The Ritman Library Bibliotheca Philosophica Hermetica

General information

The library was founded in 1957 by Amsterdam businessman Joost R. Ritman. Ritman began collecting rare early books at a young age, after having been presented by his mother with a copy of a 17th-century edition of Aurora, a work by the German mystic Jacob Böhme. Decades of assiduous collecting resulted in an unparalleled collection of 27,000 works in the field of Christian-Hermetic gnosis.

In 1984 Ritman decided to turn his private collection into a library that would be ‘hermetically open’ to all. His aim was also to acquaint a wide public, both scholars and non-scholars, with Hermetic, alchemical, mystical and gnostic works. Together, these works represent a challenging component of the European cultural and spiritual heritage. Over the past 25 years, the research carried out by the Ritman Institute has been made available by means of exhibitions, in the library and abroad, and through publications brought out by the library's own publishing house In de Pelikaan.

Following its motto ‘Ad Fontes, Ex Fontibus’ - to the sources, from the sources - The Ritman Library envisages to co-create an active offline and online community and offers an open educative platform for lively exchange of knowledge and debate in the fields of its expertise.