In our mission of enhancing reader awareness of German Luminary Bô Yin Râ (Joseph Anton Schneiderfranken, 1876-1943), Three Sages recently published a special two-part series entitled “Germany and Humanity’s Salvation: Bô Yin Râ; Jakob Böhme; Magische Blätter; The Bô Yin Râ Foundations; Kober Press; Books to Light…Now becoming more accessible in English”, Parts 1 and 2 : HERE and HERE.
To the best of our knowledge, Three Sages is, at present, the only English-language website publishing Bô Yin Râ’s material. We offer our gratitude to Books to Light—USA for permission to post copyrighted material and to the German Bô Yin Râ Foundation for permission to post reproductions of Bô Yin Râ’s paintings from their website. We also offer thanks to the Centre for Research on Globalization for posting our articles on their website at www.globalresearch.ca.
Bô Yin Râ’s great and timeless accomplishment was writing and publishing his 32-volume compendium of spiritual guidance entitled Hortus Conclusus (“The Enclosed Garden”). By profession, Bô Yin Râ was an artist, known especially for his paintings of landscapes with profound meditative overtones, but one who also produced a series of more “abstract” spiritual paintings that were published as a separate volume within Hortus Conclusus entitled Worlds of Spirit.
After lifetimes of searching and study, we at Three Sages can confirm without reservation that Hortus Conclusus has no parallel in world literature. Over the last year, Three Sages has also worked with Books to Light—USA on reproducing English translations of numerous books and sections of books from Hortus Conclusus, with more to come. These may be accessed via our archive HERE.
Bô Yin Râ lived and worked during apocalyptic times, which even today do not appear to have reached their conclusion.
Josef Anton Schneiderfranken—who later received the spiritual name Bô Yin Râ from the Luminaries by whom he was initiated—was born in Aschaffenburg, Germany in 1876, just after the formation of the German Empire, which took place at the end of the Franco-Prussian War in 1870.
As a united Germany consolidated and gained strength over the next four decades, it began to compete with the British, French, and Russian Empires in the acquisition of industrial and military power and in establishing colonies—chiefly in Africa—along with creating the maritime capabilities required by its growing international trade. It was axiomatic among the industrialized nations that only by maintaining a favorable balance of trade, to which colonies contributed substantially, could domestic populations, including those at the top of the income ladder, attain a satisfactory level of prosperity.
Conflict and war resulted, and due to the competition among European powers, World Wars I and II were waged. The chief antagonists were Great Britain and Germany. As it had done against Napoleon, Britain built a coalition against Germany to accomplish what the relatively small island nation could not achieve on its own. In 1907 the Triple Entente was formed, consisting of Britain, France, and Russia. As war broke out in 1914, Germany was joined by Austria-Hungary, Bulgaria, and the Ottoman Empire. Italy cast its lot with the Entente.
But the two chief allied powers, Britain and France—Russia dropped out in 1917 under a massive German assault and after the Bolshevik Revolution—could not have won the war without the United States. It was the U.S. that provided a gigantic quantity of armaments that allowed the British and French armies to stand up to Germany on the Western Front. These armaments were built by an American industrial machine under the dictatorial control of industrial czar Bernard Baruch, a wealthy Wall Street investor named to his post by U.S. President Woodrow Wilson.
The more than two million troops the U.S. ferried across “the Pond” to France freed up the British to attack the Ottomans in Palestine in fulfillment of the pledge conveyed by the Balfour Declaration to Lionel Walter Rothschild to support “the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people.” After the war, Palestine became a British “mandate” under the League of Nations.
Above all, it was passage by Congress of the Federal Reserve Act of 1913 that enabled American banks to loan the vast amounts of money Britain and France required to pay for the war, debts largely passed on to Germany in “reparations.” The Federal Reserve was modeled on the Bank of England. Its legislative charter was written by the British Rothschilds. For more detail on these machinations, see my recent book, Our Country, Then and Now.
Returning to Bô Yin Râ, September 1912-August 1913 marked a major milestone in his spiritual development when he traveled to Greece and met his spiritual mentor, a Luminary from the East, along with other spiritual disciples. It was during this journey that he acquired his spiritual name. While in Greece, he also sketched, painted, and wrote several books of the future cycle Hortus Conclusus, while beginning to submit writings for publication with the initials B.Y.R.
Returning to Germany in 1913, he worked as a painter in Munich and Berlin and continued to publish spiritual works with the B.Y.R. initials. World War I broke out in the summer of 1914, following the assassination of Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife in the Bosnian city of Sarajevo. Due to fear of being defeated in a two-front war, Germany attacked France through a neutral Belgium, action which gave Britain its hoped-for casus belli. Britain declared war on Germany on August 4, 1914.
Within two years of unremitting slaughter, the Western Front had reached stalemate. Within Germany, the military draft had expanded to encompass older men. In November 1916, the 40-year-old Joseph Anton Schneiderfranken—Bô Yin Râ—was inducted. At risk of summary execution, he refused to touch a weapon, but by some miracle was assigned to write medical reports and perform administrative work.
In March 1917, he was transferred to work at a POW camp as a translator for Greek soldiers in Görlitz, Silesia, until the end of the war. Görlitz had been the home of renowned German mystic and philosopher Jacob Böhme from 1599 until his death in 1624. Today, Görlitz is the easternmost town in Germany, situated in the state of Saxony.
Residence in Görlitz saw a period of intense creativity. In 1920, Bô Yin Râ founded the Jacob Böhme Society (Jakob Böhme-Bund) with fellow artists and completed his painting cycle of twenty Spiritual Perspectives, later published as Worlds of Spirit. With the famed publisher Kurt Wolff of Leipzig, he published the central book of Hortus Conclusus, entitled The Book on the Living God, the first work to show his complete spiritual name of Bô Yin Râ.
Image: Joseph Anton Schneiderfranken, Bô Yin Râ (1920) (Public Domain)
Numerous additional titles followed. Bô Yin Râ was also instrumental in founding a journal called Magische Blätter, or “Magic Leaves,” which became the prime vehicle for himself and a community of creative artists to convey his teachings and related spiritual ideas to a growing audience. Eventually, Bô Yin Râ’s writings would reach an audience of millions within the German-speaking world.
But the German nation was far from having recovered from the “Great War.” On November 9, 1918, two days before the Armistice that ended hostilities, the Weimar Republic had been declared. Wikipedia states: “In its initial years, grave problems beset the Republic, such as hyperinflation and political extremism, including political murders and two attempted coups d’etat by contending paramilitaries; internationally, it suffered isolation, reduced diplomatic standing, and contentious relationships with the great powers.”
It was obvious that the victors of World War I had no intention of allowing Germany to regain its former strength and stature. Yet Germany had lost the war without ever having been invaded. Many Germans believed the country had been betrayed by the representatives of the Weimar Republic who signed the Treaty of Versailles. Thus the Allies had unfinished business with the German nation, for a thousand years the heart of the venerable Holy Roman Empire, and its population of remarkable people.
Bô Yin Râ now decided to emigrate from Germany for what his daughter Datti characterized as “political reasons.” He was deeply engaged in work on Hortus Conclusus, which he finally completed in 1936.
Meanwhile, within a decade of the signing of the Treaty of Versailles, the German economy had collapsed with the coming of the Great Depression in 1929, with the Nazis under Adolf Hitler soon taking over. In 1934, Hitler’s secret police murdered thousands of his perceived enemies in the “Night of the Long Knives” and its aftermath. The SS and Gestapo now ran German society.
In 1935 the government blacklisted Bô Yin Râ’s writings as part of a general censorship program. They tried without success to determine with whom Bô Yin Râ, from his “seclusion,” as they called it, in Switzerland, was associated. In 1941, the successor to Magische Blätter, Die Säule (“The Column”) was forcibly shut down and its personnel arrested.
There can be little doubt that when Bô Yin Râ made his decision to leave Germany, he was able to look ahead to the time when his life’s work would have become impossible. Obviously, he had to get out. Over a two-year period, from 1923-1925, he relocated with his family to Switzerland, settling in a villa in Massagno/Lugano, Tessin, near the Italian border, and later becoming a citizen. By 1927, his writings were being published by Kober Verlag AG in Bern.
Once in Switzerland, a long period of productivity followed, during which Bô Yin Râ exerted a profound influence on the consciousness of Central Europe, lasting into the first years of World War II. Among those he counseled personally were many members of both the Catholic and Protestant clergy. One of his contacts was said to have been Cardinal Angelo Giuseppe Roncalli, the future Pope John XXIII and convener of Vatican II. Bô Yin Râ is also said to have influenced the eventual creation of the European Union through figures such as Italian prime minister Alcide De Gasperi. Bô Yin Râ passed away in Massagno in 1943, as the tide was turning against Germany in the war.
When Bô Yin Râ moved to Switzerland, he left behind so many followers that his correspondence assumed daunting proportions to the point where he eventually had to give it up. This left his published writings and attendant art works as the sole means of conveying the spirit of his body of work.
But while still in Germany, BYR counted among his followers individuals from the highest social strata, including the old German nobility which had been driven into ruin by the war and the collapse of the German monarchy under Kaiser Wilhelm II.
One of those he had to leave behind when departing Germany was Elisabeth von Oldenburg, who had been working with him since 1910. Her title of nobility was Duchess Elisabeth of Mecklenburg-Schwerin. By marriage she was Grand Duchess Consort of Oldenburg, having married Frederick Augustus II, Grand Duke of Oldenburg, in 1896, whose first wife had died. It’s said that for privacy’s sake, Elisabeth von Oldenburg had to travel incognito to Görlitz to visit the master.
The region of Oldenburg, located about 100 miles southwest of Hamburg, had been recognized as part of the Holy Roman Empire for over 800 years when Frederick Augustus was born in 1852. It had close political ties to Denmark and to other German duchies and city-states in the region, including the Hanseatic city of Lubeck, birthplace of German novelist Thomas Mann.
The Grand Duchy of Oldenburg was one of many autonomous states that had become part of the German Empire and fought on the side of Kaiser Wilhelm II in World War I before they were abolished as political entities by the Weimar Republic. During World War I, Frederick Augustus commanded a cavalry regiment. Following Germany’s surrender, he took part in various industrial enterprises but, at a time when the income and privileges of the German nobility had collapsed, had to sell a large part of his family’s art collection for his family to survive.
Despite the hardships of post-war life, during which members of the former German nobility were subjected to severe scrutiny and frequent persecution and privation, Elisabeth von Oldenburg lived for twenty-four years after her husband’s death in 1931. They had five children, with two dying in infancy, the oldest being Nicholaus, Hereditary Grand Duke of Oldenburg (1897-1970), who succeeded to his father’s titles when the latter died and was known as the “pretender” to the Grand Duchy. The current Duke of Oldenburg is Christian Nikolaus Udo Peter Herzog von Oldenburg (b. 1955). He and his wife Caroline have four children, so the family line continues.
My purpose in providing this information on the family of Elisabeth von Oldenburg is to show how deeply embedded in traditional German society were many of the followers of Bô Yin Râ. This was no ephemeral relationship. He also influenced the royal house of the Netherlands. To some he was known as an “Indian guru” or a “guru from Switzerland.” Reportedly, his discussions of higher life on other planets was a topic of interest.
Writings by Elisabeth of her experiences with Bô Yin Râ appeared in the pages of Magische Blâtter, with the only known English translation being her commentary on the Lord’s Prayer appearing here on Three Sages in the above-mentioned articles. A significant body of her additional writings and commentaries exists in German, much of it unpublished, including letters to her from Bô Yin Râ.
Following is one such unpublished manuscript quoting Bô Yin Râ that carries deep meaning and significance for events in our time. We have been provided with the translation of this material by a German source. Not being part of Hortus Conclusus,this information cannot be viewed as an official part of his spiritual guidance but is of great interest nonetheless. This material actually elaborates on some of the themes that are covered by Hortus Conclusus.
Three Sages presents this material without further comment, while referring readers to the numerous excerpts from Bô Yin Râ’s body of work previously posted or available from the sources we have cited in the articles entitled “Germany and Humanity’s Salvation,” Parts 1 and 2. See in particular The Path to God, The Great Struggle, published on Three Sages on August 1, 2025.
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The key manuscript from Elisabeth von Oldenburg that unlocks so much understanding of the time in which we live reads as follows. Fair Use is claimed for the English translation. All italicized quotations are from Bô Yin Râ.
Regarding the question of whether the “Father” addressed in the Bible is the Father of Jesus.
Yes, he is the one mentioned in the oldest writings, including the Bible: “The Ancient of Ancients, the Chief Angel.” The hierarchy of spirits is the channel through which prayer is directed to the first “begotten spirit-human.” This “First” is the central being of all, and, through the members of the hierarchy, brings about fulfillment. A distinction must be made between the original spirit-human being, whom the “Word” speaks—the “Father”—and the beings begotten from Him, who are of his kind, that is, “spiritual beings,” but on a far lower level. “Child of God”—yes, we are indeed emanations of the divine substance that fills the “Father.”
About Jesus and the Gospels.
The main focus of his work lies in the spiritual world. There, in the “realm of causes,” he creates, according to his spiritual mission and in compliance with the “Father,” the conditions that his fellow human beings need to receive spiritual help. Of course, he cannot perform “miracles,” and everything reported about them is either to be understood symbolically or belongs to the realm of myth. Nevertheless, he possesses certain intellectual abilities that border on the miraculous. The priesthood of the Jewish Temple in Jerusalem sought to eliminate Jesus as a hated and more than inconvenient admonisher, and they finally succeeded when the people wanted to proclaim Jesus king upon his entry into Jerusalem. They found a pretext to force the Roman authorities to execute him as a seditionist, in the manner then customary for such crimes.
If there is anyone in Europe today who has something authentic to say about Jesus, that person is me [i.e., Bô Yin Râ], and it would be a lie if I did not expressly emphasize this fact with conventional modesty. But all of us who are truly the “shining ones of the primordial light” represent the earthly expression of the eternal primordial word, some in a more powerful way, others in a more earthy way, just as it has been given to each of us by the Father. The “Word” that is from “God” and that is “God” was confirmed in each of us when they saw “his star.”
On the Gospel of John and the “Revelation.”
That it is not the work of the Apostle, but was written 120 to 150 years later by an unknown author, and that the version preserved today is based on a completely corrupt text from the 4th century (earlier versions are nonexistent), will be nothing new to you. The so-called “Revelation” is the work of very different authors living at different times. Some were knowledgeable, others mediums and fanatical believers of the new cult that arose from remnants of paganism. This textual material was later compiled by a person who was a true poet, resulting in the almost magnificent effect in the form we have today. It should be read in this original context, and then the insertions should be examined for their common character. The “revisers” were not “bad people,” but rather imbued with the conviction that their changes would bring about the triumph of right. And often these “false” poets, acting in good faith, were truly better poets than the writers of the original text.
About Yahweh — About Yahweh (a given, real being — About the Christian God a being created through faith — About the “Prince of Darkness.”
What was venerated and worshipped under this name was one of the “Powerful Beings of the cosmos,” one of the invisible, but therefore by no means “spiritual,” intelligences in the universe, which the Jews call “Dhyan-cholan” (pronounced cholan) and venerate as the spirits of the planets. In Hebrew teachings, they are sometimes understood as “Elohim.”
They are beings that consist only of intelligence, and for them, the belief in the spiritual, which they find in humans, is mere folly, since the spirit remains incomprehensible to them. They are a kind of “ruler” of the material cosmos, have an incomprehensibly long life by earthly standards, but are ultimately transient in gradual dissolution. They are also the true rulers in the realm of intelligence accessible to humankind: intellectual understanding, where they seek to persuade people to abandon, judging by their capacity for knowledge, the folly of believing in spiritual matters. The “Prince of this World” in the words of Joshua [Jesus?] is one of these powerful beings in the cosmos, namely the one whose consciousness resides in the matter of Earth. Jesus, through his act of love on Golgotha, deprived him of the majority of his power. Since no “name registration” is possible here, there is naturally no determination as to whether this planetary intelligence of Earth or another is the original god “Yahweh”; written in Hebrew: YHWH. (The lesser Kabbalists still work today with countless of the wildest names.) I say this only to be completely correct, because for me there is no doubt about this identity!— “Yachweh,” as it is pronounced, or “Yahweh,” however it is written, is an undeniably given entity that has nothing to do with an entity created through the collective faith of many. The Christian God of today is of a different kind, insofar as it refers to the concept that is almost universally equated with “God.”
Just as it was Jesus’ task to break the power of the “prince of this world,” so it became mine to redeem humanity, both present and future, from the power of the self-created idol and to show it that behind this all-too-humanly shaped false god there is the true deity, and how it is to be conceived in fact. Only then can what Jesus of Nazareth knew how to say finally become reality.!!!!! [Emphasis in original]
Although countless people have called themselves “Christians” for two millennia, Christianity, if one understands it as the teachings of Jesus, has always existed only in very few places on Earth. The rest is a pre-Christian mystery cult, continuing under another name and partly corrupted, or an ethical community partially detached from it, which, apart from a few Christian-tinged dogmas, possesses absolutely nothing that wasn’t already written down as wisdom from the ancient world long before the appearance of the Master of Nazareth. It is reserved for the future to recognize the true significance of the Master of Nazareth and to gradually see the core of his teachings come to life. Finally, it should be said that the name “Yahweh” was never uttered by any Jew, as it was considered too holy. They said Adonai – the Lord – or chose other circumlocutions.
The “Prince of Darkness” is the actual essence of this “Prince.” Anything else one might imagine him to be is irrelevant to this fact. All of the physical world is subject to this Prince—and everything physical, everything the animal body does—thinking, brain, etc.—is under his control and influence. This is a material entity that will one day dissolve and come to an end. Jesus did not break the spell of the intellect, but rather the power and might of this monstrous, one, material entity, which is all intellect; its fulfillment is intellect, and only insofar as was the intellect broken, whose original source and essence is the very being of the Prince of Darkness. If we were to learn about the powerful being in his “reality” in school, as we learn about the “devil,” then we would know from childhood to whom we can fall prey and how to prevent it. Since we are unaware of it, the mighty one can wield this immense power unhindered; no one learns to defend themselves.
Our ancestors knew very well about him. We have lost this knowledge, and perhaps much was omitted when the modern Bible was compiled. — That the “Great Controversy” is no longer agreeable to you is quite another matter. The starry heavens reject everything of this kind. All the star rays stand upright in a defiant, almost defensive posture when something negative and dark approaches.
I hope that is helpful.
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It’s up to you, our readers, to make use of this material as you see fit. Our first recommendation is for you to begin, or continue, your own journey along the spiritual path, with Bô Yin Râ’s Hortus Conclusus an always-available resource. Links to acquire English translations may be found in the material referenced earlier. We can refer you in particular to a free on-line PDF of The Book on the Living God, available HERE. (Fair Use claimed.)
We would also make special reference to what Bô Yin Râ is saying about the absolute necessity of recognizing the presence and works of the Prince of Darkness and learning to protect ourselves from that. As Bô Yin Râ indicates, it is extremely unfortunate that young people are not taught sufficiently about this. One such protection that Bô Yin Râ emphasizes is the sanctity of marriage.
For everyone receiving this message, the time to start is NOW, using the resources being freely provided. And you can also feel free to share with your friends the “good news.”
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Richard C. Cook is a retired U.S. federal analyst with extensive experience across various government agencies, including the U.S. Civil Service Commission, FDA, the Carter White House, NASA, and the U.S. Treasury. He is a graduate of the College of William and Mary. As a whistleblower at the time of the Challenger disaster, he exposed the flawed O-ring joints that destroyed the Space Shuttle, documenting his story in the book “Challenger Revealed.” After serving at Treasury, he became a vocal critic of the private finance-controlled monetary system, detailing his concerns in “We Hold These Truths: The Hope of Monetary Reform.” He served as an adviser to the American Monetary Institute and worked with Congressman Dennis Kucinich to advocate for replacing the Federal Reserve with a genuine national currency. See his new book, Our Country, Then and Now, Clarity Press, 2023. Also see his Three Sages Substack and his American Geopolitical Institute articles at https://www.vtforeignpolicy.com/category/agi/.
“Every human enterprise must serve life, must seek to enrich existence on earth, lest man become enslaved where he seeks to establish his dominion!” Bô Yin Râ (Joseph Anton Schneiderfranken, 1876-1943), translation by Posthumus Projects Amsterdam, 2014. Also download the Kober Press edition of The Book on the Living God here.
He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG).
Featured image: Painting by Bô Yin Râ: “The depicted Asklepieion zu Athen is situated on the southern slope of the Athenian Acropolis, with the Philopappos Hill in the background.” (Source: Three Sages)
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