About the archive

Occult Image DB is a browsable, scholarly-cataloged archive of whole illustrations from the alchemical and occult tradition — emblems, woodcuts, engravings, diagrams, and portraits, spanning late antiquity through the early modern period. It exists to put high-quality, public-domain esoteric imagery in front of the people who can use it: artists, illustrators, game designers, worldbuilders, and researchers.

What counts as an entry

Each catalog record is one complete image as it appears in its source — a full emblem plate, an entire woodcut, a whole engraved diagram, a portrait. We deliberately do not cut images into atomic elements; the dragon is catalogued together with the egg, the king together with his furnace. Every record links back to the page scan it came from and the institution that digitised it.

Method & provenance

Images are sourced from public-domain digitisations (Internet Archive, the Bibliothèque interuniversitaire de Santé, the Science History Institute, and university libraries). For each we record creator, date, place, era, tradition, motif tags, rights, and a link to the source. Scholarly summaries are written from cited secondary literature; where verified information is not yet in hand, the entry carries an explicit [needs: …] marker rather than invented filler. Treat un-summarised entries as reliable for the image and its provenance, but pending for interpretation.

Licensing & use

The underlying artworks are centuries old and in the public domain. The digital scans are redistributed here under the rights statement recorded on each item (most are public-domain or no-known-copyright library scans). For commercial work — including game assets — you are responsible for confirming the rights statement on the individual item and its source institution. When in doubt, follow the “View source ↗” link and check the holding library's terms.

Source works

The current corpus draws on the following works. Counts populate from the live catalog.

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Roadmap

• V1 (now): ~700 curated illustrations from eight flagship works, fully browsable with filters and provenance.
• Next: author scholarly summaries for flagship images; ingest the page-scan tier (Fludd, Khunrath, medieval & grimoire manuscripts) with illustration-vs-text curation.
• Later: antiquity stratum (the ouroboros of Kleopatra's Chrysopoeia, the Theban alphabet, early furnace diagrams), grimoire seals, Victorian and modern occult revival imagery.

Built on a foundation of public-domain scholarship. A sibling of the EmblemPrintShop and AtalantaClaudiens projects.