Embassy of the Free Mind, Amsterdam

The Embassy of the Free Mind is a museum, library, and meeting place for free thought, housed in Amsterdam’s historic House with the Heads. Its focus is European intellectual history, especially ideas connecting the divine, the cosmos, and humanity through hermetic writings and related traditions. Look at the carved heads across the façade: they portray Roman deities, including Apollo, Ceres, Mercury, Minerva, Bacchus, and Diana.

Mercury and Minerva stand beside the entrance, expressing the ideal of a wise merchant. The façade is credited to Hendrick de Keyser, although his son Pieter probably completed the house in 1622, after Hendrick’s death. It was built for Nicolaas Sohier, a wealthy hosiery trader, and its side wing preserves an early form of Amsterdam’s later broad canal houses.

The museum grew from Joost Ritman’s private library, begun in 1958. Its holdings now exceed 28,000 works, including a 1471 printing of the Corpus Hermeticum, along with books and manuscripts on alchemy, mysticism, magic, astrology, and related subjects. The Embassy opened in October 2017, and novelist Dan Brown supported the digitisation of its core holdings with a gift of 300,000 euros. What you see here is a historic merchant’s house turned into a home for Europe’s most unconventional books.