In the tail end of the late medieval period, going into the early modern period, there was an explosion of early scientific thought. fueled by the newfound wealth of the knowledge being created in the intellectual centers of the middle east and pushed forwards by the efforts of hundreds if not thousands of translators rendering the texts in Latin. this  of information sent many people into the newly booming fields of occultism and alchemy. as time passed  a baseline of knowledge was formed, one that could be build upon, the viewed the world though divine artifice and knowledge, and sought closer relation to god. after the explosion on syncretism, the main goal of alchemy became known as the great work, transmuting lead into gold though a mix of chemical and magical means. many of these processes are familiar, distillation, evaporation, and double boiling where all advanced by this search. some others, such as leaving live mice in boxes and allowing a half ton of bird guano to rot, have unsurprisingly fallen out of favor. the methodology of the time was not scientifically sound by modern standards, but many chemical elements, common compounds, alloys, medical theories, and even early forms of psychiatry, where pioneers by alchemists and the significantly more taboo occultists. this is not even counting mathematical and engineering breakthroughs that enabled these things to be done, many of them coming from translated codices written by Muslim scholars who themselves did there work in the name of God.  While many of these things seem like they are irrelevant in the modern era, there is a firm link between these alchemists and occultist, and the flurry of writing they produced in the late 16th and early 17th centuries, laid many of the foundations for what became what is known as the scientific revolution. build off of the back of the end of the age of alchemists, and occurring during one of the most tumultuous eras in European history, many founding thinkers of what would become modern science did there work for explicitly esoteric goals. this exhibit is a collection of there works, items that played a hand in advancing science, all of them written with esoteric goals.