Jakob Böhme

Jakob Böhme
Idealized portrait of Böhme from Theosophia Revelata (1730)
Born	1575 Alt Seidenberg near Görlitz, Upper Lusatia, Holy Roman Empire
Died	17 November 1624 Görlitz, Upper Lusatia, Holy Roman Empire
Other names	Jacob Boehme, Jacob Behmen (English spellings)
Era	Modern philosophy
Region	Western philosophy
School	Christian mysticism
Notable ideas	The mystical being of the deity as the Ungrund ("unground") or the ground without a ground
Influences Abdul Karim Jili, Paracelsus, Kaspar von Schwenkfeld, Valentine Weigel
Influenced Nikolai Berdyaev, William Blake, Hegel, John Pordage, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling, Schopenhauer, Paul Tillich

Jakob Böhme (/ˈbeɪmə, ˈboʊ-/; 1575 – 17 November 1624) was a German Christian mystic and theologian. He was considered an original thinker by many of his contemporaries within the Lutheran tradition, and his first book, commonly known as Aurora, caused a great scandal. 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.

Böhme was born on 8 March 1575 at Alt Seidenberg (now Stary Zawidów, Poland), a village near Görlitz in Upper Lusatia, a territory of the Kingdom of Bohemia. His father, George Wissen, was Lutheran, reasonably wealthy, but a peasant nonetheless. Böhme was the fourth of five children. Böhme's first job was that of a herd boy. He was, however, deemed to be not 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. In 1592 Böhme returned from his journeyman years. 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 he and Katharina had four sons and two daughters.