The Embassy of the Free Mind Launches Source Library

02 Jun 2026

'The Ripley Scroll' illustration, George Ripley, 15th century.

The World’s Largest Freely Available Collection of Translated Historical Primary Sources

The Embassy of the Free Mind (EFM) announces the public beta of Source Library — already the largest freely available collection of historical primary sources translated and read alongside their originals. Its Beta Launch takes place on 4 June 2026, at the Embassy of the Free Mind in Amsterdam.

Born from a world-record collection

Source Library is rooted in the Bibliotheca Philosophica Hermetica (BPH), home to 25,000+ volumes on alchemy, Hermetica, Kabbalah, Rosicrucianism, astrology, natural philosophy, and thepre-modern roots of modern science. The BPH holds UNESCO’s Memory of the World designation (2022) and a Guinness World Record as the world’s largest library dedicated to magic and mysticism (2024). Source Library carries this founding mission into the digital age.

A new scale of access

Powered by frontier AI translation, Source Library draws on digitised collections from the world’s foremost research libraries — including the Bavarian State Library, the Bibliothèque nationale de France, the Vatican Library, the Bodleian Library at Oxford, among more, with the Bibliotheca Philosophica Hermetica being the first one set to become fully digitised.

“The size and diversity of the Source Library enables readers to trace the development of ideas across Latin, Chinese and Sanskrit texts. Connections that were hidden by language barriers are now finally discoverable by all.”
– Dr. Derek Lomas, Source Library Programme Director

At launch, the full collection spans:

- 15,000+ books in 55+ languages translated toEnglish

- 6,000+ first-ever English translations

- Roughly 7 billion words of original text and translation — about the size of the entire English Wikipedia

- 4.5 million+ digitised page images with 142,000+extracted illustrations

Books being digitized centre on the intellectual traditions at the heart of the Bibliotheca Philosophica Hermetica (BPH) Collection. Works by Paracelsus, Robert Fludd, Marsilio Ficino, Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa, and Giordano Bruno sit alongside thousands of lesser-known texts — many appearing in English for the very first time.

Why it matters

By a widely cited estimate, ninety percent of Latin texts from the Renaissance have never been translated into a modern language. Far more Latin was written after 1500 than survives from all of ancient Rome, and almost none of it has ever been read outside a library.

“During the Renaissance, the translation of ancient Greek texts into Latin had an enormous impact on the flourishing of European society. Yet very little of the Renaissance itself has been translated. Source Library changes that.”
— Dr. Derek Lomas, Source Library Programme Director

AI-powered translations are presented alongside images of the original source pages, allowing scholars to consult the original at any point. The goal is not to replace expert scholarship, but to make vast bodies of untranslated material discoverable for the first time.

Among the works now readable in English are Robert Fludd’s History of Both Worlds (1617), the complete works of Marsilio Ficino (1561) and Pico della Mirandola (1557), Athanasius Kircher’s Musurgia Universalis (1650), and the Zohar, the central text of Kabbalah. Thousands more come from outside the Western canon, in Chinese, Sanskrit, Tibetan, Arabic, and Hebrew.

“Source Library is an essential infrastructure: open, verifiable access to primary sources, where wisdom is made accessible. Direct access to sources enables independent interpretation, academic integrity, and the sustainable transmission of cultural memory: all of which the Bibliotheca Philosophica Hermetica sets out to do.”— Jozef Ritman, Museum Director at the Embassy of the Free Mind

It is fitting that the work begins here. The Embassy of the Free Mind keeps the library of the first Renaissance, the books Ficino and his circle translated to set it in motion. Five centuries on, the same impulse of ad fontes is opening those sources to everyone.

Beta Launch on 4 June 2026

Source Library will be unveiled at a Beta Launch Party on 4 June 2026 at the Embassy of the Free Mind, Amsterdam (18:00–20:30 CET). The evening will feature an introduction and panel discussion led by PhD researcher Corey Andrews, as well as a live demonstration by Dr. Derek Lomas and a live Q&A.

The event is available via livestream for international audiences. RSVP and access the livestream here.