2,178 Occult Books Now Digitized & Put On-line, Due to the Ritman Library and Da Vinci Code Creator Dan Brown

In 2018 we introduced you some excit­ing information. Due to a gen­er­ous dona­tion from Da Vin­ci Code creator Dan Brown, Amsterdam’s Rit­man Library—a siz­in a position col­lec­tion of pre-1900 books on alche­my, astrol­o­gy, magazine­ic, and oth­er occult topics—has been dig­i­tiz­ing thou­sands of its uncommon texts beneath a dig­i­tal edu­ca­tion venture cheek­i­ly known as “Her­met­i­cal­ly Open.” We at the moment are happy to report that the primary 2,178 books from the Rit­man venture have come avail­in a position of their on-line learn­ing room.

Vis­i­tors needs to be conscious that these books are writ­ten in sev­er­al dif­fer­ent Euro­pean lan­guages. Latin, the schol­ar­ly lan­guage of Europe by­out the Medieval and Ear­ly Mod­ern peri­ods, pre­dom­i­nates, and it’s a pecu­liar Latin at that, laden with jar­gon and alchem­i­cal ter­mi­nol­o­gy. Oth­er books seem in Ger­man, Dutch, and French. Learn­ers of some or all of those lan­guages will after all have an eas­i­er time than mono­lin­gual Eng­lish converse­ers, however there’s nonetheless a lot to supply these vis­i­tors as properly.

In addi­tion to the plea­certain of pag­ing by an previous uncommon guide, even vir­tu­al­ly, Eng­lish converse­ers can fast­ly discover a col­lec­tion of learn­in a position books by click on­ing on the “Place of Pub­li­ca­tion” search fil­ter and choose­ing Cam­bridge or Lon­don, from which come such notable works as The Man-Mouse Takin in a Lure, and tortur’d to demise for gnaw­ing the Mar­gins of Euge­nius Phi­lalethes, by Thomas Vaugh­an, pub­lished in 1650.

The lan­guage is archaic—stuffed with quirky spellings and makes use of of the “lengthy s”—and the con­tent is weird. These famil­iar with this kind of writ­ing, whether or not by his­tor­i­cal examine or the work of newer inter­preters like Aleis­ter Crow­ley or Madame Blavatsky, will rec­og­nize the numerous for­mu­las: The trac­ing of magazine­i­cal cor­re­spon­dences between flo­ra, fau­na, and astro­nom­i­cal phe­nom­e­na; the care­ful pars­ing of names; astrol­o­gy and prolonged lin­guis­tic ety­molo­gies; numero­log­i­cal dis­cours­es and philo­soph­i­cal poet­ry; ear­ly psy­chol­o­gy and per­son­al­i­ty typ­ing; cryp­tic, cod­ed mythol­o­gy and med­ical professional­ce­dures. Though we’ve grown accus­tomed by pop­u­lar media to assume­ing of magazine­i­cal books as cook dinner­books, stuffed with recipes and incan­ta­tions, the true­i­ty is way dif­fer­ent.

Encoun­ter­ing the huge and unusual trea­sures in the net library, one thinks of the kind of the magi­cian rep­re­despatched­ed in Goethe’s Faust, holed up in his examine,

The place even the wel­come day­mild strains
However duski­ly by the paint­ed panes.
Hemmed in by many a prime­pling heap
Of books worm-eat­en, grey with mud,
Which to the vault­ed ceil­ing creep

The library doesn’t solely con­tain occult books. Just like the weary schol­ar Faust, alchemists of previous “stud­ied now Phi­los­o­phy / And Jurispru­dence, Med­i­cine,— / And even, alas! The­ol­o­gy.” Click on on Cam­bridge because the place of pub­li­ca­tion and also you’ll discover the work above by Hen­ry Extra, “one of many cel­e­brat­ed ‘Cam­bridge Pla­ton­ists,’” the Lin­da Corridor Library notes, “who flour­ished in mid-Seventeenth-cen­tu­ry and did their greatest to rec­on­cile Pla­to with Chris­tian­i­ty and the mechan­i­cal phi­los­o­phy that was start­ning to make inroads into British nat­ur­al phi­los­o­phy.” Those that examine Euro­pean intel­lec­tu­al his­to­ry know properly that Extra’s pres­ence in this col­lec­tion isn’t any anom­aly. For just a few hun­dred years, it was dif­fi­cult, if not impos­si­ble, to sep­a­charge the pur­fits of the­ol­o­gy, phi­los­o­phy, med­i­cine, and sci­ence (or “nat­ur­al phi­los­o­phy”) from these of alche­my and astrol­o­gy. (Isaac New­ton is a well-known examination­ple of a mathematician/scientist/alchemist/believer in unusual apoc­a­lyp­tic pre­dic­tions.) Enter the Rit­man’s new dig­i­tal col­lec­tion of occult texts right here.

Observe: An ear­li­er ver­sion of this put up appeared on our web site in 2018.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

A Large Archive of Occult Document­ings: His­toric Audio Lets You Hear Trances, Para­nor­mal Music, Glos­so­lalia & Oth­er Unusual Sounds (1905–2007)

Dis­cov­er The Key of Hell, an Illus­trat­ed 18th-Cen­tu­ry Information to Black Magazine­ic (1775)

Isaac Newton’s Recipe for the Delusion­i­cal ‘Thinker’s Stone’ Is Being Dig­i­tized & Put On-line (Together with His Oth­er Alche­my Man­u­scripts)

Aleis­ter Crow­ley Reads Occult Poet­ry within the Solely Identified Document­ings of His Voice (1920)

The Sur­re­al Paint­ings of the Occult Magi­cian, Author & Moun­taineer, Aleis­ter Crow­ley

Josh Jones is a author and musi­cian based mostly in Durham, NC.