World's largest occult library heads online

The online archive contains thousands of scanned texts. Image Credit: CC BY-SA 3.0 Tom Murphy VII

A vast library of more than 25,000 occult texts has been scanned and published on the Internet for free.
Founded by Joost Ritman, Amsterdam's Bibliotheca Philosophica Hermetica (also known as 'The Ritman Library') contains tens of thousands of texts relating to a wide range of occult topics.

The volumes contained within the collection cover such subjects as hermetica, alchemy, mysticism, gnosis, esotericism, anthroposophy, Freemasonry and comparative religion, among many others.

The library contains numerous rare works as well as thousands pre-dating the 19th Century.

Most recently, in a renewed bid to preserve these texts and make them more accessible, the library has been working to digitize the core collection and make it available for viewing online.

Known as The Hermetically Open Archive, the online collection can be found Here. Click to view

Source

Amsterdam's Bibliotheca Philosophica Hermetica (AKA "The Ritman Library) houses more ths 25,000 occult texts, covering "Hermetics, Rosicrucians, Theosophy, alchemy, mysticism, Gnosis and Western Esotericism, Sufism, Kabbalah, Anthroposophy, Catharism, Freemasonry, Manichaeism, Judaica, the Grail, Esotericism, and comparative religion."

The library has begun to scan and post its core collection to an online archive called The Hermetically Open Archive. The project was underwritten by Dan Brown in thanks for the library's contributions to his books "The Lost Symbol" and "Inferno" (the library houses the first illustrated edition of Dante's "Divine Comedy," from 1472).

Though the scans are all in the public domain, the library uses Javascript tricks to try to block scraping, though, according to Maika at Haute Macabre, there are plans to enable downloading in the future.

Source

This is amazing! I went to the museum and didn't have enough time to read everything I wanted to, so this is really good.