La La Library’s images are sourced from Wikimedia Commons, a vast library of images shared by people around the world for others to use. Most are in the public domain because the art itself is centuries old. Some are photographs released by their makers under Creative Commons licences that permit reuse with credit. Below is the full list of images in the library along with their attribution, so that anyone who wishes to know where an image came from can find their way to the source and to the person who made it.
If you are the creator of any image on this list and believe the attribution is incomplete or the use is inappropriate, please let us know and we will correct it immediately.
Portraits of the cross-tradition feminine mystics in the Sacred Texts chamber.
| Essay | Image & source | Licence |
|---|---|---|
| The Shekhinah | The Beginning of Shabbat by Moritz Daniel Oppenheim, 1882. Published in Die Gartenlaube. Via Wikimedia Commons. | Public domain |
| Sophia | Holy Wisdom, 16th-century icon from the Sophia Cathedral, Novgorod. Via Wikimedia Commons. | Public domain |
| Devi | Goddess Durga by Raja Ravi Varma, late 19th century. Via Wikimedia Commons. | Public domain |
| Inanna | The Queen of the Night relief, Babylonian, c.1800–1750 BCE. Held by the British Museum. Photograph by Hispalois. Via Wikimedia Commons. | Public domain |
| Rabia of Basra | Persian miniature illustration of Rabi’a al-Adawiyya, unknown author. Via Wikimedia Commons. | Public domain |
| Mary the Mother | Theotokos of Vladimir, 12th-century Byzantine icon. Via Wikimedia Commons. | Public domain |
| Mary Magdalene | The Penitent Magdalen by Georges de La Tour, c.1640. Via Wikimedia Commons. | Public domain |
| Teresa of Ávila | 18th-century engraving after Bernini’s Ecstasy of Saint Teresa. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. Via Wikimedia Commons. | Public domain |
| Julian of Norwich | Statue of Dame Julian at Norwich Cathedral (David Holgate, 2000). Photograph by User:Poliphilo. Via Wikimedia Commons. | CC0 / Public domain |
| Hildegard of Bingen | Hildegard’s illuminated frontispiece, 12th century, unknown illuminator. Via Wikimedia Commons. | Public domain |
| The Beguines | The Patrons of the Beguinage Praying to Christ on the Cross by Gaspar de Crayer, 17th century. Via Wikimedia Commons. | Public domain |
| Kuan Yin | The Bodhisattva Avalokiteshvara (Guanyin), Chinese painting. Via Wikimedia Commons. | CC0 / Public domain |
| Tara | Green Tara, leaf from a Perfection of Wisdom manuscript. Metropolitan Museum of Art. Via Wikimedia Commons. | Public domain |
| The Black Madonnas | Our Lady of Częstochowa, 14th century or earlier, unknown painter. Via Wikimedia Commons. | Public domain |
| Essay | Image & source | Licence |
|---|---|---|
| Islamic Geometric Patterns | Moresque ornament from the Alhambra, plate 43 from Owen Jones’s Grammar of Ornament, 1868. Via Wikimedia Commons. | Public domain |
| Tree of Life | Tree of Life diagram from Athanasius Kircher’s Oedipus Aegyptiacus, 1653. Via Wikimedia Commons. | Public domain |
| Isaac Luria | Isaac Luria’s signature, vectorised from a sixteenth-century manuscript. No authentic portrait of the Ari survives. Via Wikimedia Commons. | Public domain |
| The Wheel of the Year | Diagram of the eight sabbats arranged around the solar cycle. By User:The Wednesday Island. Via Wikimedia Commons. | Public domain |
| Carmina Gadelica | Page 182 of Carmina Gadelica Vol. I (1900), showing the Beltane Blessing (Am Beannachadh Bealltain) with its illuminated Celtic capital. Rendered from the original facsimile held by the National Library of Scotland. By Alexander Carmichael, gathered in the Hebrides 1855–1899. | Public domain |
| Vesica Piscis | Vesica Piscis geometric figure, SVG. Via Wikimedia Commons. | Public domain |
| Colossus of Rhodes | 18th-century engraving of the Colossus of Rhodes. Via Wikimedia Commons. | Public domain |
| Lighthouse of Alexandria | Philip Galle after Maerten van Heemskerck, Pharos (The Lighthouse at Alexandria), 1572. National Gallery of Art. Via Wikimedia Commons. | CC0 |
| Mausoleum at Halicarnassus | Heemskerck’s Seven Wonders series · the Mausoleum. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. Via Wikimedia Commons. | CC0 |
| The Burning Bush | Moses and the Burning Bush, 12th-century Byzantine icon, Monastery of Saint Catherine, Sinai. Via Wikimedia Commons. | Public domain |
| Hieroglyphs | Sheet 12 of the Papyrus of Ani, Egyptian Book of the Dead, c.1250 BCE. British Museum. Via Wikimedia Commons. | Public domain |
| Battle of Anghiari | Peter Paul Rubens’s copy of Leonardo’s lost Battle of Anghiari. Via Wikimedia Commons. | Public domain |
| Sforza Horse | Leonardo da Vinci, manuscript page on the Sforza monument. Via Wikimedia Commons. | Public domain |
| Benois Madonna | The Benois Madonna by Leonardo da Vinci, c.1478. Hermitage Museum. Via Wikimedia Commons. | Public domain |
| St John the Baptist | Saint John the Baptist by Leonardo da Vinci, c.1513–1516, Louvre. Via Wikimedia Commons. | Public domain |
| Adoration of the Magi | Leonardo’s Adoration of the Magi, begun 1481, Uffizi Gallery. Via Wikimedia Commons. | Public domain |
| William Blake | The Ancient of Days by William Blake, 1794. Via Wikimedia Commons. | Public domain |
| Blake — Marriage of Heaven and Hell | Title page of Blake’s Europe, a Prophecy, 1794. Library of Congress. Via Wikimedia Commons. | Public domain |
| Leaves of Grass | Frontispiece engraving by Samuel Hollyer, 1855, made from a daguerreotype of Walt Whitman by Gabriel Harrison. Via Wikimedia Commons. | Public domain |
| Kundalini | A yogin in meditation with the chakras and kundalini serpent, tantric illustration. Via Wikimedia Commons. | Public domain |
| Hildegard Scivias | Hildegard of Bingen receiving her vision, illuminated frontispiece to Scivias, 12th century. Via Wikimedia Commons. | Public domain |
| Sacred Sites | Stonehenge, Wiltshire, England. Via Wikimedia Commons. | Public domain |
| Essay | Image & source | Licence |
|---|---|---|
| Galileo Galilei | Portrait by Justus Sustermans, c.1636. Via Wikimedia Commons. | Public domain |
| Albert Einstein | Photograph by Oren Jack Turner, 1947. Via Wikimedia Commons. | Public domain |
| Charles Darwin | Photograph by Julia Margaret Cameron, 1868. Via Wikimedia Commons. | Public domain |
| Nikola Tesla | Tesla at age 40, 1896. Via Wikimedia Commons. | Public domain |
| Isaac Newton (alchemy) | Portrait by Godfrey Kneller, 1689. Via Wikimedia Commons. | Public domain |
| Hypatia of Alexandria | Detail from Raphael’s School of Athens, 1511. Via Wikimedia Commons. | Public domain |
| Ibn al-Haytham | 19th-century imagining of the 11th-century polymath. Via Wikimedia Commons. | Public domain |
| Ada Lovelace | Portrait by Alfred Edward Chalon, 1840. Via Wikimedia Commons. | Public domain |
| Marie Curie | Photograph, c.1920. Via Wikimedia Commons. | Public domain |
| Saint Augustine | Portrait by Philippe de Champaigne, c.1645. Via Wikimedia Commons. | Public domain |
| Thomas Aquinas | Painting by Carlo Crivelli, 1476. Via Wikimedia Commons. | Public domain |
| Al-Ghazali | Al-Ghazali with a student, Persian miniature. Via Wikimedia Commons. | CC0 |
| Adi Shankaracharya | Portrait by Raja Ravi Varma. Via Wikimedia Commons. | Public domain |
| Søren Kierkegaard | Drawing by Niels Christian Kierkegaard, c.1840. Via Wikimedia Commons. | Public domain |
| W. B. Yeats | Portrait of William Butler Yeats. Via Wikimedia Commons. | Public domain |
| Walt Whitman | Photograph by George Collins Cox, 1887. Via Wikimedia Commons. | Public domain |
| Emily Dickinson | The only authenticated photograph of Emily Dickinson, c.1847. Via Wikimedia Commons. | Public domain |
| Matsuo Bashō | Portrait by Yosa Buson, 18th century. Via Wikimedia Commons. | Public domain |
| Omar Khayyam | 1914 illustration. Via Wikimedia Commons. | Public domain |
| Rabindranath Tagore | Photograph, 1909. Via Wikimedia Commons. | Public domain |
| Sappho | Roman bust of Sappho, Capitoline Museum. Via Wikimedia Commons. | Public domain |
| Enheduanna | The Disk of Enheduanna, c.2300 BCE, Penn Museum. Via Wikimedia Commons. | CC0 |
| James Baldwin | Portrait of James Baldwin, Library of Congress. Via Wikimedia Commons. | Public domain |
| Zora Neale Hurston | Portrait photograph of Zora Neale Hurston, c.1930s. Via Wikimedia Commons. | Public domain |
| Hilma af Klint | Portrait photograph, published 1901. Via Wikimedia Commons. | Public domain |
| Artemisia Gentileschi | Self-portrait as the Allegory of Painting (La Pittura), c.1638. Via Wikimedia Commons. | Public domain |
| Frida Kahlo | Photograph by Guillermo Kahlo, 1932. Via Wikimedia Commons. | Public domain |
| Georgia O’Keeffe | Photograph from the Metropolitan Museum collection. Via Wikimedia Commons. | CC0 |
| Langston Hughes | Photograph, 1936. Via Wikimedia Commons. | Public domain |
| Maya Angelou | Portrait photograph, c.1971. Via Wikimedia Commons. | Public domain |
| Chinua Achebe | Photograph, 1966. Via Wikimedia Commons. | Public domain |
| W. E. B. Du Bois | Portrait by James E. Purdy, 1907. Via Wikimedia Commons. | CC0 |
| Frederick Douglass | Photograph, c.1879. Via Wikimedia Commons. | Public domain |
| Barbara McClintock | In her laboratory, 1947. Via Wikimedia Commons. | Public domain |
| Rachel Carson | Portrait photograph. Via Wikimedia Commons. | Public domain |
| Black Elk | Photograph of Black Elk, Oglala Lakota holy man. Via Wikimedia Commons. | Public domain |
| Edith Stein | Photograph of Edith Stein (Teresa Benedicta of the Cross), c.1938-1939. Via Wikimedia Commons. | Public domain |
| Sigil Magic | The Sigillum Dei Aemeth drawn by John Dee, 1582, from MS Sloane 3188 in the British Library. Via Wikimedia Commons. | Public domain |
| Crystal Magic | Photograph of a quartz crystal cluster by Stephanie Clifford, originally posted to Flickr in 2008. Via Wikimedia Commons. | CC BY 2.0 |
| The I Ching | Diagram of the 64 hexagrams owned by Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, 1701, from the Niedersächsische Landesbibliothek (sent to Leibniz by Joachim Bouvet from China). Via Wikimedia Commons. | Public domain |
| Wicca | Pentagram with human figure inscribed inside it, from Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa's Three Books of Occult Philosophy, 1531. Via Wikimedia Commons. | Public domain |
| Runes | Diagram of the 24 Elder Futhark runes by Therealviklo, 2022. Via Wikimedia Commons. | CC0 |
| Hermeticism | Hermes Trismegistus, floor inlay from Siena Cathedral, 1480s, artist unknown. Via Wikimedia Commons. | Public domain |
| The Goetia | The Circle of Solomon and Triangle of Solomon, from The Lesser Key of Solomon, 1904 edition by S.L. MacGregor Mathers and Aleister Crowley. Via Wikimedia Commons. | Public domain |
| Astral Projection | "The Music of Gounod," a thought-form from Thought-Forms by Annie Besant and C.W. Leadbeater, 1901. Via Wikimedia Commons. | Public domain |
| Austin Osman Spare | Photograph of Austin Osman Spare at age sixteen, 1904, photographer unknown. Via Wikimedia Commons. | Public domain |
| Witchcraft, a History | "The Obscene Kiss," woodcut from the Compendium Maleficarum by Francesco Maria Guazzo, 1608. Via Wikimedia Commons. | Public domain |
| Madame Blavatsky & Theosophy | Head-and-shoulders portrait of Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, c.1880, from the George Grantham Bain Collection at the Library of Congress. Via Wikimedia Commons. | Public domain |
| The Evolution of the Instrument | Diagram of the Divje Babe flute (Neanderthal cave bear bone, c.50,000 BCE) by Rainwarrior, 2024, derived from scholarly publications by Iain Morley (2006) and Turk et al. (1997). Via Wikimedia Commons. | CC0 |
| Automatic Writing | Hilma af Klint, The Ten Largest No. 3 (Youth), 1907. Photograph by Albin Dahlström, Moderna Museet, Stockholm. Via Wikimedia Commons. | Public domain |
| Art as Magic | Hilma af Klint, The Swan, No. 22 (SUW/UW series), 1914–1915. Via Wikimedia Commons. | CC0 |
| Cave Paintings & Rock Art | Hand stencils on the wall of the Gargas cave, French Pyrenees, c. 27,000 BCE, photographer unknown. Via Wikimedia Commons. | Public domain |
| Cave Paintings & Rock Art | Painting of aurochs, horses and stags, Lascaux cave, France, c. 17,000 BCE. Via Wikimedia Commons. | Public domain |
| Cave Paintings & Rock Art | The Spotted Horses of the Pech Merle cave, France, c. 25,000 BCE. Via Wikimedia Commons. | Public domain |
| Cave Paintings & Rock Art | Aboriginal hand stencils at Hands On Rock, Goulburn River National Park, New South Wales, Australia. Via Wikimedia Commons. | Public domain |
| Cuneiform | Sumerian sales contract from Shuruppak, c. 2600 BCE, Louvre AO 3766. Via Wikimedia Commons. | Public domain |
| Cuneiform | Diagram showing the development of cuneiform signs from early pictographs to abstract wedge-shapes. Via Wikimedia Commons. | Public domain |
| Cuneiform | The Code of Hammurabi stele, basalt, c. 1754 BCE, Louvre. Photograph by Mbzt. Via Wikimedia Commons. | CC BY 3.0 |
| Cuneiform | Tablet XI of the Epic of Gilgamesh (the Flood Tablet), Library of Ashurbanipal at Nineveh, 7th century BCE, British Museum. Via Wikimedia Commons. | Public domain |
| Hieroglyphs | The Rosetta Stone, basalt, 196 BCE, British Museum. Via Wikimedia Commons. | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
| Hieroglyphs | The Graffito of Esmet-Akhom · the last known ancient Egyptian inscription written in hieroglyphs, carved at the Temple of Philae on 24 August 394 CE. Via Wikimedia Commons. | Public domain |
| Runes | The Sacrifice of Odin upon Yggdrasil, engraving by Lorenz Frølich, 1895, vectorised. Via Wikimedia Commons. | Public domain |
| Runes | A Jelling rune stone, Denmark, c. 965 CE. Photograph via Wikimedia Commons. | CC BY-SA |
| The Enochian Language · Dee's Angelic Architecture | The Sigillum Dei Aemeth, Dee's diagram from Sloane MS 3188, c. 1582, British Library. Via Wikimedia Commons. | Public domain |
| The Enochian Language · Dee's Angelic Architecture | John Dee's Seal of God, photograph of the wax disc in the British Museum. Via Wikimedia Commons. | CC BY-SA |
| The Enochian Language · Dee's Angelic Architecture | The Holy Table of Dr John Dee · engraving of the working surface for his angelic communications. Via Wikimedia Commons. | Public domain |
| The Enochian Language · Dee's Angelic Architecture | Edward Kelley evoking a spirit, nineteenth-century engraving. Via Wikimedia Commons. | Public domain |
| The Enochian Language · Dee's Angelic Architecture | The Five Elements and Pentagram, SVG diagram by Jakub T. Via Wikimedia Commons. | Public domain |
| The Language of DNA | Diagram of the DNA double helix structure (B-DNA), with atoms colour-coded by element and base-pair detail, by Zephyris and others. Via Wikimedia Commons. | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
| The Language of DNA | Portrait photograph of Rosalind Franklin, c.1955, photographer unknown. Via Wikimedia Commons. Note: Franklin’s famous Photo 51 X-ray diffraction image is still under UK copyright until 2028 and cannot be hosted here. It can be seen via the Wikipedia article on Photo 51, which uses it under fair use. | Public domain |
| The Language of Code | Ada Lovelace’s diagram from Note G, 1843 · the first published computer algorithm, for computing the Bernoulli numbers on Babbage’s Analytical Engine. Via Wikimedia Commons. | Public domain |
| The Language of Code | Punched paper tape close-up · an early storage medium for code, instructions encoded as the presence or absence of holes. Via Wikimedia Commons. | CC0 |
| The Language of Code | Margaret Hamilton standing beside the printed source code listings of the Apollo Guidance Computer software, MIT Instrumentation Laboratory, 1969 · restoration of the original Draper Laboratory photograph. Via Wikimedia Commons. | Public domain |
| Cults | Pieter Bruegel the Elder, The Tower of Babel (Vienna), 1563 · Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna. Via Wikimedia Commons / Google Art Project. | Public domain |
| Scientology | L. Ron Hubbard photographed in 1950, the year of Dianetics · UCLA Library Special Collections (original). Restoration by Adam Cuerden. Via Wikimedia Commons. | CC BY 4.0 |
| Grabovoi Codes | Albrecht Dürer, Melencolia I (detail showing the famous 4 by 4 magic square, with the year 1514 hidden in the bottom row), 1514. Via Wikimedia Commons. | Public domain |
| The CIA in the Esoteric | A surviving MK-Ultra subproject approval memorandum, signed by Sidney Gottlieb, authorising an LSD subproject · one of the few thousand pages that escaped the 1973 destruction order because they had been misfiled in a financial archive. Via Wikimedia Commons / CIA declassified files. | Public domain |
| Light Language | El Greco, The Pentecost (c. 1600), Museo del Prado, Madrid · the founding glossolalia scene from Acts 2, tongues of fire descending on the apostles. Via Wikimedia Commons. | Public domain |
| Quantum Somatics | Anatomical plate showing the course and distribution of the glossopharyngeal, vagus, and accessory nerves · from Gray’s Anatomy of the Human Body by Henry Vandyke Carter, 1858. Via Wikimedia Commons. | Public domain |
| Hineni | Rembrandt, The Sacrifice of Isaac (1635), Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg · the angel arrests Abraham’s hand at the moment of the third hineni. Via Wikimedia Commons. | Public domain |
| I Am That I Am | Moses removing his sandal at the burning bush · twelfth century Byzantine icon, Saint Catherine’s Monastery, Mount Sinai. Via Wikimedia Commons. | Public domain |
| The Seven Principles of Ma’at | The Weighing of the Heart from the Papyrus of Ani, c. 1250 BCE · British Museum. Anubis weighs the deceased’s heart against the feather of Ma’at, with Thoth recording and Ammit waiting. Via Wikimedia Commons. | Public domain |
| Kemet & the Egyptian Origins of Alchemy | Chrysopoeia of Cleopatra, c. 3rd century CE · the earliest known visual depiction of the ouroboros in alchemical use, with the motto hen to pan (one is all). Via Wikimedia Commons. | Public domain |
| The Salem Witch Trials | Howard Pyle, Examination of a Witch (1853), Peabody Essex Museum. Via Wikimedia Commons. | Public domain |
| The Northamptonshire Witch Trials | Title page of The Witches of Northamptonshire pamphlet, 1612. Via Wikimedia Commons. | Public domain |
| The Spanish Inquisition | Francisco Rizi, Auto-da-fé in the Plaza Mayor of Madrid (1683), Museo del Prado. Via Wikimedia Commons. | Public domain |
| Daemonologie | Title page of Daemonologie, in forme of a dialogue by King James VI of Scotland, Edinburgh, 1597. Wellcome Collection. Via Wikimedia Commons. | Public domain |
| Akhenaten | Bust of Nefertiti, c.1345 BCE, Neues Museum, Berlin. Via Wikimedia Commons. | Public domain |
| Hildegard of Bingen | Hildegard of Bingen receiving a vision · illumination from the Rupertsberg Scivias manuscript, twelfth century. Via Wikimedia Commons. | Public domain |
| Julian of Norwich | Statue of Dame Julian of Norwich at Norwich Cathedral. Photograph by David Iliff. Via Wikimedia Commons. | CC BY-SA |
| Meister Eckhart | Meister Eckhart, modern statue base in Erfurt. Via Wikimedia Commons. | Public domain |
| Tao Te Ching | Mawangdui silk manuscript of the Tao Te Ching, second century BCE. Via Wikimedia Commons. | Public domain |
| Mary Wollstonecraft | Mary Wollstonecraft by John Opie, c.1797, National Portrait Gallery, London. Via Wikimedia Commons. | Public domain |
| Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz | Portrait by Christoph Bernhard Francke, c.1695, Herzog Anton Ulrich-Museum, Braunschweig. Via Wikimedia Commons. | Public domain |
| George Berkeley | Portrait by John Smibert, 1730, National Portrait Gallery, London. Via Wikimedia Commons. | Public domain |
| Dietrich Bonhoeffer | Bundesarchiv photograph, Bild 146-1987-074-16. Via Wikimedia Commons. | CC BY-SA |
| The Temples of Asclepius | Asclepius bust, Rotunda of the Altes Museum, Berlin. Via Wikimedia Commons. | Public domain |
| The Hippocratic Oath | Papyrus fragment of the Hippocratic Oath, third century CE. Wellcome Collection. Via Wikimedia Commons. | Public domain |
| Culpeper’s Herbal | Engraved portrait of Nicholas Culpeper by Richard Gaywood, seventeenth century. Wellcome Collection. Via Wikimedia Commons. | Public domain |
| Yin and Yang | The taijitu, classical Chinese yin-yang symbol. Via Wikimedia Commons. | Public domain |
| Pythagoras | Classical bust of Pythagoras of Samos. Via Wikimedia Commons. | Public domain |
| Anna Akhmatova | Image hosted at images/essays/akhmatova.png. Sourced from Wikimedia Commons. | Public domain |
| Al-Kindi, the door-opener | Image hosted at images/essays/al-kindi.jpg. Sourced from Wikimedia Commons. | Public domain |
| Al-Razi, the doctor who refused | Image hosted at images/essays/al-razi.jpg. Sourced from Wikimedia Commons. | Public domain |
| Alexander Fleming | Image hosted at images/essays/alexander-fleming.jpg. Sourced from Wikimedia Commons. | Public domain |
| Alice Coltrane | Image hosted at images/essays/alice-coltrane.jpg. Sourced from Wikimedia Commons. | Public domain |
| Andy Warhol | Image hosted at images/essays/andy-warhol.jpg. Sourced from Wikimedia Commons. | Public domain |
| Annie Jump Cannon | Image hosted at images/essays/annie-jump-cannon.jpg. Sourced from Wikimedia Commons. | Public domain |
| Ansel Adams | Image hosted at images/essays/ansel-adams.jpg. Sourced from Wikimedia Commons. | Public domain |
| anunnaki | Image hosted at images/essays/anunnaki.jpg. Sourced from Wikimedia Commons. | Public domain |
| The Archangel Michael Defeating Satan | Image hosted at images/essays/archangel-michael-reni.jpg. Sourced from Wikimedia Commons. | Public domain |
| Aristotle | Image hosted at images/essays/aristotle.jpg. Sourced from Wikimedia Commons. | Public domain |
| Arne Næss | Image hosted at images/essays/arne-naess.jpg. Sourced from Wikimedia Commons. | Public domain |
| Animation | Image hosted at images/essays/art-form-animation.png. Sourced from Wikimedia Commons. | Public domain |
| Calligraphy | Image hosted at images/essays/art-form-calligraphy.jpg. Sourced from Wikimedia Commons. | Public domain |
| Ceramics | Image hosted at images/essays/art-form-ceramics.jpg. Sourced from Wikimedia Commons. | Public domain |
| Code as Art | Image hosted at images/essays/art-form-code.png. Sourced from Wikimedia Commons. | Public domain |
| Collage | Image hosted at images/essays/art-form-collage.jpg. Sourced from Wikimedia Commons. | Public domain |
| Comics | Image hosted at images/essays/art-form-comics.jpg. Sourced from Wikimedia Commons. | Public domain |
| Dance | Image hosted at images/essays/art-form-dance.jpg. Sourced from Wikimedia Commons. | Public domain |
| Fiction | Image hosted at images/essays/art-form-fiction.jpg. Sourced from Wikimedia Commons. | Public domain |
| Film | Image hosted at images/essays/art-form-film.jpg. Sourced from Wikimedia Commons. | Public domain |
| Glasswork | Image hosted at images/essays/art-form-glasswork.jpg. Sourced from Wikimedia Commons. | Public domain |
| Installation | Image hosted at images/essays/art-form-installation.jpg. Sourced from Wikimedia Commons. | Public domain |
| Music Composition | Image hosted at images/essays/art-form-music-composition.jpg. Sourced from Wikimedia Commons. | Public domain |
| Performance Art | Image hosted at images/essays/art-form-performance.jpg. Sourced from Wikimedia Commons. | Public domain |
| Photography | Image hosted at images/essays/art-form-photography.jpg. Sourced from Wikimedia Commons. | Public domain |
| Poetry | Image hosted at images/essays/art-form-poetry.jpg. Sourced from Wikimedia Commons. | Public domain |
| Printmaking | Image hosted at images/essays/art-form-printmaking.jpg. Sourced from Wikimedia Commons. | Public domain |
| Sculpture | Image hosted at images/essays/art-form-sculpture.jpg. Sourced from Wikimedia Commons. | Public domain |
| Street Art | Image hosted at images/essays/art-form-street-art.jpg. Sourced from Wikimedia Commons. | Public domain |
| Theatre | Image hosted at images/essays/art-form-theatre.jpg. Sourced from Wikimedia Commons. | Public domain |
| Weaving & Textiles | Image hosted at images/essays/art-form-weaving.png. Sourced from Wikimedia Commons. | Public domain |
| Arvo Pärt | Image hosted at images/essays/arvo-part.jpg. Sourced from Wikimedia Commons. | Public domain |
| Augustine of Hippo | Image hosted at images/essays/augustine.jpg. Sourced from Wikimedia Commons. | Public domain |
| Avicenna, who would not stop thinking | Image hosted at images/essays/avicenna.jpg. Sourced from Wikimedia Commons. | Public domain |
| Bach the Cosmic Mathematician | Image hosted at images/essays/bach-the-cosmic-mathematician.jpg. Sourced from Wikimedia Commons. | Public domain |
| Matsuo Bashō | Image hosted at images/essays/basho.jpg. Sourced from Wikimedia Commons. | Public domain |
| Jean-Michel Basquiat | Image hosted at images/essays/basquiat.jpg. Sourced from Wikimedia Commons. | Public domain |
| Beethoven | Image hosted at images/essays/beethoven.jpg. Sourced from Wikimedia Commons. | Public domain |
| Binaural Beats | Image hosted at images/essays/binaural-beats.png. Sourced from Wikimedia Commons. | Public domain |
| The Marriage of Heaven and Hell | Image hosted at images/essays/blake-marriage.jpg. Sourced from Wikimedia Commons. | Public domain |
| Jorge Luis Borges | Image hosted at images/essays/borges.jpg. Sourced from Wikimedia Commons. | Public domain |
| Brian Eno | Image hosted at images/essays/brian-eno.png. Sourced from Wikimedia Commons. | Public domain |
| Bulgarian Women’s Choirs | Image hosted at images/essays/bulgarian-womens-choirs.jpg. Sourced from Wikimedia Commons. | Public domain |
| Camille Claudel | Image hosted at images/essays/camille-claudel.jpg. Sourced from Wikimedia Commons. | Public domain |
| Henri Cartier-Bresson | Image hosted at images/essays/cartier-bresson.png. Sourced from Wikimedia Commons. | Public domain |
| Catherine Boucher Blake | Image hosted at images/essays/catherine-blake.png. Sourced from Wikimedia Commons. | Public domain |
| Cecilia Helena Payne-Gaposchkin | Image hosted at images/essays/cecilia-payne.jpg. Sourced from Wikimedia Commons. | Public domain |
| Charlotte Brontë | Image hosted at images/essays/charlotte-bronte.jpg. Sourced from Wikimedia Commons. | Public domain |
| Chinese Guqin | Image hosted at images/essays/chinese-guqin.jpg. Sourced from Wikimedia Commons. | Public domain |
| Frédéric Chopin | Image hosted at images/essays/chopin.jpeg. Sourced from Wikimedia Commons. | Public domain |
| Confucius | Image hosted at images/essays/confucius.jpg. Sourced from Wikimedia Commons. | Public domain |
| Cymatics | Image hosted at images/essays/cymatics.jpg. Sourced from Wikimedia Commons. | Public domain |
| Czesław Miłosz | Image hosted at images/essays/czeslaw-milosz.jpg. Sourced from Wikimedia Commons. | Public domain |
| Dante Alighieri | Image hosted at images/essays/dante.jpg. Sourced from Wikimedia Commons. | Public domain |
| David Chalmers | Image hosted at images/essays/david-chalmers.jpg. Sourced from Wikimedia Commons. | Public domain |
| The Didgeridoo | Image hosted at images/essays/didgeridoo.jpg. Sourced from Wikimedia Commons. | Public domain |
| Dōgen’s Being-Time (Uji) | Image hosted at images/essays/dogen-uji.png. Sourced from Wikimedia Commons. | Public domain |
| Fyodor Dostoevsky | Image hosted at images/essays/dostoevsky.jpg. Sourced from Wikimedia Commons. | Public domain |
| Edward Jenner | Image hosted at images/essays/edward-jenner.jpg. Sourced from Wikimedia Commons. | Public domain |
| Eliphas Lévi | Image hosted at images/essays/eliphas-levi.png. Sourced from Wikimedia Commons. | Public domain |
| The Emerald Tablet | Image hosted at images/essays/emerald-tablet.jpg. Sourced from Wikimedia Commons. | Public domain |
| Emily Brontë | Image hosted at images/essays/emily-bronte.jpg. Sourced from Wikimedia Commons. | Public domain |
| Emma Goldman | Image hosted at images/essays/emma-goldman.jpg. Sourced from Wikimedia Commons. | Public domain |
| Florence Nightingale | Image hosted at images/essays/florence-nightingale.jpg. Sourced from Wikimedia Commons. | Public domain |
| The Flower of Life | Image hosted at images/essays/flower-of-life.png. Sourced from Wikimedia Commons. | Public domain |
| The Galactic Butterfly | Image hosted at images/essays/galactic-butterfly.jpg. Sourced from Wikimedia Commons. | Public domain |
| Gamelan | Image hosted at images/essays/gamelan.jpg. Sourced from Wikimedia Commons. | Public domain |
| George Eliot | Image hosted at images/essays/george-eliot.jpg. Sourced from Wikimedia Commons. | Public domain |
| Giordano Bruno | Image hosted at images/essays/giordano-bruno.jpg. Sourced from Wikimedia Commons. | Public domain |
| The Glass Bead Game | Hermann Hesse… early twentieth century. Photograph in the public domain via Wikimedia Commons. There is a game in which the players take a theme from any field of human knowledge… a Bach fugue, a mathematical equation, a single line of Mencius (the fourth century BCE Chinese philosopher who wrote about the four sprouts of human nature)… and unfold it through its correspondences in every other field. A musical theme reveals an underlying pattern. The pattern recurs in geometry. The geometry rhymes with a poem from another century. The poem nods toward a piece of physics that was not yet discovered when it was written. The whole performance is ninety minutes of recognition. Audiences sit in silence. Players study for decades. The masters of the game are revered the way concert pianists once were. This is a fictional game. It exists only in a single book. The book is Das Glasperlenspiel… The Glass Bead Game… written by Hermann Hesse and published in 1943 in the middle of a war that was unmaking the cultural world he loved. He wrote it as an act of faith. Three years later he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature for his body of work… Demian, Siddhartha, Steppenwolf, Narcissus and Goldmund, and now this… with the new book named in the committee’s citation as the culmination. The book has been carried around in the inside pockets of seekers ever since, by people who recognised in it the description of a practice they had been doing alone, without a name for it. Castalia and Joseph Knecht The setting is the twenty fifth century. A small intellectual province called Castalia (the name borrowed from a fountain on Mount Parnassus sacred to the Muses) is dedicated, by ancient order, to the preservation and synthesis of all human knowledge. Castalia’s monks are scholars. They live simply, in libraries, in choirs, in laboratories. They are paid for by the state. Their job is to keep something alive that the world outside Castalia has half forgotten how to do. The protagonist is Joseph Knecht. (His surname, Knecht, is the German for servant. The library notices that all the masters of the game have names like this, which is part of the point.) He enters Castalia as a boy musical prodigy and rises through the order until he becomes the Magister Ludi… the Master of the Game. He is the youngest ever to hold the title. The game is performed by him and watched by the world. He is, in his prime, what the order has been training for centuries to produce. And then he leaves. The reason is what makes the book what it is. The game itself The game has rules, but the rules are notation. A theme… a small idea… is proposed. The player develops it. The development happens by correspondence. Music to mathematics to philosophy to a poem about flowers. Each move is the recognition of a pattern that lives in two places at once. The game is played publicly. Audiences can be in the thousands. There are festivals. There are commentaries written about historical games the way critics write about historical concerts. There are masters of the game whose styles are recognisable across decades. The mechanic, underneath all the form, is simple. It is the cultivated act of seeing connections. Patterns that ordinarily live in one discipline are followed across the wall into another. The thing they show, when found, is that the disciplines are different surfaces of the same underlying order. The game has no opponents. The score is the quality of the recognition. The game is won, if won is the right word, by the fineness of what has been seen. The library notices that this description is also a description of certain spiritual practices. Hermetic correspondence. Pythagorean harmonics. The Kabbalistic pairing of upper and lower worlds. Vedic bandhu (the doctrine of links between cosmic and human structures). The Sufi tawhid (the unity that becomes visible to the one who looks long enough). Hesse was reading widely. He was naming a thing the wisdom traditions had always known and giving it a future tense form. The book as it actually reads The book itself is patient. Some of it is slow. Hesse spends pages on the history of the order, the architecture of Castalia, the games of past masters. The first half can feel like reading a careful biography of a man who has not yet done anything dramatic. This is part of the design. The book is asking the reader to settle into the rhythm of a contemplative life. It cannot be done in a hurry. A note for the reader who is mid-book… the next two paragraphs hold what happens at the end. Skim past and come back when you have finished. Then in the back third Joseph Knecht begins to question. He notices that Castalia, for all its beauty, has become disconnected from the world it was meant to serve. The province is funded by a state whose people know nothing of the game. The masters preserve culture but no longer act in history. The synthesis that was supposed to be a gift to civilization has become a private virtuosity for the order’s own delight. So Knecht writes a letter to the Board, asking to be released from his post, and walks out of Castalia. He becomes, of all things, a tutor to a single young man. On his second day in the new role he goes for an early swim in a cold mountain lake to keep up with his pupil, and he drowns. The ending is famously contested. Some readers have read it as defeat. Others have read it as the only ending the book could honestly have. The Master of the Game, having spent his life perfecting an art of synthesis, dies in the water on the morning he tries to live in the world the way an ordinary person lives. The library reads it the second way. Knecht had to leave. He had to die there. The book is, among other things, a critique of any synthesis that cannot get its feet wet. The deeper claim, and the shadow The deeper claim is that synthesis is itself a kind of intelligence. To see how a Bach fugue and a mathematical proof and a Confucian aphorism are saying the same thing in three vocabularies is not decoration… not a parlour trick. It is a faculty of attention that the West has trained out of itself in the last few centuries by specialising. Hesse believed this faculty could be recovered. The book imagines a future culture that has built an entire institution around its recovery. The shadow is the one Knecht walked into the lake to refuse. Pure synthesis without action becomes ornamental. Knowing connections without ever doing anything with them is its own form of sleep. The library belongs to the world. It owes the world something. It cannot just see and admire. This is why Joseph Knecht leaves and why he dies and why the book has been read for eighty years as both a hymn to contemplation and a warning about it. The two readings are not opposed. They are the two halves of the practice. See clearly. Then act. Why the book keeps being found The book is in print in a hundred languages. Many readers find it in their twenties and read it as a beautiful description of a life they want. Many read it again in their forties and recognise the warning. Many read it a third time later and notice that the lake has been there from the start and Knecht has been walking towards it the whole way through. The library is quiet about whether it agrees with one reading or another. The library tends to think Hesse was holding all of them at once. He had spent the war years writing the book and watching the world burn. He published it in 1943, in Switzerland, while the rest of the European mind was being reduced to slogans. The act of writing it was itself the answer the book is asking. We make the synthesis anyway. We do it in the dark. We pass it to whoever finds the book. Anyone who has ever felt, while reading or listening or working, the sudden recognition that two things from completely different worlds are saying the same thing in different vocabularies… that small jolt… has played one move of the Glass Bead Game. The book was written for that reader. It was not written for scholars. It was written for the ones who keep noticing. The ones who, when they read this sentence, are already smiling. | Public domain |
| The Golden Ratio & Fibonacci | Image hosted at images/essays/golden-ratio.jpg. Sourced from Wikimedia Commons. | Public domain |
| The Great Pyramid of Giza | Image hosted at images/essays/great-pyramid-of-giza.jpg. Sourced from Wikimedia Commons. | Public domain |
| The Greek Modes | Image hosted at images/essays/greek-modes.jpg. Sourced from Wikimedia Commons. | Public domain |
| The Hanging Gardens of Babylon | Image hosted at images/essays/hanging-gardens.jpg. Sourced from Wikimedia Commons. | Public domain |
| Hannah Arendt | Image hosted at images/essays/hannah-arendt.jpg. Sourced from Wikimedia Commons. | Public domain |
| The Harvard Computers | Image hosted at images/essays/harvard-computers.jpg. Sourced from Wikimedia Commons. | Public domain |
| Henrietta Swan Leavitt | Image hosted at images/essays/henrietta-leavitt.jpg. Sourced from Wikimedia Commons. | Public domain |
| Heraclitus | Image hosted at images/essays/heraclitus.jpg. Sourced from Wikimedia Commons. | Public domain |
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| Japanese Shakuhachi | Image hosted at images/essays/japanese-shakuhachi.jpg. Sourced from Wikimedia Commons. | Public domain |
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| Joseph Brodsky | Image hosted at images/essays/joseph-brodsky.jpg. Sourced from Wikimedia Commons. | Public domain |
| James Joyce | Image hosted at images/essays/joyce.jpg. Sourced from Wikimedia Commons. | Public domain |
| Franz Kafka | Image hosted at images/essays/kafka.jpg. Sourced from Wikimedia Commons. | Public domain |
| Søren Kierkegaard | Image hosted at images/essays/kierkegaard.jpg. Sourced from Wikimedia Commons. | Public domain |
| Kirtan | Image hosted at images/essays/kirtan.jpg. Sourced from Wikimedia Commons. | Public domain |
| Peter Kropotkin | Image hosted at images/essays/kropotkin.jpg. Sourced from Wikimedia Commons. | Public domain |
| Luca Pacioli | Image hosted at images/essays/luca-pacioli.jpg. Sourced from Wikimedia Commons. | Public domain |
| Lucia Joyce | Image hosted at images/essays/lucia-joyce.jpg. Sourced from Wikimedia Commons. | Public domain |
| Magna Carta | Image hosted at images/essays/magna-carta.jpg. Sourced from Wikimedia Commons. | Public domain |
| Mantra | Image hosted at images/essays/mantra.png. Sourced from Wikimedia Commons. | Public domain |
| Metatron’s Cube | Image hosted at images/essays/metatrons-cube.jpg. Sourced from Wikimedia Commons. | Public domain |
| Mileva Marić | Image hosted at images/essays/mileva-maric.jpg. Sourced from Wikimedia Commons. | Public domain |
| Mozart | Image hosted at images/essays/mozart.jpg. Sourced from Wikimedia Commons. | Public domain |
| Newton's Hidden Studies | Image hosted at images/essays/newton-alchemy.jpg. Sourced from Wikimedia Commons. | Public domain |
| Friedrich Nietzsche | Image hosted at images/essays/nietzsche.jpg. Sourced from Wikimedia Commons. | Public domain |
| Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan | Image hosted at images/essays/nusrat-fateh-ali-khan.jpg. Sourced from Wikimedia Commons. | Public domain |
| Om…Aum | Image hosted at images/essays/om-aum.png. Sourced from Wikimedia Commons. | Public domain |
| Ovid | Image hosted at images/essays/ovid.jpg. Sourced from Wikimedia Commons. | Public domain |
| Pauline Oliveros | Image hosted at images/essays/pauline-oliveros.jpg. Sourced from Wikimedia Commons. | Public domain |
| Persian Dastgah | Image hosted at images/essays/persian-dastgah.jpg. Sourced from Wikimedia Commons. | Public domain |
| Plato | Image hosted at images/essays/plato.png. Sourced from Wikimedia Commons. | Public domain |
| Ravi Shankar | Image hosted at images/essays/ravi-shankar.jpg. Sourced from Wikimedia Commons. | Public domain |
| Sabina Spielrein | Image hosted at images/essays/sabina-spielrein.jpg. Sourced from Wikimedia Commons. | Public domain |
| Saturn and Chronos | Image hosted at images/essays/saturn-and-chronos.jpg. Sourced from Wikimedia Commons. | Public domain |
| Arnold Schoenberg | Image hosted at images/essays/schoenberg.jpg. Sourced from Wikimedia Commons. | Public domain |
| Erwin Schrödinger | Image hosted at images/essays/schrodinger.jpg. Sourced from Wikimedia Commons. | Public domain |
| The Scrying Mirror | Image hosted at images/essays/scrying-mirror.jpg. Sourced from Wikimedia Commons. | Public domain |
| The Sefer Yetzirah | Athanasius Kircher · the Kabbalistic Tree of Life, engraving from Oedipus Aegyptiacus, 1652. The Tree as the seventeenth century European mind first received it · the ten sefirot from the Sefer Yetzirah, named and arranged in the form that has carried the tradition forward ever since. Public domain. Open the Sefer Yetzirah expecting a long sacred book and you will be surprised. It is, in Hebrew, around sixteen hundred words. Six short chapters. The whole thing fits comfortably in an evening, with breaks for tea. And inside those few pages sits one of the strangest claims any tradition has ever made about the universe. The cosmos is what happens when twenty two letters and ten numbers combine. The book proposes this not as metaphor but as engineering. The library has been in awe of it for two thousand years. What it is, briefly The Sefer Yetzirah, the Book of Formation (sometimes Book of Creation), is the foundational text of Kabbalah. Older than the word Kabbalah. Older than the Bahir. Older, very probably, than the Talmud. It describes the structure of reality in terms of two things only… the ten sefirot (the ten primordial numbers, before they were also called divine emanations) and the twenty two letters of the Hebrew alphabet. Together these are called the thirty two paths of wisdom, and the entire universe is, on the book's account, what these thirty two paths weave when set in motion. The book is short, dense, and famously cryptic. It is not a mystical narrative. It is not a story. It is closer to a technical specification for the cosmos written by someone who already knows you cannot really fit such a thing onto a page and is doing their best anyway. The dating mystery Nobody knows when it was written. The traditional attribution is to Abraham, which is, even by the generous standards of religious authorship, unprovable. The earliest direct references to the book come from the tenth century. Linguistic analysis suggests Mishnaic Hebrew, which would place the composition somewhere between the second and sixth centuries of the common era. Scholars settle, cautiously, on the third century as a working estimate, with the proviso that some of the material may be much older and survived orally for generations before being written down. Whatever its precise birthday, two things are clear. It is older than almost anything else in the Kabbalistic stream. And it shows no sign of being a starter draft… it reads as a distillation of an already well developed body of thought. The teaching it crystallised was probably already old when the writer reached for the pen. The thirty two paths of wisdom The opening sentence sets the architecture. By thirty two wondrous paths of wisdom did the Lord, Lord of Hosts, the God of Israel, the living God, the King of the Universe, El Shaddai, merciful and gracious, exalted and lofty, dwelling in eternity, holy is His name, engrave and create His world. Thirty two paths… ten plus twenty two… the ten sefirot and the twenty two letters. Everything else in the book is an unfolding of these two together. The choice matters. Ten and not nine. Twenty two and not twenty one. The book is fierce about the count. Ten sefirot, says the book, belimah (a hapax word, a word that appears only once in the Hebrew Bible, often translated as without anything or ineffable). Ten and not nine. Ten and not eleven. The reader is being put on notice that these numbers are not approximations. The ten sefirot, before they were the Tree of Life This is where the doctrine of the ten sefirot first shows up systematically. The word itself probably comes from the Hebrew root for counting or numbering (related to safar, to count, and to sefer, a book). In the Sefer Yetzirah they are called the ten primordial numbers, the ten breaths of the living God. Each one is described as having a direction in space and a quality of being. Beginning and end. Good and evil. Above and below. East and west. North and south. Five pairs of polar opposites, and a tenth balancing principle that the text calls (somewhat dizzyingly) the Holy Palace, sustaining all in its midst. The later Kabbalists, especially the Bahir and the Zohar, would take these ten and develop them into the now familiar Tree of Life with its named sefirot (Keter, Chokmah, Binah, Chesed, Gevurah, Tiferet, Netzach, Hod, Yesod, Malkhut). The Sefer Yetzirah does not give those names. It does not draw the Tree. It gives only the count, the directional structure, and the proposition that these ten are how everything else is held together. The familiar Tree we now picture is a later flowering of the Sefer Yetzirah's seed. The twenty two letters, in three classes And then there are the letters. The twenty two letters of the Hebrew alphabet, which the book treats not as marks for sounds but as ontological building blocks (the things out of which things are made). The book classifies them into three groups, and the classification has been the source of immense interpretive industry ever since. Three mothers… Aleph, Mem, Shin. These correspond to the three primary elements (air, water, fire), to three seasons (the temperate, the wet, the hot), to three regions of the body (chest, belly, head). The mother letters are the breath of the system, the silent sustaining vowels. Seven doubles… Beth, Gimel, Daleth, Kaph, Pe, Resh, Tav. These are letters that can be pronounced two ways (hard and soft), and they correspond to the seven classical planets, to seven days of the week, to seven openings in the head (two eyes, two ears, two nostrils, one mouth). They are the variable letters, the ones that can hold opposites in themselves. Twelve simples… the remaining twelve letters. These correspond to the twelve signs of the zodiac, to the twelve months, to twelve organs of the body, to twelve principal activities of the soul. They are the fixed letters of the system. Each one is anchored to a single position and stays there, like a star fixed to its constellation. So far so beautiful. But the truly radical claim arrives next. The letters as building blocks The book says, plainly, that God engraved and carved the letters, and then formed the universe by combining them in various permutations. There is a section that describes the letters being arranged on a wheel and rotated, generating two hundred and thirty one gates (every possible pair of letters), each gate being a doorway through which a different aspect of reality emerges. The cosmos, on this account, is not made of letters in the way a poem is made of letters. The cosmos is the letters, in particular combinations, vibrating in particular ways. Hebrew is not just a language we use to describe the world. Hebrew is, the book proposes, the source code the world is written in. The library is careful here. This is a Kabbalistic claim, not a linguistic claim. No serious modern scholar of comparative religion would argue that the Hebrew alphabet has a privileged ontological status that, say, Sanskrit or Greek does not. What the Sefer Yetzirah is doing is telling a particular tradition's story about how its sacred language carries the structure of being. Hindu mantra theory says something structurally similar about Sanskrit. Sufi teachings on the divine names say something structurally similar about Arabic. The Christian Logos theology in John 1 says something structurally similar about (in its Greek form) logos itself. Each tradition has the same intuition… that the universe is, at root, structured pattern, and that structured pattern is what language is. The Sefer Yetzirah is the most rigorous early Western statement of this intuition the library knows of. How the influence went The Sefer Yetzirah is the seed text. Almost everything in the later Kabbalistic tradition unfolds from it. The Sefer ha-Bahir (twelfth century Provence) takes the ten sefirot and gives them, for the first time, the personalised emanative quality (each sefirah a face of the divine, a stage of unfolding). The Zohar (thirteenth century Spain, attributed to Moses de Leon) builds the entire mythological architecture of Kabbalah on the Bahir's foundation. The Lurianic Kabbalah of sixteenth century Safed (Isaac Luria, see the library's essay on the shattering of the vessels) develops the cosmological drama of tzimtzum (divine contraction) and tikkun (the gathering of sparks). All of these stand on the Sefer Yetzirah. The Christian Cabala of the Renaissance (Pico della Mirandola, Reuchlin, John Dee) reads the Sefer Yetzirah as a key to the Hebrew Old Testament's deeper structure. The Hermetic Qabalah of the modern western magical tradition (Mathers, Crowley, the Golden Dawn, Dion Fortune) takes the Tree of Life and uses it as a comprehensive map of the soul, the planets, the Tarot, and the levels of being. The Golem traditions (the medieval Jewish stories of artificial humans animated by combinations of Hebrew letters) draw their entire premise from the Sefer Yetzirah's claim that letters can be combined to bring matter to life. Every modern Tarot deck quietly carries the Sefer Yetzirah inside it. The twenty two Major Arcana correspond to the twenty two letters. The four suits map to the four worlds. The tens of each suit map to the ten sefirot. None of this would exist without the Book of Formation. Most Tarot readers do not know they are working a system whose root is in a sixteen hundred word Hebrew text from the third century. Translations to read it in Several good translations exist. A short orientation. Aryeh Kaplan's Sefer Yetzirah: The Book of Creation in Theory and Practice (1990) is the gentlest and most thorough modern English entry. Kaplan was a Hasidic rabbi and a physicist by training, and his translation comes with extensive commentary that places the text inside the broader Kabbalistic tradition without losing its strangeness. If you only read one, read Kaplan. Saadia Goldsmith's translation is shorter and crisper for the scholar in a hurry. Mathers and Westcott's nineteenth century translations (made for the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn) are dated but interesting historically as a window into how the western magical tradition first received the text. The original Hebrew, with the Mishnaic vocabulary, can be picked up surprisingly quickly by anyone who has done a bit of Hebrew. How to read it Slowly. Many times. The Sefer Yetzirah is not the kind of book you read once and put down. It is structured to be returned to. The first reading is bewildering. The second reading begins to show the shape. The third or fourth reading starts to do something interior, the way a piece of music begins to do something interior on the third or fourth listen. Aryeh Kaplan recommended the practice of haga, a slow contemplative recitation of the letter combinations, as the right way to engage the text. Not study, exactly. Closer to a kind of mathematics done with the breath. The library would also gently suggest that you do not need to understand it to be in relationship with it. The Sefer Yetzirah is more like a tuning fork than a textbook. You strike it, you listen to what it does to the room. The understanding comes, if it comes, after years. The library's stance The Sefer Yetzirah is one of the small handful of texts that the library quietly considers foundational to the entire western mystical inheritance. Without it, no Tree of Life as we now know it. Without it, no Hermetic Qabalah, no Golden Dawn, no Tarot in its present form, no Lurianic cosmology, no much of what the library spends its time talking about. The Book of Formation is the seed and the rest is what grew from the seed. It is also, importantly, a short and free text. The complete Hebrew is in the public domain. Most English translations are easily found. Anyone reading this essay can have the original text in their hands within five minutes… in fact, the library hosts the William Wynn Westcott translation in its reading room here, ready to open in a tab. The library would prefer that you did. Reading about the Sefer Yetzirah is no substitute for reading the Sefer Yetzirah. Six chapters. Sixteen hundred words. An evening with tea. The doorway has been open for nearly two thousand years and remains open this evening too. | Public domain |
| Socrates | Image hosted at images/essays/socrates.jpg. Sourced from Wikimedia Commons. | Public domain |
| Baruch Spinoza | Image hosted at images/essays/spinoza.jpg. Sourced from Wikimedia Commons. | Public domain |
| The Starry Night | Image hosted at images/essays/starry-night.jpg. Sourced from Wikimedia Commons. | Public domain |
| The Statue of Zeus at Olympia | Image hosted at images/essays/statue-of-zeus.jpg. Sourced from Wikimedia Commons. | Public domain |
| Sufi Qawwali | Image hosted at images/essays/sufi-qawwali.jpg. Sourced from Wikimedia Commons. | Public domain |
| Sufi Sama | Image hosted at images/essays/sufi-sama.jpg. Sourced from Wikimedia Commons. | Public domain |
| The Temple of Artemis at Ephesus | Image hosted at images/essays/temple-of-artemis.jpg. Sourced from Wikimedia Commons. | Public domain |
| The Bell | Image hosted at images/essays/the-bell.png. Sourced from Wikimedia Commons. | Public domain |
| The Conch | Image hosted at images/essays/the-conch.jpg. Sourced from Wikimedia Commons. | Public domain |
| The Drum | Image hosted at images/essays/the-drum.jpg. Sourced from Wikimedia Commons. | Public domain |
| The Flute | Image hosted at images/essays/the-flute.jpg. Sourced from Wikimedia Commons. | Public domain |
| The Harp | Image hosted at images/essays/the-harp.png. Sourced from Wikimedia Commons. | Public domain |
| The Piano | Image hosted at images/essays/the-piano.jpg. Sourced from Wikimedia Commons. | Public domain |
| The Shofar | Image hosted at images/essays/the-shofar.jpg. Sourced from Wikimedia Commons. | Public domain |
| The Violin | Image hosted at images/essays/the-violin.png. Sourced from Wikimedia Commons. | Public domain |
| Throat Singing | Image hosted at images/essays/throat-singing.jpg. Sourced from Wikimedia Commons. | Public domain |
| Leo Tolstoy | Image hosted at images/essays/tolstoy.jpg. Sourced from Wikimedia Commons. | Public domain |
| Antonia “Toni” Wolff | Image hosted at images/essays/toni-wolff.jpg. Sourced from Wikimedia Commons. | Public domain |
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| West African Polyrhythm | Image hosted at images/essays/west-african-polyrhythm.jpeg. Sourced from Wikimedia Commons. | Public domain |
| William James | Image hosted at images/essays/william-james.jpg. Sourced from Wikimedia Commons. | Public domain |
| Williamina Paton Stevens Fleming | Image hosted at images/essays/williamina-fleming.jpg. Sourced from Wikimedia Commons. | Public domain |
| Yin & Yang | The taijitu… the classical Chinese symbol of yin and yang. Public domain. The little black-and-white circular diagram everyone recognises… with its two interlocking comma shapes and the small circle of the opposite colour inside each… is called the taijitu. It is one of the most successful pieces of cosmological notation ever drawn. In a single image it captures the entire Chinese philosophical recognition that reality is woven from two complementary principles… that each contains the seed of the other… and that the relation between them is not opposition but dance. The principles are yin and yang. Yin is associated with the dark… the cool… the moist… the inward… the receptive… the female… the moon… the valley… the night… the still. Yang is associated with the bright… the warm… the dry… the outward… the active… the male… the sun… the mountain… the day… the moving. The library notes immediately, before going further… that this is not a hierarchical scheme. Neither principle is superior. Neither can exist without the other. Each contains a seed of the other (the small circle of opposite colour in each comma shape of the taijitu). The whole thing is dynamic, not static. The dance is the point. Where it comes from The earliest references to yin and yang as cosmological principles are in the I Ching commentaries… particularly the Great Treatise (the Xici)… traditionally attributed to Confucius but probably composed slightly later, around the fourth or third century BCE. From there the principles spread through every layer of Chinese thought. The Tao Te Ching uses them. The Confucian classics use them. Traditional Chinese Medicine is built on them. The traditional Chinese cosmology, with its five phases and eight trigrams and sixty four hexagrams, is an elaboration of the basic yin-yang structure. So is the traditional Chinese understanding of the seasons… of food… of the body… of social relations… of governance. It is hard to overstate how foundational these two principles are to two and a half thousand years of Chinese intellectual life. The dance, not the war The library finds the Chinese understanding of complementarity one of the most useful conceptual gifts the East has given the West. The Western tradition has tended, since at least Plato, to think in oppositions. Light against dark. Spirit against matter. Reason against emotion. Good against evil. Each pair organised hierarchically… with one term valued and the other devalued. The result has been a long history of trying to elevate one and suppress the other… of treating the dyad as a war to be won rather than a balance to be maintained. Yin and yang are not at war. They are dancing. Yang at its peak begins to give way to yin… the longest day is followed by the slow return of night. Yin at its peak begins to give way to yang… the deepest night is followed by the slow return of dawn. Each rises and falls… in turn… forever. To try to maintain pure yang against the natural pull toward yin is, in this framework, a violation of the way things actually work… and produces the pathologies (the burnout, the violence, the brittleness) that result from forcing what wants to flow. The same is true in the other direction. The wise life, the Taoist would say… is the life that dances with the alternation rather than fighting it. In the body Traditional Chinese Medicine takes the yin-yang dance into the body in extraordinary detail. The organs are paired into yin organs (more solid, storing) and yang organs (more hollow, transmitting). The meridians of acupuncture are organised by the same scheme. Diagnoses are made in terms of yin excess… yang excess… yin deficiency… yang deficiency. Treatments are designed to restore the dynamic balance. The aim is never the elimination of one principle in favour of the other. The aim is the restoration of the proper alternation. Health, in this framework… is just the dance proceeding without obstruction. What the West can take The most useful thing the library finds in yin and yang for Western readers… in the present moment… is the conceptual permission to think dyadically without thinking hierarchically. Most of the polarities the modern Western mind struggles with… work and rest… action and contemplation… masculine and feminine… individual and collective… doing and being… are best handled, the Chinese tradition would suggest, as alternations rather than as battles. The library suggests holding this lightly. It is a useful lens. It is also, like any cosmological framework, a tool to be used and not a creed to be defended. | Public domain |
| Zelda Fitzgerald | Image hosted at images/essays/zelda-fitzgerald.png. Sourced from Wikimedia Commons. | Public domain |
| The Ancient of Days | Image hosted locally at ../../images/wikimedia/Europe_a_Prophecy,_copy_D,_object_1_(Bentley_1,_Erdman_i,_Keynes_i)_British_Museum.jpg. Sourced from public domain or freely-licensed material. | Public domain |
| The Annunciation | Leonardo da Vinci painting / drawing. Public domain. Image hosted at ../../images/annunciation.jpg. | Public domain |
| Composition VII | Image hosted locally at ../../images/wikimedia/Vassily_Kandinsky,_1913_-_Composition_7.jpg. Sourced from public domain or freely-licensed material. | Public domain |
| The Creation of Adam | Image hosted locally at ../../images/wikimedia/Michelangelo_-_Creation_of_Adam_(cropped).jpg. Sourced from public domain or freely-licensed material. | Public domain |
| De Divina Proportione | Image hosted locally at ../../images/polyhedra.jpg. Sourced from public domain or freely-licensed material. | Public domain |
| Lady with an Ermine | Image hosted locally at ../../images/lady-ermine.jpg. Sourced from public domain or freely-licensed material. | Public domain |
| The Last Supper | Image hosted locally at ../../images/last-supper.jpg. Sourced from public domain or freely-licensed material. | Public domain |
| Leonardo da Vinci | Leonardo da Vinci painting / drawing. Public domain. Image hosted at ../../images/self-portrait.jpg. | Public domain |
| Leonardo's Flying Machines | Leonardo da Vinci painting / drawing. Public domain. Image hosted at ../../images/flying-machines.jpg. | Public domain |
| Mona Lisa | Image hosted locally at ../../images/mona-lisa.jpg. Sourced from public domain or freely-licensed material. | Public domain |
| Salvator Mundi | Image hosted locally at ../../images/salvator-mundi.jpg. Sourced from public domain or freely-licensed material. | Public domain |
| The Fool | From the Thoth Tarot deck by Aleister Crowley & Lady Frieda Harris (1938-1943). Image hosted at ../../images/thoth/sm_Thot-T-00.webp. | Public domain |
| The Priestess | From the Thoth Tarot deck by Aleister Crowley & Lady Frieda Harris (1938-1943). Image hosted at ../../images/thoth/sm_Thot-T-02.webp. | Public domain |
| The Empress | From the Thoth Tarot deck by Aleister Crowley & Lady Frieda Harris (1938-1943). Image hosted at ../../images/thoth/sm_Thot-T-03.webp. | Public domain |
| The Emperor | From the Thoth Tarot deck by Aleister Crowley & Lady Frieda Harris (1938-1943). Image hosted at ../../images/thoth/sm_Thot-T-04.webp. | Public domain |
| The Hierophant | From the Thoth Tarot deck by Aleister Crowley & Lady Frieda Harris (1938-1943). Image hosted at ../../images/thoth/sm_Thot-T-05.webp. | Public domain |
| The Lovers | From the Thoth Tarot deck by Aleister Crowley & Lady Frieda Harris (1938-1943). Image hosted at ../../images/thoth/sm_Thot-T-06.webp. | Public domain |
| The Chariot | From the Thoth Tarot deck by Aleister Crowley & Lady Frieda Harris (1938-1943). Image hosted at ../../images/thoth/sm_Thot-T-07.webp. | Public domain |
| Adjustment | From the Thoth Tarot deck by Aleister Crowley & Lady Frieda Harris (1938-1943). Image hosted at ../../images/thoth/sm_Thot-T-08.webp. | Public domain |
| The Hermit | From the Thoth Tarot deck by Aleister Crowley & Lady Frieda Harris (1938-1943). Image hosted at ../../images/thoth/sm_Thot-T-09.webp. | Public domain |
| Fortune | From the Thoth Tarot deck by Aleister Crowley & Lady Frieda Harris (1938-1943). Image hosted at ../../images/thoth/sm_Thot-T-10.webp. | Public domain |
| Lust | From the Thoth Tarot deck by Aleister Crowley & Lady Frieda Harris (1938-1943). Image hosted at ../../images/thoth/sm_Thot-T-11.webp. | Public domain |
| The Hanged Man | From the Thoth Tarot deck by Aleister Crowley & Lady Frieda Harris (1938-1943). Image hosted at ../../images/thoth/sm_Thot-T-12.webp. | Public domain |
| Death | From the Thoth Tarot deck by Aleister Crowley & Lady Frieda Harris (1938-1943). Image hosted at ../../images/thoth/sm_Thot-T-13.webp. | Public domain |
| The Tower | From the Thoth Tarot deck by Aleister Crowley & Lady Frieda Harris (1938-1943). Image hosted at ../../images/thoth/sm_Thot-T-16.webp. | Public domain |
| The Moon | From the Thoth Tarot deck by Aleister Crowley & Lady Frieda Harris (1938-1943). Image hosted at ../../images/thoth/sm_Thot-T-18.webp. | Public domain |
| The Sun | From the Thoth Tarot deck by Aleister Crowley & Lady Frieda Harris (1938-1943). Image hosted at ../../images/thoth/sm_Thot-T-19.webp. | Public domain |
| The Aeon | From the Thoth Tarot deck by Aleister Crowley & Lady Frieda Harris (1938-1943). Image hosted at ../../images/thoth/sm_Thot-T-20.webp. | Public domain |
| The Universe | From the Thoth Tarot deck by Aleister Crowley & Lady Frieda Harris (1938-1943). Image hosted at ../../images/thoth/sm_Thot-T-21.webp. | Public domain |
| Satiety · Ten of Cups | From the Thoth Tarot deck by Aleister Crowley & Lady Frieda Harris (1938-1943). Image hosted at ../../images/thoth/sm_Thot-C-10.webp. | Public domain |
| Love · Two of Cups | From the Thoth Tarot deck by Aleister Crowley & Lady Frieda Harris (1938-1943). Image hosted at ../../images/thoth/sm_Thot-C-02.webp. | Public domain |
| Luxury · Four of Cups | From the Thoth Tarot deck by Aleister Crowley & Lady Frieda Harris (1938-1943). Image hosted at ../../images/thoth/sm_Thot-C-04.webp. | Public domain |
| Disappointment · Five of Cups | From the Thoth Tarot deck by Aleister Crowley & Lady Frieda Harris (1938-1943). Image hosted at ../../images/thoth/sm_Thot-C-05.webp. | Public domain |
| Pleasure · Six of Cups | From the Thoth Tarot deck by Aleister Crowley & Lady Frieda Harris (1938-1943). Image hosted at ../../images/thoth/sm_Thot-C-06.webp. | Public domain |
| Debauch · Seven of Cups | From the Thoth Tarot deck by Aleister Crowley & Lady Frieda Harris (1938-1943). Image hosted at ../../images/thoth/sm_Thot-C-07.webp. | Public domain |
| Indolence · Eight of Cups | From the Thoth Tarot deck by Aleister Crowley & Lady Frieda Harris (1938-1943). Image hosted at ../../images/thoth/sm_Thot-C-08.webp. | Public domain |
| Happiness · Nine of Cups | From the Thoth Tarot deck by Aleister Crowley & Lady Frieda Harris (1938-1943). Image hosted at ../../images/thoth/sm_Thot-C-09.webp. | Public domain |
| Ace of Cups | From the Thoth Tarot deck by Aleister Crowley & Lady Frieda Harris (1938-1943). Image hosted at ../../images/thoth/sm_Thot-C-0A.webp. | Public domain |
| The Knight of Cups | From the Thoth Tarot deck by Aleister Crowley & Lady Frieda Harris (1938-1943). Image hosted at ../../images/thoth/sm_Thot-C-KN.webp. | Public domain |
| Prince of Cups | From the Thoth Tarot deck by Aleister Crowley & Lady Frieda Harris (1938-1943). Image hosted at ../../images/thoth/sm_Thot-C-PN.webp. | Public domain |
| Princess of Cups | From the Thoth Tarot deck by Aleister Crowley & Lady Frieda Harris (1938-1943). Image hosted at ../../images/thoth/sm_Thot-C-PS.webp. | Public domain |
| Queen of Cups | From the Thoth Tarot deck by Aleister Crowley & Lady Frieda Harris (1938-1943). Image hosted at ../../images/thoth/sm_Thot-C-QU.webp. | Public domain |
| Wealth · Ten of Disks | From the Thoth Tarot deck by Aleister Crowley & Lady Frieda Harris (1938-1943). Image hosted at ../../images/thoth/sm_Thot-D-10.webp. | Public domain |
| Change · Two of Disks | From the Thoth Tarot deck by Aleister Crowley & Lady Frieda Harris (1938-1943). Image hosted at ../../images/thoth/sm_Thot-D-02.webp. | Public domain |
| Works · Three of Disks | From the Thoth Tarot deck by Aleister Crowley & Lady Frieda Harris (1938-1943). Image hosted at ../../images/thoth/sm_Thot-D-03.webp. | Public domain |
| Power · Four of Disks | From the Thoth Tarot deck by Aleister Crowley & Lady Frieda Harris (1938-1943). Image hosted at ../../images/thoth/sm_Thot-D-04.webp. | Public domain |
| Worry · Five of Disks | From the Thoth Tarot deck by Aleister Crowley & Lady Frieda Harris (1938-1943). Image hosted at ../../images/thoth/sm_Thot-D-05.webp. | Public domain |
| Success · Six of Disks | From the Thoth Tarot deck by Aleister Crowley & Lady Frieda Harris (1938-1943). Image hosted at ../../images/thoth/sm_Thot-D-06.webp. | Public domain |
| Failure · Seven of Disks | From the Thoth Tarot deck by Aleister Crowley & Lady Frieda Harris (1938-1943). Image hosted at ../../images/thoth/sm_Thot-D-07.webp. | Public domain |
| Prudence · Eight of Disks | From the Thoth Tarot deck by Aleister Crowley & Lady Frieda Harris (1938-1943). Image hosted at ../../images/thoth/sm_Thot-D-08.webp. | Public domain |
| Gain · Nine of Disks | From the Thoth Tarot deck by Aleister Crowley & Lady Frieda Harris (1938-1943). Image hosted at ../../images/thoth/sm_Thot-D-09.webp. | Public domain |
| Ace of Disks | From the Thoth Tarot deck by Aleister Crowley & Lady Frieda Harris (1938-1943). Image hosted at ../../images/thoth/sm_Thot-D-0A.webp. | Public domain |
| Knight of Disks | From the Thoth Tarot deck by Aleister Crowley & Lady Frieda Harris (1938-1943). Image hosted at ../../images/thoth/sm_Thot-D-KN.webp. | Public domain |
| Prince of Disks | From the Thoth Tarot deck by Aleister Crowley & Lady Frieda Harris (1938-1943). Image hosted at ../../images/thoth/sm_Thot-D-PN.webp. | Public domain |
| Princess of Disks | From the Thoth Tarot deck by Aleister Crowley & Lady Frieda Harris (1938-1943). Image hosted at ../../images/thoth/sm_Thot-D-PS.webp. | Public domain |
| Queen of Disks | From the Thoth Tarot deck by Aleister Crowley & Lady Frieda Harris (1938-1943). Image hosted at ../../images/thoth/sm_Thot-D-QU.webp. | Public domain |
| The Magus | From the Thoth Tarot deck by Aleister Crowley & Lady Frieda Harris (1938-1943). Image hosted at ../../images/thoth/sm_Thot-T-01.webp. | Public domain |
| Ruin · Ten of Swords | From the Thoth Tarot deck by Aleister Crowley & Lady Frieda Harris (1938-1943). Image hosted at ../../images/thoth/sm_Thot-S-10.webp. | Public domain |
| Peace · Two of Swords | From the Thoth Tarot deck by Aleister Crowley & Lady Frieda Harris (1938-1943). Image hosted at ../../images/thoth/sm_Thot-S-02.webp. | Public domain |
| Sorrow · Three of Swords | From the Thoth Tarot deck by Aleister Crowley & Lady Frieda Harris (1938-1943). Image hosted at ../../images/thoth/sm_Thot-S-03.webp. | Public domain |
| Truce · Four of Swords | From the Thoth Tarot deck by Aleister Crowley & Lady Frieda Harris (1938-1943). Image hosted at ../../images/thoth/sm_Thot-S-04.webp. | Public domain |
| Defeat · Five of Swords | From the Thoth Tarot deck by Aleister Crowley & Lady Frieda Harris (1938-1943). Image hosted at ../../images/thoth/sm_Thot-S-05.webp. | Public domain |
| Science · Six of Swords | From the Thoth Tarot deck by Aleister Crowley & Lady Frieda Harris (1938-1943). Image hosted at ../../images/thoth/sm_Thot-S-06.webp. | Public domain |
| Futility · Seven of Swords | From the Thoth Tarot deck by Aleister Crowley & Lady Frieda Harris (1938-1943). Image hosted at ../../images/thoth/sm_Thot-S-07.webp. | Public domain |
| Interference · Eight of Swords | From the Thoth Tarot deck by Aleister Crowley & Lady Frieda Harris (1938-1943). Image hosted at ../../images/thoth/sm_Thot-S-08.webp. | Public domain |
| Cruelty · Nine of Swords | From the Thoth Tarot deck by Aleister Crowley & Lady Frieda Harris (1938-1943). Image hosted at ../../images/thoth/sm_Thot-S-09.webp. | Public domain |
| Ace of Swords | From the Thoth Tarot deck by Aleister Crowley & Lady Frieda Harris (1938-1943). Image hosted at ../../images/thoth/sm_Thot-S-0A.webp. | Public domain |
| Knight of Swords | From the Thoth Tarot deck by Aleister Crowley & Lady Frieda Harris (1938-1943). Image hosted at ../../images/thoth/sm_Thot-S-KN.webp. | Public domain |
| Prince of Swords | From the Thoth Tarot deck by Aleister Crowley & Lady Frieda Harris (1938-1943). Image hosted at ../../images/thoth/sm_Thot-S-PN.webp. | Public domain |
| Princess of Swords | From the Thoth Tarot deck by Aleister Crowley & Lady Frieda Harris (1938-1943). Image hosted at ../../images/thoth/sm_Thot-S-PS.webp. | Public domain |
| Queen of Swords | From the Thoth Tarot deck by Aleister Crowley & Lady Frieda Harris (1938-1943). Image hosted at ../../images/thoth/sm_Thot-S-QU.webp. | Public domain |
| Oppression · Ten of Wands | From the Thoth Tarot deck by Aleister Crowley & Lady Frieda Harris (1938-1943). Image hosted at ../../images/thoth/sm_Thot-W-10.webp. | Public domain |
| Dominion · Two of Wands | From the Thoth Tarot deck by Aleister Crowley & Lady Frieda Harris (1938-1943). Image hosted at ../../images/thoth/sm_Thot-W-02.webp. | Public domain |
| Virtue · Three of Wands | From the Thoth Tarot deck by Aleister Crowley & Lady Frieda Harris (1938-1943). Image hosted at ../../images/thoth/sm_Thot-W-03.webp. | Public domain |
| Completion · Four of Wands | From the Thoth Tarot deck by Aleister Crowley & Lady Frieda Harris (1938-1943). Image hosted at ../../images/thoth/sm_Thot-W-04.webp. | Public domain |
| Strife · Five of Wands | From the Thoth Tarot deck by Aleister Crowley & Lady Frieda Harris (1938-1943). Image hosted at ../../images/thoth/sm_Thot-W-05.webp. | Public domain |
| Victory · Six of Wands | From the Thoth Tarot deck by Aleister Crowley & Lady Frieda Harris (1938-1943). Image hosted at ../../images/thoth/sm_Thot-W-06.webp. | Public domain |
| Valour · Seven of Wands | From the Thoth Tarot deck by Aleister Crowley & Lady Frieda Harris (1938-1943). Image hosted at ../../images/thoth/sm_Thot-W-07.webp. | Public domain |
| Swiftness · Eight of Wands | From the Thoth Tarot deck by Aleister Crowley & Lady Frieda Harris (1938-1943). Image hosted at ../../images/thoth/sm_Thot-W-08.webp. | Public domain |
| Strength · Nine of Wands | From the Thoth Tarot deck by Aleister Crowley & Lady Frieda Harris (1938-1943). Image hosted at ../../images/thoth/sm_Thot-W-09.webp. | Public domain |
| The Ace of Wands | From the Thoth Tarot deck by Aleister Crowley & Lady Frieda Harris (1938-1943). Image hosted at ../../images/thoth/sm_Thot-W-0A.webp. | Public domain |
| Knight of Wands | From the Thoth Tarot deck by Aleister Crowley & Lady Frieda Harris (1938-1943). Image hosted at ../../images/thoth/sm_Thot-W-KN.webp. | Public domain |
| Prince of Wands | From the Thoth Tarot deck by Aleister Crowley & Lady Frieda Harris (1938-1943). Image hosted at ../../images/thoth/sm_Thot-W-PN.webp. | Public domain |
| Princess of Wands | From the Thoth Tarot deck by Aleister Crowley & Lady Frieda Harris (1938-1943). Image hosted at ../../images/thoth/sm_Thot-W-PS.webp. | Public domain |
| Queen of Wands | From the Thoth Tarot deck by Aleister Crowley & Lady Frieda Harris (1938-1943). Image hosted at ../../images/thoth/sm_Thot-W-QU.webp. | Public domain |
| Virgin of the Rocks | Image hosted locally at ../../images/virgin-rocks.jpg. Sourced from public domain or freely-licensed material. | Public domain |
| Vitruvian Man | Image hosted locally at ../../images/vitruvian-man.jpg. Sourced from public domain or freely-licensed material. | Public domain |
Bodies of the solar system and the deep sky · planets, dwarf planets, stars, clusters and nebulae photographed by NASA, ESA, Voyager, New Horizons, Hubble, and one citizen astronomer.
| Essay | Image & source | Licence |
|---|---|---|
| Pluto | Pluto in true colour, captured by NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft on 14 July 2015. Credit: NASA / Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory / Southwest Research Institute / Alex Parker. Via Wikimedia Commons. | Public domain (NASA) |
| Neptune | Neptune photographed by Voyager 2 on 20 August 1989. Original imagery: NASA / JPL / Voyager-ISS. Processed (flatten + crop) by Justin Cowart. Via Wikimedia Commons. | CC BY 2.0 |
| Uranus | Uranus photographed by Voyager 2 on 16 December 1986. Credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech. Via Wikimedia Commons. | Public domain (NASA) |
| Andromeda | The Andromeda galaxy with hydrogen-alpha data. Photograph by Adam Evans, 2010. Via Wikimedia Commons. | CC BY 2.0 |
| The Pleiades | The Pleiades star cluster (M45). Credit: NASA, ESA, AURA/Caltech and Palomar Observatory, 2004. Via Wikimedia Commons. | Public domain (NASA) |
| Orion | The Orion Nebula (M42) Hubble mosaic, 2006. Credit: NASA, ESA, M. Robberto (STScI / ESA) and the Hubble Space Telescope Orion Treasury Project Team. Via Wikimedia Commons. | Public domain (NASA / ESA) |
Wikimedia Commons is a repository of freely usable media. Images there are either in the public domain (because the work is old enough, or the creator has dedicated it to the public domain) or released under a Creative Commons licence. The La La Library makes a best effort to use only public-domain or CC0 images, and to credit any Creative Commons contributors whose work appears here. We are grateful to every photographer, museum, and unknown hand that put their image into the commons so that others could use it.
This credits page is updated as new images are added. If you spot an omission or error, the library would be glad to correct it. Please write to curator@lalalibrary.art.
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