Joost R. Ritman

Every book in this library descends from one man’s conviction that the wisdom of the past belongs to everyone.

Joost Ruben Ritman, entrepreneur, art collector, and Rosicrucian, gave seventy years of his life to a single mission. At sixteen he had the realization that everything is one, and he never let go of it. He built a fortune and spent it gathering the hermetic, alchemical, and mystical heritage of humankind into one place, guided by a principle he made his own: ad fontes, back to the source. He sought the earliest, most authentic edition of every work he could find.

In 1984 he opened that collection to the public as the Bibliotheca Philosophica Hermetica (the Ritman Library), centred on Hermes Trismegistus and grown into one of the great collections of esoteric thought, inscribed on UNESCO’s Dutch Memory of the World Register. In 2007 he acquired Amsterdam’s House with the Heads, built in 1622, as its permanent home; in 2015 he gave both the library and the building away so they could outlast him. From that gift rose the Embassy of the Free Mind: a research institute, a publishing house, a museum, and an academy. It is a living institute, in his words, hermetically open to all.

He was described by those who knew him as generous and spirited, untamable and elusive and persistent: a man who made the impossible possible, and a passionate guardian of the freedom of the mind. He built bridges between worlds and between people, and never stopped believing that a single rare book, read and understood, could change a life.

Source Library began in his library. It was at the Embassy of the Free Mind, among the shelves Joost Ritman spent a lifetime building, that we came across Marsilio Ficino’s Liber de Voluptate, written in 1457, printed in 1497, and never once translated into English in all the centuries since. That single untranslated book became the seed of everything you can read here. The motto of this library is the motto that was his: ad fontes, carried forward.

We are here because he was here first. Every text we digitize, translate, and give freely to the world is a continuation of the work he began, and a debt of gratitude we will go on repaying for as long as this library stands.