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Discover the legacy of Joost R. Ritman, founder of the Bibliotheca Philosophica Hermetica (formerly known as the Ritman Library) and the vis
Ritman assembled the most comprehensive private collection of works on alchemy and Hermeticism in the world. Open to the public in Amsterdam.
The Ritman Library - Amsterdam
collection of over 23,000 rare esoteric books on alchemy, magic and the occult. This documentary is a good yet tantalizing look inside.
In 2018 we brought you some exciting news.
Back in December we brought you some exciting news.
[Note: Article is from February 2018.]
Back in December we brought you some exciting news. Thanks to a generous donation from Da Vinci Code author Dan Brown, Amsterdam’s Ritman Library — a sizable collection of pre-1900 books on alchemy, astrology, magic, and other occult subjects — has been digitizing thousands of its rare texts under a digital education project cheekily called “Hermetically Open.” We are now pleased to report, less than two months later, that the first 1,617 books from the Ritman project have come available in their online reading room. The site is still in beta, so to speak; in their Facebook announcement, the Ritman admits they are “still improving the whole presentation,” which is a bit clunky at the moment. But for fans and students of this literature, a little inconvenience is a small price to pay for full access to hundreds of rare occult texts.
Visitors should be aware that these books are written in several different European languages. Latin, the scholarly language of Europe throughout the Medieval and Early Modern periods, predominates, and it’s a peculiar Latin at that, laden with jargon and alchemical terminology. Other books appear in German, Dutch, and French. Readers of some or all of these languages will of course have an easier time than monolingual English speakers, but there is still much to offer those visitors as well.
In addition to the pleasure of paging through an old rare book, even virtually, English speakers can quickly find a collection of readable books by clicking on the “Place of Publication” search filter and selecting Cambridge or London, from which come such notable works as The Man-Mouse Takin in a Trap, and tortur’d to death for gnawing the Margins of Eugenius Philalethes, by Thomas Vaughn, published in 1650.
The language is archaic — full of quirky spellings and uses of the “long s” — and the content is bizarre. Those familiar with this type of writing, whether through historical study or the work of more recent interpreters like Aleister Crowley or Madame Blavatsky, will recognize the many formulas: The tracing of magical correspondences between flora, fauna, and astronomical phenomena; the careful parsing of names; astrology and lengthy linguistic etymologies; numerological discourses and philosophical poetry; early psychology and personality typing; cryptic, coded mythology and medical procedures. Although we’ve grown accustomed through popular media to thinking of magical books as cookbooks, full of recipes and incantations, the reality is far different.
Encountering the vast and strange treasures in the online library, one thinks of the type of the magician represented in Goethe’s Faust, holed up in his study,
Where even the welcome daylight strains But duskily through the painted panes. Hemmed in by many a toppling heap Of books worm-eaten, gray with dust, Which to the vaulted ceiling creep
The library doesn’t only contain occult books. Like the weary scholar Faust, alchemists of old “studied now Philosophy / And Jurisprudence, Medicine,— / And even, alas! Theology.” Click on Cambridge as the place of publication and you’ll find the work above by Henry More, “one of the celebrated ‘Cambridge Platonists,’” the Linda Hall Library notes, “who flourished in mid-17th-century and did their best to reconcile Plato with Christianity and the mechanical philosophy that was beginning to make inroads into British natural philosophy.” Those who study European intellectual history know well that More’s presence in this collection is no anomaly. For a few hundred years, it was difficult, if not impossible, to separate the pursuits of theology, philosophy, medicine, and science (or “natural philosophy”) from those of alchemy and astrology. (Isaac Newton is a famous example of a mathematician/scientist/alchemist/believer in strange apocalyptic predictions.)
Given the Ritman’s alacrity and eagerness to publish this first batch of texts, even as it works to smooth out its interface, we’ll likely see many hundreds more books become available in the next month or so. For updates, follow the Ritman Library and The Embassy of the Free Mind — Dan Brown’s own Dutch library of rare occult books — on Facebook.
Enter the Ritman's new digital collection of occult texts here.
Related Content:
3,500 Occult Manuscripts Will Be Digitized & Made Freely Available Online, Thanks to Da Vinci Code Author Dan Brown
Isaac Newton’s Recipe for the Mythical ‘Philosopher’s Stone’ Is Being Digitized & Put Online (Along with His Other Alchemy Manuscripts)
Aleister Crowley Reads Occult Poetry in the Only Known Recordings of His Voice (1920)
Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
Looks like there are now over 2,100 items in the collection.
Back in December we brought you some exciting news.
If there’s one thing The Da Vinci Code’s Dan Brown and “The Library of Babel”’s Jorge Luis Borges have in common it is a love for obscure religious and occult books and artifacts.
Brown, the Ritman notes, “is a great admirer of the library and visited on several occasions while writing his novels The Lost Symbol and Inferno.” Now he's giving back. Some of the revenue generated by his bestselling novels, along with a €15,000 contribution from the Dutch Prins Bernhard Cultuurfonds, will allow the library’s core collection, “some 3,500 ancient books,” to come online soon in an archive called “Hermetically Open.
Lyra, the Alchemical Eve
From the Latin and German manuscript Geheime Figuren der Rosenkreuzer [Secret Figures of the Rosicrucians], before 1785, at the Ritman Library.
I’ve posted at length how Lyra being called the new Eve in HDM was a very positive thing, alchemically speaking. The Ritman Library makes the same general point:
This evocative image of Sophia or Wisdom describes her as ‘the heavenly and earthly Eve, the mother of all creatures in heaven and on earth’. It is a very positive description, as Eve usually had quite a bad press in the history of Christianity. There are many references to the Old and the New Testament, but the lower part of the image, with its small globes circling around a central globe inscribed with the word ‘Chaos’, is purely alchemical. To us, ‘chaos’ sounds alarming, but to alchemists it represented the primal form or matter that was full of potential and with which they could work in their laboratories. The crown worn by Sophia is characteristically topped by the symbol for the Philosopher’s Stone: ‘Der Stein der Weisen’, as we read left and right to the symbol in red.
You can see why Sophia would be a perfect name for the female protagonist in an alchemical story. The only one I know about is Sophie Newman, in Michael Scott’s Secrets of the Immortal Nicholas Flamel series. Does anyone know any others?
I just discovered that the Ritman Library in Amsterdam is producing and selling its own alchemy masks. The top one is the well-known image from Michael Maier’s Atalanta fugiens, the middle one is a rebis/hermaphrodite, and the bottom one is Sophia--all from the library’s collection. You can go to their Facebook page for more information and to order.
