Alchemy in Jacob Boehme’s Theosophy | Down the Rabbit Hole

During the Early Modern Period the world was undergoing a major transition from a geocentric to a heliocentric cosmogony; from an occult and animistic landscape to a mechanistic and reductionist one defined by mechanistic processes that operated independently of any conscious and creative force. The indeterminate space left vacant between Copernican limelight and the Newtonian sunrise was quickly filled by the speculative and metaphysical vision of Jacob Boehme (1575-1624), a German cobbler who integrated streams of Hermetic, Renaissance Neo-platonic, alchemical, mystical, Christian, and early scientific thought to create a Weltanschauung (a comprehensive view of the world) apprehended in theosophical terms. In 1600 Boehme had been overrun by a spiritual emergency involving the sun’s reflection in a pewter dish, a phenomenon which convinced him that the being and body of God was omnipresent in all things animate and alive or inert and seemingly lifeless. Quintessentially esoteric in his reasoning, this leitmotif is blatantly expressed in Aurora (1612) when he says: “Where is God? Listen you blind human, you live in God and God in you…”