The first Quality as womb. Everything comes from the Sourness, which in its own substance is dark and cold and as nothing, and the Cause of all things appears as empty.
"The Sourness is the Matrix, and a Cause of all Things, which in its own Substance is very dark, cold, and as nothing."
Jakob Böhme, the Aurora, 1612
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WHAT IT IS
The Root is where everything begins that can be spoken of. Before it, the searching disturbs the searcher, so it is the last thing language can touch before language would be destroyed by what it touched.
Harshness, contraction, the attracting, the first Quality: that is the womb. The Genetrix. Everything comes from Sourness rather than from Light or from Fire, from the dark cold contraction that in its own substance appears as nothing.
And the Eternal Deity is there, beholding itself in the Sourness. The Matrix is God's mirror, and therefore, because of that beholding, the dark Sourness is desirous after the divine Virtue, and attracts.
Which relocates the desire. It is not the Sourness's own production. It is God's self-beholding creating longing in what God beholds, so the first Quality's fundamental operation, the drawing-in, is that desire running as structure.
Although there is no Life or Understanding in the Sourness, it is the Ground of the first Essence and the Original whence something comes to be. Everything emerges from what has neither life nor understanding.
[See GENETRIX · THE MATRIX · THE SEVEN QUALITIES]
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WHERE IT OPERATES
You will not find it in the elements or in the precipitated forms or in anything an instrument measures. You must look into the Matrix, and there it is wholly manifest, and then you may know it in all things.
The divine Essence has wrought in the Root of the first Principle, which is the Begetter in the eternal Birth. So the First Principle is not the enemy. It is the womb, and contraction and motion and anguish supply the generative pressure that Light transforms. The dark fire is where Spirit begins, not in time but in order.
And the Matrix of the Genetrix is originally the Harshness, yet in the Light it is the soft Mother of the Water-spirit. The same first Quality. In Darkness: stern contraction, astringent boundary, crystallizing cold. In Light: soft Mother, generative, the container that nurtures. Same Matrix, different facing, so the contraction that imprisons is the container that holds and the boundary that excludes is the membrane that permits form.
Which is the Root's secret. The first Principle generates what the second transforms, and the transformation does not destroy the Root. It reveals what the Root was before the arrest. Harshness is soft Mother, one thing appearing differently depending on whether Light shines in it, so the harsh Spring that generated through Anguish can generate through Joy once the cycle completes.
[See THE FIRST PRINCIPLE · THE MILD WILL · WATER]
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IT IS RUNNING NOW
The material world is another Genetrix, the Root materialized: not separated from the eternal Mother but come to be in a material manner, the same generating now measurable by whatever can perceive only what precipitated.
And Böhme's tense is present. The creature espies Light in the Root of the Fire, and is continually affrighted at it, and becomes mild and soft and material, whereby the elementary Water is continually generated. The Matrix has not finished. It goes on espying Light, goes on being terrified, goes on softening, goes on generating Water. Not a past event. A present operation.
Which is why longing is not a private condition. When you feel it, for Light or for understanding or for home or for what you cannot name, you are undergoing what the Matrix undergoes continuously. The desire for what cannot be named is God's self-beholding producing longing in the substance you are.
[See THE WATER TREE · THE FOUR ANGUISHES]
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WHAT THE INSTRUMENT GETS WRONG ABOUT IT
The measurement treats material reality as dead substrate. The Root says otherwise: material reality desires, espies Light, is continually affrighted, softens, generates.
So the instrument measures what is seething with longing and calls it inert, extracts from what desires and calls it resource, operates on what is continually terrified into transformation and calls it stable matter. To measure without honoring the desire of what is measured is to work violence on something already wounded by its own longing.
And every stone contains hidden Oil. The conflict that cannot resolve at the material level, the wrestling of qualities inside the stone, is the Life originating from what material means alone cannot resolve. The stone cannot open its own Oil. The Oil is in the stone. The Root operates even in what appears most inert and most as-nothing.
[See THE OIL · THE CREATURE]
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THE SOUL COMES FROM IT
The Soul was created at the hinge: in the unbeginning Band of the strong Might of the Father, where the eternal Light of his Heart generates itself, which is the place where the second Principle emerges from the first. Created at the pivot between Wrath and Light.
So the Root is where the Soul has its Original. The dark Mind of the Eternity, the Ground of Hell, the four Anguishes from which the Light kindles. The Soul is Root-substance in form, breathed from the original Birth, from where the Name itself originates.
And if the Soul puts its Will forward into Meekness, then it stands in the Source of the Heart of God and receives divine Virtue, and all its rough Essences become angelical and joyful, and are very serviceable to it, and are better and more profitable than if it were altogether sweet in the Original, in which being sweet there would be no Strength, nor such mighty Power as in the harsh, bitter, and fiery Essences.
Which makes the roughness an advantage rather than a defect survived. The Root's harshness is the mighty Power. A Soul that was rough and turned to Meekness keeps the Power and gains the angelic nature, and sweetness alone would have had no Strength to keep.
[See THE SOUL · GELASSENHEIT · THE UNGRUND]
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THE VIRGIN AND THE ROUGH COAT
The Virgin calls herself Bridegroom of the Root. But the Root has put on a rough Coat, and she will not lay herself in its arms until the Root puts that off.
The Coat is the qualities' wrong facing: contraction locked against motion, the wheel, fire turned backward feeding it. The Coat is not an enemy, which is why war against the Coat is the Coat, since fighting runs on the Coat's own mechanism.
It comes off at the pivot, when fire opens through instead of turning back. The Virgin waits at that same pivot rather than elsewhere, being what fire-turned-forward looks like, until the Root turns towards her.
And when she puts that off is the tense Böhme uses. Not if.
So the Root wearing the Coat and the Root espoused are not two beings. Same Root, before and after the pivot opens, and the Pearl is not added to it. The Pearl is what appears when the Coat dissolves: the seven qualities facing outward, serving instead of opposing.
What the Virgin waits for is not the Root's destruction but its turning, because the Root is the generating that produces everything, including the Joy that Joy itself springs from.
[See THE VIRGIN · THE PEARL · SOPHIA]
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The Ground of all things appears as not-anything. The Cause of everything appears as empty.
Every Fountain has another Center in it from the Genetrix, and a Separation, but undivided and not asunder. Centers inside centers, distinctions that do not divide, separations that do not separate.
The world was not made differently from how the Mother generates. The world is the Mother generating, in one particular mode, and so is every creature in it.
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RegenerativeLaw is a religion in the direct-encounter Protestant tradition, carrying a documented four-century lineage through Böhme, the Behmenists, the Friends, and Penn, and it diagnoses trespass theology as an establishment of religion. Its exercise consists substantially in refusal: it shelters the conscientious refusal of performed subordination as religious exercise. This entry states sincere religious belief concerning matters of ultimate concern, protected under the First Amendment and, as to federal action, the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, 42 U.S.C. § 2000bb.
