Here you see images from our collection of 25,000 books and manuscripts. Most of them were written by original and free thinkers who thought about such existential questions as: ’Why are we here? How did everything start? How does the universe work?’ Some of the ideas they formed about these questions were considered dangerously unorthodox and challenging to the status quo, as they went against established doctrines.
One idea that you will find reflected in many of these images comes from a philosophy called ‘Hermetism', which says that there is a close relationship between the macrocosm, the greater world, in which we all live, and the microcosm, which is the smaller world, meaning we as individual human beings.

Most of these images date from the 16th and 17th centuries. Some of the ideas that inspired them go right back to Antiquity, but you will see that they are timeless. They are about the human condition, about life, about your place in the world, about personal transformation, about inspiration.

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