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Occult books digitized and put online by Amsterdam’s Ritman Library

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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. 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, 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.

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