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There are mystics who speak about God.
And then there are mystics who speak from inside the rupture where language fails.

Marguerite Porete and Jakob Böhme never met, never read one another, and never belonged to the same spiritual moment — yet they arise from the same psychic territory: the place where inner revelation bypasses permission.

Both were untrained by institutions.
Both spoke in symbolic, paradoxical language.
Both were accused not because they denied God — but because they claimed direct knowing.

🜁 The Archetype They Share: The Unauthorized Mystic

Through a Jungian lens, Porete and Böhme embody what might be called the Self-Taught Self — the archetype that emerges when the psyche is seized by numinous truth before the ego has a sanctioned framework to contain it.

Jung warned that encounters with the Self are destabilizing not only for the individual, but for the collective. When someone speaks from that depth without mediation, the system feels exposed.

And exposure is experienced as threat.

🔥 Marguerite Porete: Love Beyond Obedience

Marguerite Porete was a Beguine — a lay mystic woman outside monastic authority — who wrote The Mirror of Simple Souls. In it, she described a soul so united with divine love that it moved beyond virtue, effort, and even obedience.

Not immoral.
Post-moral.

From a Jungian perspective, Porete articulated a consciousness beyond ego-based righteousness — what Jung might later recognize as individuation that has passed through the moral superego and returned to an inner law.

The Church could not tolerate this.

A woman claiming union without intermediaries, without penance, without fear — this struck directly at the collective shadow of control. Her book was burned. She refused to recant.

Then she was.

🌌 Jakob Böhme: God in the Contradiction

Jakob Böhme was a shoemaker who received a sudden, overwhelming vision while gazing at reflected light. From that rupture poured a cosmology of fire, darkness, desire, and becoming.

He wrote of God not as static perfection, but as living tension — a divine process that includes wrath, longing, and differentiation.

Jung would later echo this exact insight when he spoke of the dark side of the Self and the necessity of holding opposites. Böhme intuited psychologically what theology could not yet bear: that wholeness contains contradiction.

Authorities warned him to stop writing.

He didn’t.

🪞 The Mirror They Hold

Porete and Böhme reflect a truth that repeats across history:

✨ Inner authority threatens external power
✨ Symbolic language frightens literal minds
✨ Direct knowing destabilizes hierarchy

They weren’t rebels for rebellion’s sake. They were obedient to something deeper — an inner summons that did not ask permission.

And that kind of obedience is the most dangerous of all.

✍️ Journaling Prompts

📓 Where in my life do I sense truth before I can explain it?
📓 What part of me waits for permission to trust my own knowing?
📓 Where has my inner authority been labeled dangerous, arrogant, or wrong?
📓 What symbols, dreams, or images keep returning — asking to be listened to rather than justified?

🌙 Closing Thoughts

History does not only persecute prophets.

It persecutes those who remember.

Marguerite Porete and Jakob Böhme remind us that the deepest truths often arrive without credentials, without polish, and without safety nets. They emerge raw, symbolic, and disruptive — not to destroy faith, but to return it to the living soul.

Not all mirrors are comfortable.

Some are meant to wake us up. 🔥

🔔 Invitation

If this reflection stirred something in you, don’t rush to define it. Sit with the discomfort, the resonance, the quiet recognition. Truth often arrives as a symbol long before it becomes a sentence.

Let yourself listen.

With devotion and wonder,
The Inspired Imaginative | The Devoted Mystic

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