Jakob Böhme (; ; 24 April 1575 – 17 November 1624) was a German philosopher, Christian mystic, and LutheranProtestanttheologian. He was considered an original thinker by many of his contemporaries within the Lutheran tradition, and his first book, commonly known as ''Aurora'', caused a great scandal. In contemporary English, his name may be spelled Jacob Boehme (retaining the older German spelling); in seventeenth-century England it was also spelled Behmen, approximating the contemporary English pronunciation of the German ''Böhme''.