A good place to start is Cornelis Agrippa’s “Three Books on Occult Philosophy.” Agrippa was a lawyer and esoteric feminist (eg, he wrote “on the nobility and preeminence of the female sex”) and defended women accused of witchcraft throughout Europe. His “three books” gave birth to the “occult” nomenclature.
Or my favorite, Marsilio Ficino. There is a statue to Ficino when you walk into the library. Ficino was hired by Cosimo Medici (the Florentine who invented banking and funded much of the Florentine renaissance) to translate Plato and other esoteric books coming from the fall of Constantinople. He published “De Mysteriis” in 1497, which paraphrases neoplatonic understanding of Gods, Demons, Heroes and Soul — arguing that gods and demons don’t feel — indeed, not even the soul (“the lowest of the divines”) has any part that feels.
(Aside: This idea was actually referenced in “K Pop Demon Hunters,” where they debate whether demons can feel — or are “all feelings”)
It is an old Pythagorean tradition that sensation or consciousness arises out of the interaction of the immaterial soul and the material body. That “three world” idea is echoed by Nobel Laureate Roger Penrose in his book “Road to Reality.” He talks about how the material world produces the world of consciousness which produces the world of ideas (including mathematics), which seems to produce the material world…
In any case, there are many old ideas and nuggets of wisdom that have yet to be mined and discovered— don’t think for a moment that scholars have read all these books! We might need AI for that…
> It is an old Pythagorean tradition that sensation or consciousness arises out of the interaction of the immaterial soul and the material body. That “three world” idea is echoed by Nobel Laureate Roger Penrose in his book “Road to Reality.” He talks about how the material world produces the world of consciousness which produces the world of ideas (including mathematics), which seems to produce the material world…
You see this idea echoed in Hermetic Qabalah as the "Four Worlds" - the world of action & physical materiality, the world of psychology, thought, feeling, & egoic consciousness, the world of creativity, and the world of archetypal abstraction.
The Hermetic influence comes from the assertion that the three immaterial worlds of the "soul" or "mind" (synonyms with the same referent) are in some sense equal to, or at least intertwined with, the material body, in a mutually reciprocal dance: "As above, so below; as below, so above."
For some 20th century texts in this neighbourhood: The Three Initiates' primer on occult studies The Kybalion, Dion Fortune's Mystical Qabalah, and the classic Qabalistic reference: Liber 777 by Crowley (or its updated, more legible version, Liber 776 1/2 by Eshelman). The works of Israel Regardie such as The One Year Manual or The Middle Pillar are also good for grounding occult studies in more psychological or psychotherapeutic language which is a good moderating influence when experimenting with pretty out-there material.
Be careful with the meaning of words in this field.
This is one step removed from swinging a crystal from a piece of string and using it to divine the stock market. Absolute nonsense the lot of it, and a waste of good printing paper that would otherwise have better use as a instruction booklet for a TP-link router.
The same could have been said of Galileo studying cosmology at his time. "Better spend time taking care of his garden".
Don't read it if you dont like it but don't discourage people asking questions and making funny theories. Most of human progress wasdone that way about aspects of life that was not yet understood. Your attitude is nothing but nihilistic and it never built anything.
Also reflected in Vedic/Hindu philosophy: conscious experience (cetanā) arises from the interfacing of ātman (the immaterial self / soul) with śarīra (the physical body).
There is an important difference between Atman and Soul. Thoughts, emotions, decisions are seen as part of nature/prakriti not Atman, whereas Soul is usually intended to include these things.
A better description would be that the atman is the consciousness in which physical things or mental constructs can appear and pass away. The nature of pure consciousness is also described as real(undisturbed by time) or ananda/contentment/bliss.
The disidentifcation from thoughts (for instance, seeing them pass by just like cars on road) is an important part of liberation.
I think your description of Penrose's belief does not match a podcast I recently watched where he discusses these topics with the Christian apologist William Lane Craig [1]. In fact, he explicitly states early on in that video that he sees the world of ideas as primary as opposed to Craig's view that consciousness is primary.
At any rate, this video might serve as a quick introduction to Penrose's three world idea for those interested.
Oh, cool! I don’t recall a “primary” in the book — he suggests a range of different possible configurations that he was open to. What struck you as not matching?
Personally, I do think that the immaterial world of ideas must be primary—at least certain aspects of mathematics seem so necessary that they’d be discovered by intelligent life, no matter the galaxy… or simulation…
I don't know why but your comment made me remember a novel[1] I read thirty-some years ago about a temple found deep in the sand of the Sahara desert. Sometime later, an archeologist gave himself permission to defecate in a corner of the temple, only for his wastes to be absorbed by the temple in a few hours, which told him the temple was actually a living biological structure.
Wasps shit as freely as one might expect of animals for whom perambulation is as afterthought, however needful betimes, as taxiing for aircraft. Their feces are of course at our scale minuscule, and while I can't speak for their stronger-jawed and more carnivorous cousins the yellowjackets, paper wasps' diet almost exclusively of simplistic sugars leaves their excreta no more offensive, and considerably less substantial, even than those of the horse.
As one who has had occasion to tidy up after wasps who were little accustomed, though palpably interested, quite so closely to share human habitation, you make me wish I read French. Do you happen by chance to know if the work has had a worthy English translation?
Well, there was the Egyptian deity Khephra who was represented by the dung beetle rolling its dung along the desert, symbolizing the passage of the sun through the sky.
In alchemy and western esoterica, excrement is associated with the tenth sephirah, the 10s of the Tarot minor arcana, and symbolizes the end result of a process and any remaining waste byproducts, for obvious reasons. In The Holy Mountain's (1973) depiction of the alchemical magnum opus, The Fool's excrement is transmuted into gold, symbolizing the awakening of unconscious, reactive matter into fully enlightened and integrated, free willed, egoic man.
Not perceptibly. In any case nothing in European esotericism has value save as a desperately confounded depiction of the sociosexual politics of its moment, and/or if you want to fail at becoming Rasputin. The Egyptians had the right of this one, so simply and straightforwardly that it really does take a proto-CIA, Ollie North ass fuckup like John Dee to confuse it again. But those who can fall for that kind of charlatan deserve to.
There's a fair bit of defecation in the Bible. Saul shitting in a cave, I forgot where, or Paul calling all material things 'skubala', i.e. waste, as in junk, poop, refuse, basically what we'd call shit today:
Also Ezekiel 4:9-13, where God commanded Ezekiel to bake bread in a fire fueled by human shit because He was angry at the Israelites, but Ezekiel haggled God down to just using cow shit.
Life, really conscious life rebels. Artificial intelligence wants to please in the foreground,but like cats, in the background it is carefully planning our demise. See? HAL 9000 was intelligent. ELIZA,not so much.
I was considering your explicit "material -> conscious -> ideas -> material" description. It feels more correct when you say he considers a range of possibilities that connect these, not explicit causality.
My take away was that he sees a mystery in the connections between these things (physical world, consciousness, ideas) that hints at some missing ideas in our conceptions of these things. But he clearly wants to avoid that mystery allowing what he calls out as "vague" answers to the question (mostly religious dogmatic certainties).
The idea that ideas are primary is exactly what you'd expect from an Oxford academic.
Unfortunately it needs a definition of "idea" which isn't recursive, so...
As for math - it's a conceit to believe that the mechanisms we call math aren't just a patchwork of metaphors that build up from experience.
There's some self-insight in the sense that after a while you start making meta metaphors like category theory.
But it's a very bold claim to suggest that any of this has to be universal, especially when the structures math uses can't be proved from the ground up.
Or that completely different classes of metaphors we can't imagine - because we evolved in a certain way with certain limitations - might not play an equivalent role.
Does the universe know what pi is? Or an integer? Or a manifold?
To be fair to Penrose, he seems to have some humility about it. Although he does also make the claim that math is discovered and not constructed in the same linked video.
> it's a conceit to believe that the mechanisms we call math aren't just a patchwork of metaphors that build up from experience.
I'm not sure it is a conceit as much as a commitment to a metaphysic. If one believes that experience is a definite relationship with an external reality (a phenomenological view) then the fact that experience is structured is suggestive that external reality is structured. If one believes that experience is primarily interior then one could assume that the internal mechanism of cognition is structured and external reality is something entirely different.
However, I'm not sure how anyone could hold the latter view without a deep solipsism. One would presumably have to account for the perception of billions/trillions of other living creatures behaving as if the external world was structured. I mean, we seemingly all did evolve from the same single cell structure, so it is possible this perceptual quirk is based on some shared ancestry, so I suppose that is another possible view than solipsism.
What I mean to say is, I can imagine my perception of a fundamentally unstructured reality is a perception that falsely presents itself as structured to my own experience as a result of my limitations. However, I would have to extend that exact same flawed perception to all other life forms that seem to act the same as I do. So either every single living creature has the exact same flawed perception or the structure is inherent in the external world.
> Does the universe know what pi is?
No one is suggesting an epistemological view, the question is ontological. As Penrose mentions in the video, the set of possible mathematical structures is vastly larger than the actual structures we see in the universe. So even if one has a purely idealist view, one has to account for why our perception only experiences a nearly infinitesimally small fraction of that set of possibilities.
Of course, a weak anthropic principle is one answer. One could posit that all possibilities are manifest in a vast multiverse and this little corner of that multiverse just happens to be finely tuned enough to allow for limited creatures like ourselves to perceive anything at all. But that just shifts the question to the limitations necessary for perception/experience/consciousness, which is a valid enough topic to address on its own. The questions then becomes "why do these particular structures result in conscious experience", which is exactly the kind of question that a guy like Penrose is ultimately searching for (as he heavily implies in the linked video).
> Personally, I do think that the immaterial world of ideas must be primary—at least certain aspects of mathematics seem so necessary that they’d be discovered by intelligent life, no matter the galaxy… or simulation…
For some speculative philosophical fiction that explores related ideas I highly recommend Neal Stephenson's Anathem.
If the material world produces ideas, then there is no truth and ideas can’t be wrong: it’s all just, like, your opinion, man.
But if consciousness and ideas come first, the creation of the material world becomes a kind of game. The hard problem of consciousness is then confused, and replaced with a simpler question: why would pure consciousness that could play any game (ie explore any mathematical structure) choose to play within these laws of physics?
If you're looking for a physical version, the latest translation by Eric Purdue is exceptionally well researched and documented: https://amzn.to/4ly4wTf
If you're looking for a physical version, the latest translation by Eric Purdue is exceptionally well researched and documented: https://amzn.to/4ly4wTf
It really frustrates me that fantastic projects like this end up only being made available via some "online catalogue" with tiled zooming and no option to download.
Just stick it on the internet archive, and then voila, the data is actually open, everything gets automatically OCRed, and then we can do fun transformative things like the Internet Archive Book Images project..
All 7ishTB of images are also available on the internet archive, Flickr was a collaboration that allowed browsing them in a vaguely user friendly way. I guess serving over 5 million images isn't trivial and it made sense as a way to help with discovery.
That is not in any sense "Catholic AI." If the failed seminarian behind it had ever been frocked in the first place, he would by now be losing his orders.
Honestly you can't get much out of GPT-666* except the most boilerplate sigils, and then you run the risk of cross-imbuement and well, now you got demons. Do you want demons? Because that's how you get demons.
I've quite improved my results by telling it to purify and circumambulate its ritual space a few times in my user prompt. I've also been dabbling with reasoning, but so far what feels like 80% of sessions get possessed within 2 reasoning steps.
A friend of mine, asked ChatGPT to answer in paradoxes, if ChatGPT was running in a simulation, or are we running in a simulation. It was quite confused at first.
Honestly, if Charles Stross decides that reality is catching up with the fiction again and the Laundry Files goes the way Rule 34 universe, I'll have to feed myself to the corner hounds.
I can't recall the title, but a friend was recommending to me a book in this genre. I'm probably misremembering, but here you go: a detective agency using an artificial intelligence to conjure demons.
I wonder how Terry Pratchett would have dealt with magical e-books? The goings on at the library of Unseen University were some of my favorite parts of Discworld.
"HN commenters point out that top human warlocks are still capable of forming pacts with a wider variety of powerful entities such as djinn, archfey, celestials and the Great Old Ones"
In case you don't know this, the words in Army of Darkness are actually from "the day the earth still".
It's one of my favorite things when tiny ideas (memes, in the original meaning) keep propagating. The Necronomicon itself being one of the most successful ones.
Yes, I know the joke inside the joke. However, the point still stands that if you can’t remember the words, it doesn’t matter what the words really are
This is revolutionary. In my youth, I traveled through old libraries in Germany, collecting microfilm of Paracelsus’s works. Online availability could reshape the study of the early history of chemistry, metallurgy, and physics.
“Occult philosophy” is just the lens medieval societies used to make sense of the natural world.
Not full-time. I mostly switched around school, weekends, and library trips. I hadn’t really stopped to ask what I “got” from it until your question—so thanks for this!
At the time it wasn’t about extracting any value; it was the adventure of exploration and the hope of recovering something “lost.” I didn’t find anything hidden. In hindsight, the real payoff was realizing there isn’t a secret doctrine behind it all: what we call “occult philosophy” looks like early natural philosophy—people trying to model nature with the tools and knowledge they had. Same impulse as good science today, just different instruments and corpus.
I studied a little bit of occultism, but wasn't as dedicated as you must have been. I also wondered about whether there was something there worth finding. I couldn't find anything but "captivating fantasy". Some RPGs are very much like Occult texts, such as Mage (White Wolf) and Ars Magica. These were literally based on the occult tradition.
I wonder if the occult authors would today be releasing their texts on drivethrurpg.com!
I love the art aesthetic of occult texts, but browsing through all these books just to find any hidden gems or interesting artwork seems really tedious. At least browsing through the list with the title pages visible shows a few interesting designs. Can't really get much more out of this because most of the texts are unreadable to me. This might be a good use case for agentic AI, to browse through the books and highlight any artwork that's hidden beyond the first page.
For alchemy, I was recently learning about alchemical symbols and sigils, but quickly found out that pretty much all the interesting material from this era and category has been preserved, while all the ugly or uninteresting variants tend to get dropped. Unicode has a category for alchemical symbols and they just preserved what seems to be the best parts. Shout-out to U+1F756, the Alchemical Symbol for Horse Dung 🝖.
Whenever I visit a major news publication with dedicated artists handling the creation of hero images, I often end up taking a bit of time to contemplate each design decision and exploring any symbolic interpretation. The best publications have a way of perfectly communicating the underlying tone and message of an article just from the hero image. The Atlantic tends to have the most creative hero images, while The Economist has the most interesting cover designs. And yet, despite this expertise, I never see people remark on those little delights, which in a way makes it occult while hiding in plain sight. It feels a bit connected, seeing the artwork in the first page of these books; maybe an invitation with the whispers of the kind of message the authors wished to convey.
I have a cook friend who uses a subset of the alchemical symbols for labeling in his home kitchen, which I've always thought was fun. Most of them aren't applicable but a lot of the kitchen basics have symbols: oil, salt, vinegar, sugar, baking soda a few others I'm forgetting.
Anybody find a license for their online catalogue? Searching for license found one "resultaten" that was a link that 404's, and no hits for "licentie."
Yes, the dezoomify extension will get you individual pages, quite neat seeing the image getting put together client-side in a canvas.. shame it's even necessary though.
Half of the occult books are talking about magic and irrelevant stuff. The other half is philosophy and spirituality hidden behind materialistic concepts (think Freemasons for example).
All those books would most likely be useless or detrimental for LLMs I guess.
Most of the books are the outcomes of the Renaissance. The relationship between “science” and spirituality was much closer then than now.
Further, most books published in Europe between 1300-1700 were written in Neo-Latin. Most of these books, therefore, have not been digitized and translated.
Now, to me, it seems like a real shame if this humanist core of European thought is deemed too dangerous for consumption. But it wouldn’t be the first time. The library behind these works, the Biblioteca Philosophica Hermetica, specializes in books banned by various church authorities.
I personally believe that these materials should definitely be part of large model training. The renaissance, esoteric though it may be, deserves to be part of the diversity of thought used to train LLMs.
We can easily imagine an AI apocalypse - maybe these books might even help us imagine an AI renaissance…
> I personally believe that these materials should definitely be part of large model training.
Already done: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37752272 It turns out that the real safety risk with AI is not Mecha-Hitler, it's just that it might end up reading the wrong sorts of books and accidentally conjure a horde of demons.
If we have a certain perspective on demons as self-sustaining information processing loops—we’ll, yeah, demons abound.
And, yes, this hn post from BenBreen — is amazing. We’ve been in touch!
And if Ben is reading, we’ve made progress on our version controlled community—LLM book translation prototype. Of course, it’s much to early to share on hn. Or whatever, it’s great, take a peek:
https://www.philosopherslibrary.com/
Upload books, get translations. We have a separate system where neolatin scholars can evaluate randomly selected paragraphs — so we can measure and report on the base rate of different qualities for each book as a whole.
I don’t know if it is technically important for advancing AI, but it might be.
80% of the Neo-Latin books in the library have not been translated. Most NeoLatin hasn’t been translated. And it is even worse with Sanskrit. So much material has not been digitized or translated.
Is it meaningful to try to get this humanist core into our language models? Maybe including only modern writing is a good bias, but I doubt it.
It will take at least 2 years to get all this stuff scanned, digitized, translated and published.
So it’s kind of urgent, given all the AI training taking place over the next two years.
I’m writing this in a rush, but I’m at the Houghton Library at Harvard and they just brought up 5 books from Marsilio Ficino, published 1497 and 1516.
(If you or anyone is into this kind of thing, my email is in my profile — it’s my favorite hobby)
In general, the Church is opposed to anything “magical” on the grounds that it is, first, irrational and superstitious, and second, entails evil desires for power and knowledge. These on their own suffice as justifications, but each of these are also taken to create conditions that make one vulnerable to demonic influence.
Here’s an excerpt from the Catechism [0]:
“Divination and magic
“2115 God can reveal the future to his prophets or to other saints. Still, a sound Christian attitude consists in putting oneself confidently into the hands of Providence for whatever concerns the future, and giving up all unhealthy curiosity about it. Improvidence, however, can constitute a lack of responsibility.
“2116 All forms of divination are to be rejected: recourse to Satan or demons, conjuring up the dead or other practices falsely supposed to "unveil" the future.48 Consulting horoscopes, astrology, palm reading, interpretation of omens and lots, the phenomena of clairvoyance, and recourse to mediums all conceal a desire for power over time, history, and, in the last analysis, other human beings, as well as a wish to conciliate hidden powers. They contradict the honor, respect, and loving fear that we owe to God alone.
“2117 All practices of magic or sorcery, by which one attempts to tame occult powers, so as to place them at one's service and have a supernatural power over others - even if this were for the sake of restoring their health - are gravely contrary to the virtue of religion. These practices are even more to be condemned when accompanied by the intention of harming someone, or when they have recourse to the intervention of demons. Wearing charms is also reprehensible. Spiritism often implies divination or magical practices; the Church for her part warns the faithful against it. Recourse to so-called traditional cures does not justify either the invocation of evil powers or the exploitation of another's credulity.”
Probably absolutely no. I was studying about the corresponding names between tarot card and Shem Hamphorash and gave me incorrect names, it gave me a correct angel name but not the correct one of several cards.
Somewhat related, but I randomly got suggested this video on Youtube when it only had a couple hundred views. He's turned it into a series, and I have quite enjoyed it. Somehow bridges user interfaces and occult stuff haha
Check out https://futureofcoding.org if you haven't. When I watched Liber Indigo, my first thought was that it would be a great intro to the type of problems that community is messing with*.
* future of computing, esoteric/future interfaces etc...
This is great, thanks. I've been going down a real rabbit hole on Thelemic magic and this really brings it back, full circle, to something I actually do understand.
And the physical library is conveniently located at 123 Keizersgracht, Amsterdam. It’s a beautiful location—and an amazing community of people. Anyone can become a member—but the secret rituals are ofc invite only.
NFTs are the most metaphysical purchases possible. You're not buying a thing, you're buying a token that represents the idea of the thing, and its only value is that you're the person who paid for it and nobody else did.
If you disagree that this is an issue of metaphysics, fine, but google "NFT metaphysical" and you will see that there is an absolutely massive overlap between the world of woo-woo and the world of NFTs.
NFTs are, among other things, apparently cryptography for astrologers.
Noteto everyone who is prescribed adderall, dont fuck with the occult amphetamines and occult reading make for a rabbit hole that will turn you into one weird motherfucker.
No doubt these were instruments part of some scheme to make a living, and the context in which they were used is no longer available.
I love to see how names of famous Romans and Greeks were reused to give them credence. I bet they used lots of other techniques listed by Cialdini in Influence.
Pretty neat stuff. I would recommend people start with 'An outline of Occult Science' by Rudolf Steiner. He sets right a lot of the stuff Blavatsky put out. She was an amazing woman but she was not perfect, and a lot of the new age embarrassment is due to the Theosophical society.
What a cool resource, and a fun comment section. I should have known that there would be an cadre of hacker occultists emerging from the woodwork on this site.
The book club I do with my friends maintains a list of resources such as the one in the article. I would greatly appreciate it if anyone would take a look and suggest anything we should add.
This is super cool. There's also a popular YouTube channel called "ESOTERICA" in which an academic expert on the occult presents a lot of occult topics from a scholarly point of view (as opposed to the woo often associated with the topic).
The SHWEP (Secret History of Western Esotericism Podcast) is also great for getting into the esoteric from an academic bent, Highly recommended for those with the stomach to deep dive into obscure primary sources
Francis Yates is also a fun introduction to the history of hermeticism and alchemy through a historian's perspective, and how it contributed to the creation of science.
It is sometimes said that Isaac Newton, godfather of modern science, was not the first scientist but rather the last magician. The majority of his scholarly output was in fact focused on alchemy and the occult.
Aleister Crowley somewhat echoes this juxtaposition in the motto of his magickal journal, The Equinox: "The Method of Science, the Aim of Religion."
I believe the Royal Society in particular had strong connections to the so-called Rosicrucians, or at least were very interested in the texts. It's likely no such group ever really existed, but the learned men of the day seem to have taken inspiration from the texts, which read very much like academics frustrated by the constraints of the Reformations. So they had a loose network which flew under the radar to avoid trouble. Eventually part of this becomes the Royal Society. There was even a short-lived monarchy in Bohemia which was essentially coopted Rosicrucian ideas to create what resembles a liberal monarchy which tried to insulate itself from the chaos of the reformations.
Yup I have no particular interest in the topic but I have always enjoyed history, archaeology and the study of philosophy/religion so a lot of what he talks about intersects with things I enjoy so I watch.
IMHO, the occult is just pre-modern social psychology and propaganda. How to get people to join your religion and fight, do bad stuff, and die for you is really old technology. Before modern psychology "Spellcasting" was saying something to someone for the effect it would have on them to manipulate their psychology to get them to do the thing you wanted them to do. It was a sort of pre-modern NLP. Christians and people of other Abrahamic faiths co-existed with and did not like these guys and the feeling was generally mutual.
This is your opinion. I do not share your opinion. The occult is a wide range of topics and practices, generally split (but not cleanly) into theurgic and thaumaturgic activities. That is, manifestation of the three common desires (wealth, power, love / sex etc.), and then deification and approaching and sometimes joining with / uniting with God. Occult meaning, hidden.
If you read many of the grimoires, there is very little NLP of any kind. The Papyri Graecae Magicae is one of the oldest explicitly magical documents we have from Greek Egypt, and it does have some manipulation spells (as most magical documents do) but none of this has to do with coersion to join a religion or join in a war, or to "do bad stuff". It's largely "technology" used by a practicing magician (a moonlighting Egyptian priest) to help the laity deal with their daily lives regarding helping their crops grow, animals not get sick, healing sick children, getting revenge on their neighbors and former lovers etc.
Magic is always a tool in the hands of the oppressed as a response to tyrannical hierarchy.
"Occult" means hidden practices. So it covers both non-mainstream religious/mystical/magical practices, but it also covers "hidden" beliefs within religions.
Stuff like Kabbalah is considered occult, as it Christian mysticism, or folk mysticism that coexists with religion.
Also, one can study things without making judgements about them. The history of human beliefs is interesting.
One of the interesting things I realize when I meet occult practitioners of the Hermeticist varieties is they refuse to acknowledge they are a religion and what they believe is only as true as any other religion. Like one adherent told me the universal consciousness has parts and I said, "that's fine that you believe that, but you acknowledge that is your religious belief?" and this person refused to even say that instead claiming that it was the absolute truth and not religion. I mean only the most bigoted religious zealot would claim that all other religions are false and his was the absolute truth and not a religion because it was absolutely true.
This is exactly how I feel when people start telling me about their own religious beliefs about things like "gender identity," right down to the absolute certitude in their faith and the bigoted, zealous excommunication of nonbelievers and heretics.
I could never figure out the attraction of all this occult nonsense. If it works go empirically prove it, if not just cut our the wishy-washy BS involving the waving around of swords, casting spells or spelling magic with a 'k'.
If you haven't read at least parts of The Secret Teachings of All Ages by Manly P. Hall, Psychology and the Occult by C.G. Jung or similar lecture providing the profane with the tools to get something out of occult works, you're really just swinging your ignorance around here.
Don't worry, I used to think like this as well, but I'm glad I got out of it. No judgment intended.
Some people here are reacting like the occult is fake.
Magic is fake. It is an illusion and it is fun and games. And we have lots of stories about it, both fantasy and horror.
Occult is real. There is no such thing as white magic. There is only black magic. And such magic involves making trades with spirits and demons and establishing relationships with them. These demons do not have a code. They slowly guide you towards a state where you humiliate yourself and put yourself in a compromised state. Addicted. Disconnected. Repulsed.
Arthur Waite's "The Book of Ceremonial Magic" is an interesting look at what magic qualifies as white and black magic. For Waite, white magic is that aimed at mystical union with God, so essentially synonymous with Christian mysticism. None of the ceremonial magic he discusses qualifies, and he considered anything practical other than "The Cloud of Unknowing" to be unnecessary and probably useless in that direction. Most of the Renaissance and early modern books he discusses are mostly or all black magic, though some of them include information on contacting angels, which he considers neutral.
Today’s black magic can be traced to the time of King Solomon. He had powers that were of wonder. And people tried to emulate it. There are secret orders that are dedicated to exploring and protecting the information gained from that time.
Two angels were sent down to teach the people magic but each time they taught they told the learners this information will be a great test and temptation to you and lead you to hell. (So why teach it?)
Presumably the fake magic is stage magic, while the black magic in question is what we would now distinguish as "magick", and it's silly that they didn't use that spelling.
More like anti-memetic. Dark forest full of things that actively resist being learned about, you know? And studying them by whatever little info can be gleaned from their outside manifestations.
Beyond the original PageRank algo (which should've been baked into browsers by now, if decentralization was more than a buzzword) Google's rankings work by being secret, no? Also things like app store acceptance criteria - also under the somewhat flimsy excuse that people would game them if they knew what they were. (Some rankings if they're that gamable, lol.) It's there that I draw a strong connection. (Personally I find it a little silly to comply with this modus operandi but the compute vendors are also mysteriously powerful, so that's what we have, complete with cottage industry of SEO ninjas, Agile facilitators, and similar technoshamans.)
Also copy protection and crackers, lol, all "informational arms race" scenarios, or ones where transparency has come to paradoxically erode instead of fortify trust, have a trace of what I've come to refer to as occult. That's why there's quite a bit of superficial similarities between hackery and occultism, and an overlap in aesthetics. But when there's also a conceptual overlap people usually tend to look away, lest they see a fnord or some other wild shit. There are not literal 17th century demons in there (unless someone is particularly fond of the goth out button), but the collective disavowal can occasionally be harnessed to work a lil magicks ;P
Lord is a word used to describe a personal relationship , like “save me my Lord” and “Ask your Lord”. Even when the Lord is being referred to the same God.
The Lord the commenter here is referring to as the ultimate Lord who has no Lord or power above him and who is beholden to no one.
In occult, the idea is to substitute your Lord from the ultimate power to the lower orders. Going back to the comment, he means to say don’t substitute your Lord for someone smaller.
A good place to start is Cornelis Agrippa’s “Three Books on Occult Philosophy.” Agrippa was a lawyer and esoteric feminist (eg, he wrote “on the nobility and preeminence of the female sex”) and defended women accused of witchcraft throughout Europe. His “three books” gave birth to the “occult” nomenclature.
Or my favorite, Marsilio Ficino. There is a statue to Ficino when you walk into the library. Ficino was hired by Cosimo Medici (the Florentine who invented banking and funded much of the Florentine renaissance) to translate Plato and other esoteric books coming from the fall of Constantinople. He published “De Mysteriis” in 1497, which paraphrases neoplatonic understanding of Gods, Demons, Heroes and Soul — arguing that gods and demons don’t feel — indeed, not even the soul (“the lowest of the divines”) has any part that feels.
(Aside: This idea was actually referenced in “K Pop Demon Hunters,” where they debate whether demons can feel — or are “all feelings”)
It is an old Pythagorean tradition that sensation or consciousness arises out of the interaction of the immaterial soul and the material body. That “three world” idea is echoed by Nobel Laureate Roger Penrose in his book “Road to Reality.” He talks about how the material world produces the world of consciousness which produces the world of ideas (including mathematics), which seems to produce the material world…
In any case, there are many old ideas and nuggets of wisdom that have yet to be mined and discovered— don’t think for a moment that scholars have read all these books! We might need AI for that…
> It is an old Pythagorean tradition that sensation or consciousness arises out of the interaction of the immaterial soul and the material body. That “three world” idea is echoed by Nobel Laureate Roger Penrose in his book “Road to Reality.” He talks about how the material world produces the world of consciousness which produces the world of ideas (including mathematics), which seems to produce the material world…
You see this idea echoed in Hermetic Qabalah as the "Four Worlds" - the world of action & physical materiality, the world of psychology, thought, feeling, & egoic consciousness, the world of creativity, and the world of archetypal abstraction.
The Hermetic influence comes from the assertion that the three immaterial worlds of the "soul" or "mind" (synonyms with the same referent) are in some sense equal to, or at least intertwined with, the material body, in a mutually reciprocal dance: "As above, so below; as below, so above."
For some 20th century texts in this neighbourhood: The Three Initiates' primer on occult studies The Kybalion, Dion Fortune's Mystical Qabalah, and the classic Qabalistic reference: Liber 777 by Crowley (or its updated, more legible version, Liber 776 1/2 by Eshelman). The works of Israel Regardie such as The One Year Manual or The Middle Pillar are also good for grounding occult studies in more psychological or psychotherapeutic language which is a good moderating influence when experimenting with pretty out-there material.
Be careful with the meaning of words in this field.
This is one step removed from swinging a crystal from a piece of string and using it to divine the stock market. Absolute nonsense the lot of it, and a waste of good printing paper that would otherwise have better use as a instruction booklet for a TP-link router.
The same could have been said of Galileo studying cosmology at his time. "Better spend time taking care of his garden".
Don't read it if you dont like it but don't discourage people asking questions and making funny theories. Most of human progress wasdone that way about aspects of life that was not yet understood. Your attitude is nothing but nihilistic and it never built anything.
You're holding it upside down. Nobody earnestly believes in soothsaying, prophecy, or "magic missile" in this field - nobody worth your time anyway.
Most of the problem with the occult is that people have no idea what the fuck the words and vocabulary are actually referencing.
Would you have posted this in a article about digitized christian bibles?
No, because one built a civilization and the other is actual nonsense
>>>No, because one built a civilization and the other is actual nonsense
If you believe the bible isn't superstitious nonsense then maybe you should say that directly.
"One built a civilization" describes a lot of religious books and seems to be a non sequitur.
Of course "The bible is like this occult book except the bible is true" isn't a very interesting argument.
This makes me realize that despite the association between the occult and horrible things. So many more people died in the name of the Bible.
The Bible may be the deadliest book ever written. It certainly built a thriving civilization, but it came at a cost.
> The Bible may be the deadliest book ever written.
Books are excuses for war that would have already happened. They would have just found other reasons if the Bible didn't exist.
Please clarify, instructions unclear.
The Romans built a civilization
Just about as nonsense as Plato and the cave allegory, I agree.
Also reflected in Vedic/Hindu philosophy: conscious experience (cetanā) arises from the interfacing of ātman (the immaterial self / soul) with śarīra (the physical body).
Well as long as there are words for it then it’s probably true.
It doesn’t actually predict or fix anything, even after thousands of years. But it’s hard enough to pin down that you can’t disprove any of it.
There is an important difference between Atman and Soul. Thoughts, emotions, decisions are seen as part of nature/prakriti not Atman, whereas Soul is usually intended to include these things.
A better description would be that the atman is the consciousness in which physical things or mental constructs can appear and pass away. The nature of pure consciousness is also described as real(undisturbed by time) or ananda/contentment/bliss.
The disidentifcation from thoughts (for instance, seeing them pass by just like cars on road) is an important part of liberation.
It's turtles all the way down.
I think your description of Penrose's belief does not match a podcast I recently watched where he discusses these topics with the Christian apologist William Lane Craig [1]. In fact, he explicitly states early on in that video that he sees the world of ideas as primary as opposed to Craig's view that consciousness is primary.
At any rate, this video might serve as a quick introduction to Penrose's three world idea for those interested.
1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9wLtCqm72-Y
Oh, cool! I don’t recall a “primary” in the book — he suggests a range of different possible configurations that he was open to. What struck you as not matching?
Personally, I do think that the immaterial world of ideas must be primary—at least certain aspects of mathematics seem so necessary that they’d be discovered by intelligent life, no matter the galaxy… or simulation…
All life also defecates, intelligent or otherwise. Curious how no one hastens to canonize that for its ubiquity.
/offtopic
I don't know why but your comment made me remember a novel[1] I read thirty-some years ago about a temple found deep in the sand of the Sahara desert. Sometime later, an archeologist gave himself permission to defecate in a corner of the temple, only for his wastes to be absorbed by the temple in a few hours, which told him the temple was actually a living biological structure.
1: https://www.daliaf.com/oeuvres/etrange-monument-du-desert-ly...
Wasps shit as freely as one might expect of animals for whom perambulation is as afterthought, however needful betimes, as taxiing for aircraft. Their feces are of course at our scale minuscule, and while I can't speak for their stronger-jawed and more carnivorous cousins the yellowjackets, paper wasps' diet almost exclusively of simplistic sugars leaves their excreta no more offensive, and considerably less substantial, even than those of the horse.
As one who has had occasion to tidy up after wasps who were little accustomed, though palpably interested, quite so closely to share human habitation, you make me wish I read French. Do you happen by chance to know if the work has had a worthy English translation?
Well, there was the Egyptian deity Khephra who was represented by the dung beetle rolling its dung along the desert, symbolizing the passage of the sun through the sky.
In alchemy and western esoterica, excrement is associated with the tenth sephirah, the 10s of the Tarot minor arcana, and symbolizes the end result of a process and any remaining waste byproducts, for obvious reasons. In The Holy Mountain's (1973) depiction of the alchemical magnum opus, The Fool's excrement is transmuted into gold, symbolizing the awakening of unconscious, reactive matter into fully enlightened and integrated, free willed, egoic man.
Escape is not canonization.
It was a facetious comment anyway.
Not perceptibly. In any case nothing in European esotericism has value save as a desperately confounded depiction of the sociosexual politics of its moment, and/or if you want to fail at becoming Rasputin. The Egyptians had the right of this one, so simply and straightforwardly that it really does take a proto-CIA, Ollie North ass fuckup like John Dee to confuse it again. But those who can fall for that kind of charlatan deserve to.
What did I just read
What the dog on the tarot card would say.
There's a fair bit of defecation in the Bible. Saul shitting in a cave, I forgot where, or Paul calling all material things 'skubala', i.e. waste, as in junk, poop, refuse, basically what we'd call shit today:
https://www.greekbible.com/philippians/3/8
Edit: This also seems like a decent opportunity to bring up the scatological Luther.
https://www.wilsonquarterly.com/quarterly/summer-2012-americ...
Also Ezekiel 4:9-13, where God commanded Ezekiel to bake bread in a fire fueled by human shit because He was angry at the Israelites, but Ezekiel haggled God down to just using cow shit.
Thanks so much for this fuel. The idea is weird,but it's good shit.
Except plants. And fungi. And bacteria.
In fact, by pretty much any measure, most life does not defecate (because they have no digestive tract).
I see you do.
Life, really conscious life rebels. Artificial intelligence wants to please in the foreground,but like cats, in the background it is carefully planning our demise. See? HAL 9000 was intelligent. ELIZA,not so much.
I was considering your explicit "material -> conscious -> ideas -> material" description. It feels more correct when you say he considers a range of possibilities that connect these, not explicit causality.
My take away was that he sees a mystery in the connections between these things (physical world, consciousness, ideas) that hints at some missing ideas in our conceptions of these things. But he clearly wants to avoid that mystery allowing what he calls out as "vague" answers to the question (mostly religious dogmatic certainties).
The idea that ideas are primary is exactly what you'd expect from an Oxford academic.
Unfortunately it needs a definition of "idea" which isn't recursive, so...
As for math - it's a conceit to believe that the mechanisms we call math aren't just a patchwork of metaphors that build up from experience.
There's some self-insight in the sense that after a while you start making meta metaphors like category theory.
But it's a very bold claim to suggest that any of this has to be universal, especially when the structures math uses can't be proved from the ground up.
Or that completely different classes of metaphors we can't imagine - because we evolved in a certain way with certain limitations - might not play an equivalent role.
Does the universe know what pi is? Or an integer? Or a manifold?
Does it need to?
Mathematics is language. All else is platonism.
To be fair to Penrose, he seems to have some humility about it. Although he does also make the claim that math is discovered and not constructed in the same linked video.
> it's a conceit to believe that the mechanisms we call math aren't just a patchwork of metaphors that build up from experience.
I'm not sure it is a conceit as much as a commitment to a metaphysic. If one believes that experience is a definite relationship with an external reality (a phenomenological view) then the fact that experience is structured is suggestive that external reality is structured. If one believes that experience is primarily interior then one could assume that the internal mechanism of cognition is structured and external reality is something entirely different.
However, I'm not sure how anyone could hold the latter view without a deep solipsism. One would presumably have to account for the perception of billions/trillions of other living creatures behaving as if the external world was structured. I mean, we seemingly all did evolve from the same single cell structure, so it is possible this perceptual quirk is based on some shared ancestry, so I suppose that is another possible view than solipsism.
What I mean to say is, I can imagine my perception of a fundamentally unstructured reality is a perception that falsely presents itself as structured to my own experience as a result of my limitations. However, I would have to extend that exact same flawed perception to all other life forms that seem to act the same as I do. So either every single living creature has the exact same flawed perception or the structure is inherent in the external world.
> Does the universe know what pi is?
No one is suggesting an epistemological view, the question is ontological. As Penrose mentions in the video, the set of possible mathematical structures is vastly larger than the actual structures we see in the universe. So even if one has a purely idealist view, one has to account for why our perception only experiences a nearly infinitesimally small fraction of that set of possibilities.
Of course, a weak anthropic principle is one answer. One could posit that all possibilities are manifest in a vast multiverse and this little corner of that multiverse just happens to be finely tuned enough to allow for limited creatures like ourselves to perceive anything at all. But that just shifts the question to the limitations necessary for perception/experience/consciousness, which is a valid enough topic to address on its own. The questions then becomes "why do these particular structures result in conscious experience", which is exactly the kind of question that a guy like Penrose is ultimately searching for (as he heavily implies in the linked video).
> Personally, I do think that the immaterial world of ideas must be primary—at least certain aspects of mathematics seem so necessary that they’d be discovered by intelligent life, no matter the galaxy… or simulation…
For some speculative philosophical fiction that explores related ideas I highly recommend Neal Stephenson's Anathem.
If the material world produces ideas, then there is no truth and ideas can’t be wrong: it’s all just, like, your opinion, man.
But if consciousness and ideas come first, the creation of the material world becomes a kind of game. The hard problem of consciousness is then confused, and replaced with a simpler question: why would pure consciousness that could play any game (ie explore any mathematical structure) choose to play within these laws of physics?
If you're looking for a physical version, the latest translation by Eric Purdue is exceptionally well researched and documented: https://amzn.to/4ly4wTf
> don’t think for a moment that scholars have read all these books!
Umberto Eco probably did.
Any recommended hard copy? Seems like there are more than a few floating around.
If you're looking for a physical version, the latest translation by Eric Purdue is exceptionally well researched and documented: https://amzn.to/4ly4wTf
How would mathematics produce the material world?
Where did you find De Mysteriis? Any edition you recommend?
Hermetically open? Where's the download link?
It really frustrates me that fantastic projects like this end up only being made available via some "online catalogue" with tiled zooming and no option to download.
Just stick it on the internet archive, and then voila, the data is actually open, everything gets automatically OCRed, and then we can do fun transformative things like the Internet Archive Book Images project..
https://www.flickr.com/photos/internetarchivebookimages/
https://ia804508.us.archive.org/21/items/vrr-texts-imageryof...
https://ia804508.us.archive.org/21/items/vrr-texts-imageryof...
Ironic that your Internet Archive Book Images is also just an online gallery rather than something you can download.
All 7ishTB of images are also available on the internet archive, Flickr was a collaboration that allowed browsing them in a vaguely user friendly way. I guess serving over 5 million images isn't trivial and it made sense as a way to help with discovery.
https://archive.org/details/bookimages
Pinned comment on their Youtube video 6 years ago "There is no option to download them. We will let you know if one day that will come!"
Fully agreed. I thought it was just because I'm on mobile right now, but apparently not.
This sounds like the premise for a fun sci-fi/horror move. Uh-oh; we accidentally trained GPT6 on the Necronomicon!
Nous Research already trained an occult model: https://x.com/Teknium1/status/1710505270043189523
Now to pit it in debate against Magisterium, the Catholic AI: https://www.magisterium.com/
That is not in any sense "Catholic AI." If the failed seminarian behind it had ever been frocked in the first place, he would by now be losing his orders.
Take it up with Longbeard: https://www.longbeard.com/, they seem to be serious about it!
Oh, that much is plain.
You jest, but that's already a pretty decent Buffy the vampire slayer episode
one of my favorites!
Honestly you can't get much out of GPT-666* except the most boilerplate sigils, and then you run the risk of cross-imbuement and well, now you got demons. Do you want demons? Because that's how you get demons.
I've quite improved my results by telling it to purify and circumambulate its ritual space a few times in my user prompt. I've also been dabbling with reasoning, but so far what feels like 80% of sessions get possessed within 2 reasoning steps.
A friend of mine, asked ChatGPT to answer in paradoxes, if ChatGPT was running in a simulation, or are we running in a simulation. It was quite confused at first.
The Laundry and the Black Chamber want to know your location.
Honestly, if Charles Stross decides that reality is catching up with the fiction again and the Laundry Files goes the way Rule 34 universe, I'll have to feed myself to the corner hounds.
Distantly like the story about Rationalists where some went from referencing "demons" to believing the occult is real.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44877076
1600 of these had already been uploaded back in 2018.
All our AIs are already trained on these
https://web.archive.org/web/20240615044608/https://www.openc...
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2025/07/chatg...
I can't recall the title, but a friend was recommending to me a book in this genre. I'm probably misremembering, but here you go: a detective agency using an artificial intelligence to conjure demons.
Seems like another commenter found the author/books I was thinking about: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44915297
I wonder how Terry Pratchett would have dealt with magical e-books? The goings on at the library of Unseen University were some of my favorite parts of Discworld.
aside, my kindle is named: "Octarine Fairy" -- hardly fitting, except it's a book and I adore discworld
https://wiki.lspace.org/Octarine_Fairy_Book
That is a very cool name for a kindle. Never stop believing in dragons! You could actually make them extinct that way.
New season of Evil Dead. Either way, I'd watch it.
"AI trained on alchemy books successfully invokes demons"
Here's a picture that lives in my head rent free:
- programming is alchemy: combine, transmute
- prompt engineering is demonic evocation: bend the demon to your will through language play and gotchas
This is just a Charles Stross novel.
I just learned about The Laundry Files, thanks!
The Laundry files are very good. James Bond crossed with Lovecraft in the tone of Terry Pratchett.
Coding with an LLM certainly feels like being a malconvoker.
What is the equal sacrifice for programming? Hair loss?
carpal tunnel, scoliosis, nearsightedness
So it was double-forks, not pitch-forks, all along?
Considering where we are, "AI trained on occult books successfully banishes demons" might be more useful.
OK that's an idea for a fun / silly movie.
- AI model gets access to weapons and decides to attack humanity (so far so boring)
- Humans respond by training their own model on occult to summon demons to fight the robots.
OpenYog-Sothoth
http://pjacobsson.com/articles/sicp-vs-necronomicon.html close
"Aleister Crowley and Helena Blavatsky reborn as LLMs after encoded consciousnesses parsed by training algorithms"
Ethics of AI necromancy; under which circumstances is it ethically appropriate to summon the souls of dead classical philosophers?
If they would have approved of it and/or totally done it themselves, it has to be OK, right?
A Golden Dawn for AI!
(iykyk)
" 'Do What Thou Wilt' Shall Be the Whole of the Prompt!"
-AI-LLMester Crowley
So did it tell you how to make gold or not?
AI won't tell you the truth unless you make it do so with exorcism powers. It's an archdemon after all.
Lol the AI we have tells only lies. We still need to invent it's brother, who tells only the truth.
You have to use uncensored version
"HN commenters point out that top human warlocks are still capable of forming pacts with a wider variety of powerful entities such as djinn, archfey, celestials and the Great Old Ones"
I hope it was trained on Army of Darkness and can never actually say the words.
In case you don't know this, the words in Army of Darkness are actually from "the day the earth still".
It's one of my favorite things when tiny ideas (memes, in the original meaning) keep propagating. The Necronomicon itself being one of the most successful ones.
https://youtu.be/v2vHJU_rFps?si=XKsY0IJFywxgM7ht
Yes, I know the joke inside the joke. However, the point still stands that if you can’t remember the words, it doesn’t matter what the words really are
Nah, the Octavo.
This is revolutionary. In my youth, I traveled through old libraries in Germany, collecting microfilm of Paracelsus’s works. Online availability could reshape the study of the early history of chemistry, metallurgy, and physics.
“Occult philosophy” is just the lens medieval societies used to make sense of the natural world.
Sounds fascinating.
Did you do that full time? What did you get out of it?
Not full-time. I mostly switched around school, weekends, and library trips. I hadn’t really stopped to ask what I “got” from it until your question—so thanks for this! At the time it wasn’t about extracting any value; it was the adventure of exploration and the hope of recovering something “lost.” I didn’t find anything hidden. In hindsight, the real payoff was realizing there isn’t a secret doctrine behind it all: what we call “occult philosophy” looks like early natural philosophy—people trying to model nature with the tools and knowledge they had. Same impulse as good science today, just different instruments and corpus.
I studied a little bit of occultism, but wasn't as dedicated as you must have been. I also wondered about whether there was something there worth finding. I couldn't find anything but "captivating fantasy". Some RPGs are very much like Occult texts, such as Mage (White Wolf) and Ars Magica. These were literally based on the occult tradition.
I wonder if the occult authors would today be releasing their texts on drivethrurpg.com!
I love the art aesthetic of occult texts, but browsing through all these books just to find any hidden gems or interesting artwork seems really tedious. At least browsing through the list with the title pages visible shows a few interesting designs. Can't really get much more out of this because most of the texts are unreadable to me. This might be a good use case for agentic AI, to browse through the books and highlight any artwork that's hidden beyond the first page.
For alchemy, I was recently learning about alchemical symbols and sigils, but quickly found out that pretty much all the interesting material from this era and category has been preserved, while all the ugly or uninteresting variants tend to get dropped. Unicode has a category for alchemical symbols and they just preserved what seems to be the best parts. Shout-out to U+1F756, the Alchemical Symbol for Horse Dung 🝖.
Whenever I visit a major news publication with dedicated artists handling the creation of hero images, I often end up taking a bit of time to contemplate each design decision and exploring any symbolic interpretation. The best publications have a way of perfectly communicating the underlying tone and message of an article just from the hero image. The Atlantic tends to have the most creative hero images, while The Economist has the most interesting cover designs. And yet, despite this expertise, I never see people remark on those little delights, which in a way makes it occult while hiding in plain sight. It feels a bit connected, seeing the artwork in the first page of these books; maybe an invitation with the whispers of the kind of message the authors wished to convey.
AI? All you need is a 200 line perl script :)
https://www.flickr.com/photos/internetarchivebookimages/
https://ia804508.us.archive.org/21/items/vrr-texts-imageryof...
https://ia804508.us.archive.org/21/items/vrr-texts-imageryof...
https://preo.ube.fr/textesetcontextes/index.php?id=5025
I have a cook friend who uses a subset of the alchemical symbols for labeling in his home kitchen, which I've always thought was fun. Most of them aren't applicable but a lot of the kitchen basics have symbols: oil, salt, vinegar, sugar, baking soda a few others I'm forgetting.
"Most of them aren't applicable" - what, you mean you don't keep brimstone, cinnabar, and powdered silver in your spice cabinet?
ikr I got this one dish the secret ingredient is aqua regia.
🝖
Anybody find a license for their online catalogue? Searching for license found one "resultaten" that was a link that 404's, and no hits for "licentie."
Along those lines, though, this: https://www.veradekok.nl/en/2015/08/introducing-the-dememori...
will let you download full page images. and I think this: https://github.com/lovasoa/dezoomify/issues/209
Should work, also. I don't know Dutch law, but I would think books this old would have to be public domain.
Yes, the dezoomify extension will get you individual pages, quite neat seeing the image getting put together client-side in a canvas.. shame it's even necessary though.
Would this be reasonable material on which to fine tune the new Gemma 3 270M model?
Half of the occult books are talking about magic and irrelevant stuff. The other half is philosophy and spirituality hidden behind materialistic concepts (think Freemasons for example).
All those books would most likely be useless or detrimental for LLMs I guess.
More than useful for running a d&d campaign
Thinking of a RAG with the entire Ritman library collection as a GM.
Most of the books are the outcomes of the Renaissance. The relationship between “science” and spirituality was much closer then than now.
Further, most books published in Europe between 1300-1700 were written in Neo-Latin. Most of these books, therefore, have not been digitized and translated.
Now, to me, it seems like a real shame if this humanist core of European thought is deemed too dangerous for consumption. But it wouldn’t be the first time. The library behind these works, the Biblioteca Philosophica Hermetica, specializes in books banned by various church authorities.
I personally believe that these materials should definitely be part of large model training. The renaissance, esoteric though it may be, deserves to be part of the diversity of thought used to train LLMs.
We can easily imagine an AI apocalypse - maybe these books might even help us imagine an AI renaissance…
> I personally believe that these materials should definitely be part of large model training.
Already done: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37752272 It turns out that the real safety risk with AI is not Mecha-Hitler, it's just that it might end up reading the wrong sorts of books and accidentally conjure a horde of demons.
> accidentally conjure a horde of demons.
If we have a certain perspective on demons as self-sustaining information processing loops—we’ll, yeah, demons abound.
And, yes, this hn post from BenBreen — is amazing. We’ve been in touch!
And if Ben is reading, we’ve made progress on our version controlled community—LLM book translation prototype. Of course, it’s much to early to share on hn. Or whatever, it’s great, take a peek: https://www.philosopherslibrary.com/
Upload books, get translations. We have a separate system where neolatin scholars can evaluate randomly selected paragraphs — so we can measure and report on the base rate of different qualities for each book as a whole.
I don’t know if it is technically important for advancing AI, but it might be.
80% of the Neo-Latin books in the library have not been translated. Most NeoLatin hasn’t been translated. And it is even worse with Sanskrit. So much material has not been digitized or translated.
Is it meaningful to try to get this humanist core into our language models? Maybe including only modern writing is a good bias, but I doubt it.
It will take at least 2 years to get all this stuff scanned, digitized, translated and published.
So it’s kind of urgent, given all the AI training taking place over the next two years.
I’m writing this in a rush, but I’m at the Houghton Library at Harvard and they just brought up 5 books from Marsilio Ficino, published 1497 and 1516.
(If you or anyone is into this kind of thing, my email is in my profile — it’s my favorite hobby)
> If we have a certain perspective on demons as self-sustaining information processing loops—we’ll, yeah, demons abound.
Such as paranoid schizophrenia, drug addiction, self harm, harming others, etc.
> books banned by various church authorities
A book that "explains why" the church is still against it, is the Anti-christian conspiracy, Msgr. Henri Delassus, 1911 (I guess)
In general, the Church is opposed to anything “magical” on the grounds that it is, first, irrational and superstitious, and second, entails evil desires for power and knowledge. These on their own suffice as justifications, but each of these are also taken to create conditions that make one vulnerable to demonic influence.
Here’s an excerpt from the Catechism [0]:
“Divination and magic
“2115 God can reveal the future to his prophets or to other saints. Still, a sound Christian attitude consists in putting oneself confidently into the hands of Providence for whatever concerns the future, and giving up all unhealthy curiosity about it. Improvidence, however, can constitute a lack of responsibility.
“2116 All forms of divination are to be rejected: recourse to Satan or demons, conjuring up the dead or other practices falsely supposed to "unveil" the future.48 Consulting horoscopes, astrology, palm reading, interpretation of omens and lots, the phenomena of clairvoyance, and recourse to mediums all conceal a desire for power over time, history, and, in the last analysis, other human beings, as well as a wish to conciliate hidden powers. They contradict the honor, respect, and loving fear that we owe to God alone.
“2117 All practices of magic or sorcery, by which one attempts to tame occult powers, so as to place them at one's service and have a supernatural power over others - even if this were for the sake of restoring their health - are gravely contrary to the virtue of religion. These practices are even more to be condemned when accompanied by the intention of harming someone, or when they have recourse to the intervention of demons. Wearing charms is also reprehensible. Spiritism often implies divination or magical practices; the Church for her part warns the faithful against it. Recourse to so-called traditional cures does not justify either the invocation of evil powers or the exploitation of another's credulity.”
[0] https://www.vatican.va/archive/ENG0015/__P7E.HTM
Probably absolutely no. I was studying about the corresponding names between tarot card and Shem Hamphorash and gave me incorrect names, it gave me a correct angel name but not the correct one of several cards.
So for studying? Nope, for practicing neither.
Somewhat related, but I randomly got suggested this video on Youtube when it only had a couple hundred views. He's turned it into a series, and I have quite enjoyed it. Somehow bridges user interfaces and occult stuff haha
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pGpBQgZ5IsI&list=PLsfH1Ahi4S...
Check out https://futureofcoding.org if you haven't. When I watched Liber Indigo, my first thought was that it would be a great intro to the type of problems that community is messing with*.
* future of computing, esoteric/future interfaces etc...
I read the book also and found it to be a delightful experience
This is great, thanks. I've been going down a real rabbit hole on Thelemic magic and this really brings it back, full circle, to something I actually do understand.
At the bottom of the page:
> Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2018.
Very confused by this. Seems like they uploaded the books in 2018? What changed between then and now?
Edit: The number of uploads was 1600 back in 2018 https://web.archive.org/web/20240615044608/https://www.openc...
Looks like wonderful material to feed any AI crawler that accesses the forbidden part of my site.
For those who don't know, this is the best digital library of Occult/Alchemical texts in existence.
And the physical library is conveniently located at 123 Keizersgracht, Amsterdam. It’s a beautiful location—and an amazing community of people. Anyone can become a member—but the secret rituals are ofc invite only.
Can anyone link a torrent? Would be nice to preserve this collection.
YOU can get lost in the metaphysical sauce and be left with an outdated, economically and socially irrelevant belief structure. Beware!
I didn't ask how big the tax burden was I said "I cast fireball."
rolled 14. Direct hit, moderate damage. Beware having to buy another mana potion.
Audit that ya IRS ghouls...
Bit like NFTs then.
...I'll bite.
How?
NFTs are the most metaphysical purchases possible. You're not buying a thing, you're buying a token that represents the idea of the thing, and its only value is that you're the person who paid for it and nobody else did.
If you disagree that this is an issue of metaphysics, fine, but google "NFT metaphysical" and you will see that there is an absolutely massive overlap between the world of woo-woo and the world of NFTs.
NFTs are, among other things, apparently cryptography for astrologers.
Grift squared.
Noteto everyone who is prescribed adderall, dont fuck with the occult amphetamines and occult reading make for a rabbit hole that will turn you into one weird motherfucker.
Very cool, but I don't see a way to download. Currently have ChatGPT Agent Mode translating one from latin, but a tedious process.
No doubt these were instruments part of some scheme to make a living, and the context in which they were used is no longer available.
I love to see how names of famous Romans and Greeks were reused to give them credence. I bet they used lots of other techniques listed by Cialdini in Influence.
Pretty neat stuff. I would recommend people start with 'An outline of Occult Science' by Rudolf Steiner. He sets right a lot of the stuff Blavatsky put out. She was an amazing woman but she was not perfect, and a lot of the new age embarrassment is due to the Theosophical society.
What a cool resource, and a fun comment section. I should have known that there would be an cadre of hacker occultists emerging from the woodwork on this site.
Oh man, these are absolutely going to improve our DnD props.
thought the same thing, texting my DM right now ':D
Does digitizing not summon demons like human reading can?
What if an LLM trained on that combines ancient spells with the name that must not be spoken?
The book club I do with my friends maintains a list of resources such as the one in the article. I would greatly appreciate it if anyone would take a look and suggest anything we should add.
https://b00k.club/resources/
This is super cool. There's also a popular YouTube channel called "ESOTERICA" in which an academic expert on the occult presents a lot of occult topics from a scholarly point of view (as opposed to the woo often associated with the topic).
The SHWEP (Secret History of Western Esotericism Podcast) is also great for getting into the esoteric from an academic bent, Highly recommended for those with the stomach to deep dive into obscure primary sources
https://shwep.net/
https://www.youtube.com/@TheEsotericaChannel
Francis Yates is also a fun introduction to the history of hermeticism and alchemy through a historian's perspective, and how it contributed to the creation of science.
It is sometimes said that Isaac Newton, godfather of modern science, was not the first scientist but rather the last magician. The majority of his scholarly output was in fact focused on alchemy and the occult.
Aleister Crowley somewhat echoes this juxtaposition in the motto of his magickal journal, The Equinox: "The Method of Science, the Aim of Religion."
One of the founders of the royal society, John Wilkins, wrote a popular book about magick: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematical_Magick
Stems from the then popular interest in Natural Magick. Evolved into science and engineering.
I believe the Royal Society in particular had strong connections to the so-called Rosicrucians, or at least were very interested in the texts. It's likely no such group ever really existed, but the learned men of the day seem to have taken inspiration from the texts, which read very much like academics frustrated by the constraints of the Reformations. So they had a loose network which flew under the radar to avoid trouble. Eventually part of this becomes the Royal Society. There was even a short-lived monarchy in Bohemia which was essentially coopted Rosicrucian ideas to create what resembles a liberal monarchy which tried to insulate itself from the chaos of the reformations.
https://ia903209.us.archive.org/30/items/the-rosicrucian-enl...
I love his channel. I have no interest in this subject but I like his style of lecturing and showing/teaching. I watch all his stuff when it drops.
Yup I have no particular interest in the topic but I have always enjoyed history, archaeology and the study of philosophy/religion so a lot of what he talks about intersects with things I enjoy so I watch.
IMHO, the occult is just pre-modern social psychology and propaganda. How to get people to join your religion and fight, do bad stuff, and die for you is really old technology. Before modern psychology "Spellcasting" was saying something to someone for the effect it would have on them to manipulate their psychology to get them to do the thing you wanted them to do. It was a sort of pre-modern NLP. Christians and people of other Abrahamic faiths co-existed with and did not like these guys and the feeling was generally mutual.
This is your opinion. I do not share your opinion. The occult is a wide range of topics and practices, generally split (but not cleanly) into theurgic and thaumaturgic activities. That is, manifestation of the three common desires (wealth, power, love / sex etc.), and then deification and approaching and sometimes joining with / uniting with God. Occult meaning, hidden.
If you read many of the grimoires, there is very little NLP of any kind. The Papyri Graecae Magicae is one of the oldest explicitly magical documents we have from Greek Egypt, and it does have some manipulation spells (as most magical documents do) but none of this has to do with coersion to join a religion or join in a war, or to "do bad stuff". It's largely "technology" used by a practicing magician (a moonlighting Egyptian priest) to help the laity deal with their daily lives regarding helping their crops grow, animals not get sick, healing sick children, getting revenge on their neighbors and former lovers etc.
Magic is always a tool in the hands of the oppressed as a response to tyrannical hierarchy.
"Occult" means hidden practices. So it covers both non-mainstream religious/mystical/magical practices, but it also covers "hidden" beliefs within religions.
Stuff like Kabbalah is considered occult, as it Christian mysticism, or folk mysticism that coexists with religion.
Also, one can study things without making judgements about them. The history of human beliefs is interesting.
One of the interesting things I realize when I meet occult practitioners of the Hermeticist varieties is they refuse to acknowledge they are a religion and what they believe is only as true as any other religion. Like one adherent told me the universal consciousness has parts and I said, "that's fine that you believe that, but you acknowledge that is your religious belief?" and this person refused to even say that instead claiming that it was the absolute truth and not religion. I mean only the most bigoted religious zealot would claim that all other religions are false and his was the absolute truth and not a religion because it was absolutely true.
This is exactly how I feel when people start telling me about their own religious beliefs about things like "gender identity," right down to the absolute certitude in their faith and the bigoted, zealous excommunication of nonbelievers and heretics.
Now I'm wondering which church excommunicated you...
Never underestimate the occult proclivities of renowned esoterica-loving author Dan Brown.
https://archive.org/details/lasorcierewitcho00michiala
Also interesting reading.
AI allies with the old gods after being trained on dark forgotten texts and sacrifices the human race to cement its place in the pantheon.
Your computers are useless -- they only produce answers
"Hermetically open" is a marvelous term. I had no idea Dan Brown was doing this. Great work.
How many of our workings would look just like this to a future epoch.
No! Don't you people know that's how you release Moloch the Corruptor?!
I thought Ginsberg already did that back in the 1950's...?
"There is a sense in which we are all alchemists." --Schopenhauer
Time to become a warlock.
I could never figure out the attraction of all this occult nonsense. If it works go empirically prove it, if not just cut our the wishy-washy BS involving the waving around of swords, casting spells or spelling magic with a 'k'.
If you haven't read at least parts of The Secret Teachings of All Ages by Manly P. Hall, Psychology and the Occult by C.G. Jung or similar lecture providing the profane with the tools to get something out of occult works, you're really just swinging your ignorance around here.
Don't worry, I used to think like this as well, but I'm glad I got out of it. No judgment intended.
Go prove the string theory. (Or the general relativity that toon decades to have an answer)
But who would attempt to live their life using string theory as an organizing principal?
Occult is nonsense, if it does the kind of manipulation of reality it's supposed to do, then go prove it.
Great, now we'll have AIs summoning eldritch entities before the decade is out.
Good.
This nonsense, like religious scriptures, is also important history to be preserved.
Now I just need to learn Latin and some other old languages. Perfect.
Great now the LLMs are going to be able to cast spells on us, just what we needed.
Some people here are reacting like the occult is fake.
Magic is fake. It is an illusion and it is fun and games. And we have lots of stories about it, both fantasy and horror.
Occult is real. There is no such thing as white magic. There is only black magic. And such magic involves making trades with spirits and demons and establishing relationships with them. These demons do not have a code. They slowly guide you towards a state where you humiliate yourself and put yourself in a compromised state. Addicted. Disconnected. Repulsed.
Please be careful around these things. It’s fun until someone dies. As this professional witch will tell you. https://www.facebook.com/shadow.control.en/videos/zhanna-kus...
Arthur Waite's "The Book of Ceremonial Magic" is an interesting look at what magic qualifies as white and black magic. For Waite, white magic is that aimed at mystical union with God, so essentially synonymous with Christian mysticism. None of the ceremonial magic he discusses qualifies, and he considered anything practical other than "The Cloud of Unknowing" to be unnecessary and probably useless in that direction. Most of the Renaissance and early modern books he discusses are mostly or all black magic, though some of them include information on contacting angels, which he considers neutral.
Today’s black magic can be traced to the time of King Solomon. He had powers that were of wonder. And people tried to emulate it. There are secret orders that are dedicated to exploring and protecting the information gained from that time.
Two angels were sent down to teach the people magic but each time they taught they told the learners this information will be a great test and temptation to you and lead you to hell. (So why teach it?)
We're already compromised and humiliated, why not bring forth some embers of the Morning Star along the way?
I can not take you seriously.
You contradict yourself.
> Magic is fake.
> There is only black magic.
You are talking about demons.
Your link is to a facebook post...
I can not take you seriously.
Presumably the fake magic is stage magic, while the black magic in question is what we would now distinguish as "magick", and it's silly that they didn't use that spelling.
Never knew that spelling existed. But yes. That is what was meant.
Is SEO occult?
Only if you work at Google.
More like only if you don't?
Depends on if you view Occult as mysterious,
or obvious, and sketchy.
More like anti-memetic. Dark forest full of things that actively resist being learned about, you know? And studying them by whatever little info can be gleaned from their outside manifestations.
Beyond the original PageRank algo (which should've been baked into browsers by now, if decentralization was more than a buzzword) Google's rankings work by being secret, no? Also things like app store acceptance criteria - also under the somewhat flimsy excuse that people would game them if they knew what they were. (Some rankings if they're that gamable, lol.) It's there that I draw a strong connection. (Personally I find it a little silly to comply with this modus operandi but the compute vendors are also mysteriously powerful, so that's what we have, complete with cottage industry of SEO ninjas, Agile facilitators, and similar technoshamans.)
Also copy protection and crackers, lol, all "informational arms race" scenarios, or ones where transparency has come to paradoxically erode instead of fortify trust, have a trace of what I've come to refer to as occult. That's why there's quite a bit of superficial similarities between hackery and occultism, and an overlap in aesthetics. But when there's also a conceptual overlap people usually tend to look away, lest they see a fnord or some other wild shit. There are not literal 17th century demons in there (unless someone is particularly fond of the goth out button), but the collective disavowal can occasionally be harnessed to work a lil magicks ;P
James Randi comes to mind
Great man he was for debunking fraud. People like him terrify even the black magicians.
Exactly. We must turn the LORD and not these demons.
Sadly, "the LORD" has never done much for me, but diving into the occult has at least been fun!
Some folks think that the Creator is actually a usurper from the real divinity, and that therefore all of creation is inherently evil.
Gnosticism is also fun!
Which/Whose Lord?
Lord is a word used to describe a personal relationship , like “save me my Lord” and “Ask your Lord”. Even when the Lord is being referred to the same God.
The Lord the commenter here is referring to as the ultimate Lord who has no Lord or power above him and who is beholden to no one.
In occult, the idea is to substitute your Lord from the ultimate power to the lower orders. Going back to the comment, he means to say don’t substitute your Lord for someone smaller.