Dionysius Andreas Freher, Boehme’s Apostle to the English

Abstract This chapter details how Dionysius Andreas Freher brought the spiritual alchemy of rebirth from the Low Countries to England and thus served as the most important link for transmitting it to the nineteenth century. Freher arrived in Amsterdam in late 1685 and soon joined a religious commune near Leiden, led by Johann Georg Gichtel’s disciple Johann Wilhelm Überfeld. In this context, Freher immersed himself into the writings of Jacob Boehme for almost ten years. Eventually, his conflicts with Überfeld and news of Jane Leade’s Philadelphian Society in London prompted him to go to England. Not much is known about Freher’s life there, yet he seems to have acted as a Boehme expert who explained the theosopher’s opaque writings to an English audience. Freher’s main work on Boehme, Fundamenta mystica, also described the spiritual alchemy of rebirth. In shortened form, one of Freher’s treatises found inclusion in an influential nineteenth-century volume on alchemy.