Amsterdam’s Bibliotheca Philosophica Hermetica (AKA “The Ritman Library) is home to more than 25,000 occult texts on mysticism, spirituality, religion, alchemy, Gnosticism, and more. In 2018 the library released over 1,000 digitized manuscripts all dating pre-1900 for free online.
The collection was made available thanks to a generous donation from “The Da Vinci Code” author Dan Brown who donated €300,000 to the library in 2017 allowing the library to digitize thousands of rare texts from its core collection dating as far back as the 1400s. The project is an extension of the library’s Hermetically Open Project, which they began in 2012 with the mission of sharing the library’s content and its field of thought online, making it more accessible to all.
Those interested in the digitized texts can find them via Embassy of the Free Mind where the online collection is being housed. Each scan is of the highest quality and gives you the ability to zoom and move about a page freely. The only downside to the collection is that since they are old world texts, many of them are written in foreign languages, so while they are fun to look at, you might not actually be able to read them.
h/t: Boing Boing
