Dan Brown is Paying for Occult Texts

Dan Brown is paying for Occult Texts to be digitised so that we can read them for free.

Dan Brown well known author and upsetter of Churches is donating €300,000 so that a collection of ancient books can be digitised. These 4,600 pre 1900 texts on subjects such as alchemy, magic, theosophy, and astrology are currently kept at Amsterdam’s Ritman Library which is also known as Bibliotheca Philosophica Hermetica and Brown announced on June 16th that he planned to donate the money enabling the library to digitise all of the texts thereby making them available to us for free!

Included in the texts are some very early copies of the Bible and the Qu’ran and extremely valuable texts on Hermeticism.

Discussing Jakob Böhme’s works Esther Ritman, the library’s director and librarian says of this particularly important example of text, “When I show this book in the library, it’s like traveling in an entire new world.” She continues that, once the work is available online “We can take everyone along the journey of this book digitally.”

Jakob Böhme’s works in English (1764-1781): A shoemaker who became a seminal figure of German Christian mysticism.

Corpus Hermeticum (1472): “When the manuscript arrived at the de’Medici court in 1463, scholar Marsilio Ficino was told to stop his translation of all the works of Plato, in order to translate this immediately.” says Ritman on the source work on Hermetic wisdom.

Giordano Bruno’s Spaccio de la bestia trionfante (1584): The author of which was burned at the stake for refusing to recant his ideas on the infinite universe.

Early Quran printed in Arabic (1694): Printed in Arabic, this is the fourth edition of the Qu’ran and was printed in Hamburg, Germany.
a copy of a first-edition Quran in Latin (1542-1543): Printed in Basel, Switzerland.

The first printed version of the tree of life (1516): A graphic representation of the 10 virtues of God also known as the sefirot, according to the Kabbalah.

Hand-colored version of the Bible (1568-1573): Printed for King Philip II of Spain, this is a hand-inked version of the Bible and had four side-by-side translations, written in Greek, Latin, Hebrew, and Chaldaic.

All being well it is predicted that the bulk of this fascinating collection will be available for us all to view online, for free,  in the spring of 2017.

I love attempting to read ancient texts, and I will definitely be taking the opportunity to peruse these examples when they became available to us, thanks to Dan Brown.