Boehme was a shoemaker in Gorlitz in Lusatia, with a village school education and no Latin, when in 1600 he experienced something he spent the rest of his life trying to state. The traditional account has it beginning with sunlight striking a pewter dish. What he claimed to have been shown, in a quarter of an hour, was the inner constitution of everything: the ground of nature, the origin of good and evil, and the reason there is a world at all.
He said nothing for twelve years. Then, in 1612, he wrote it out in a manuscript he called Aurora, the dawning of the day in the east, which is dense, repetitive, strange, unfinished and unlike any theological writing before it. He lent it to a friend, copies were made without his knowledge, and one reached Gregorius Richter, the chief pastor of the town, who denounced him from the pulpit as a heretic. The council confiscated the manuscript and instructed him to stop writing.
He obeyed for seven years. Then, in 1618, he began again and did not stop, producing an enormous body of work in six years, circulating in manuscript among a network of sympathetic physicians and nobles, and drawing a second and more violent attack from Richter that drove him out of the town shortly before his death. Almost all of it was printed only after he died.