contemporary English pronunciation of the German Böhme. Jakob Böhme (anonymous portrait)Böhme was born in April 1575 at Alt Seidenberg (now a part of Sulików, Lower Silesian Voivodeship, Poland), a village near Görlitz in Upper Lusatia, a territory of the Holy Roman Empire. His father, George Wissen, was reasonably wealthy, but a peasant nonetheless. Böhme's first job was that of a herd boy, however he was deemed to not be strong enough for husbandry. When he was 14 years old he was sent to Seidenberg as an apprentice to become a shoemaker. His apprenticeship for shoemaking was hard; he lived with a family who were not Christians, which exposed him to the controversies of the time. He regularly prayed and read the Bible as well as works by visionaries such as Paracelsus, Weigel and Schwenckfeld, although he received no formal education. After three years as an apprentice, Böhme left to travel. Although it is unknown just how far he went, he at least made it to Görlitz. By 1599 Böhme was master of his craft with his own premises in Görlitz. That same year he married Katharina daughter of Hans Kuntzschmann, a butcher in Görlitz, and together they had four sons and two daughters. Böhme had a number of mystical experiences throughout his youth, culminating in a vision in...