An alchemist's laboratory, pitcher plants and a meteor storm

Heinrich Khunrath's Amphitheatrum Sapientiae Aeternae (1609) is one of the strangest books of its century. Two of its plates join Esoterica this week: the famous laboratory, half chapel and half workshop, and the gateway, a staircase climbing into a cave of light. Both are cut from the Science History Institute's scans at more than 11,000 pixels.

Also new: Ole Worm's 1655 frontispiece of his own cabinet of curiosities, with a polar bear hanging from the ceiling. Haeckel's pitcher plants and siphonophores, from the National Library of Poland. Two more Trouvelots, and Andreas Cellarius's 1660 chart of the universe as Ptolemy saw it, with the Earth at the centre.