The Esoteric Archive of Rochester came to be in 2022. Its mission was twofold:
- Create a graphical interface to deal with my massive collection of occult-themed PDFs, and,
- To further investigate the esoteric roots of Rochester, NY and the so-called Burned Over District of New York state.
Like many seekers, I had accumulated hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of PDFs, mostly scans of books published in the late 1800s and very early 1900s (all in the public domain now). These files, with typically useless file names, were all stored in my Google Drive, and it was impossible to find anything I might be looking for.
So, I decided to treat this massive collection like an archivist might. I broke the collection up into “racks” of 22 titles each, and on a very simple website, I listed the title, author, and year of publication. The identifying information linked to the file itself. This way, at least, I could ctrl-f my way into better finding things. And, once I had a better idea of what was in the collection, I could work on moving the files to a better, more organized, system.
Working through all these files showed me that I had a lot of actual trash and a lot of stuff that was not in the public domain.
As I was working through the collection, identifying and weeding, I realized that I needed a more robust website. It was then, at the end of 2022, that I started building a wiki to house the collection.
This was immediately a problem. I am not someone with a strong background in coding. In fact, in college my computer science professor took me to community court after she discovered that I copied my HTML table code from another student. (The court, a collection of students at the college, thought the professor was overreacting a lot and did not decide to actually punish me in any way. I was, however, removed from the class and received an “incomplete” as a result)
Suddenly, I was building a wiki and every individual little piece of that wiki had to be manually built. I made a lot of progress (with a lot of help), but it became clear that this was not something I was going to be able to maintain on my own, despite trying to do so for a long time.
So, in mid-2024 I started working on the website you’re currently visiting. So far, it’s looking way more polished and is way simpler to use.
The wiki, I think, was really over-engineered for what I needed. This WordPress build uses document library plugins from Barn2, and they act a lot more like a database than the wiki did. You now have access to all the digital files (all actually in the public domain) all at once, and you can narrow the search results based on author, publication year, publication location, publishing house, category, etc. You can even search the text of any of those fields, as well as the title and subtitle. It’s now significantly easier to navigate the collection, which is what I was going for in the first place.
I want to thank you for visiting our new home and I’d also encourage you to stick around! We are growing all the time and I’m really excited to see where we end up.
The best way to keep up with what we’re doing is to become a Patron. News and updates are always posted there first, and you’ll also get an inside look into the nuts and bolts of the process.
If you become a patron at the Practicus level or higher, you have access to the guerrilla library – check out the catalog here.
And lastly, I post on Instagram fairly regularly. Follow us there!
I don’t know where this project is going or what the future will look like. To deal with this I try to keep in mind the third Delphic aphorism as much as possible:
Ἐγγύα πάρα δ’ Ἄτα
The translation of this aphorism is actually pretty debated. It’s the first word (Ἐγγύα) that can be translated a few ways. It can represent a pledge (or surety given for a loan), an oath given during a marriage ceremony, or just a strong affirmation. On the footer of this website I’ve used the translation “Surety Brings Ruin,” though I understood “surety” to mean something more like “being certain.” Basically, having a solid view of the future that you believe will happen will lead to unhappiness.
Despite all our planning and toiling, nothing is written in stone and we simply cannot be certain of what’s to come. So, I will continue to work on the EAR without any expectation of what the future may hold.
Thank you so much for joining me on that journey.
-Nick