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…
ryandv 14 hours ago [-]
> 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.
elmomle 7 hours ago [-]
Also reflected in Vedic/Hindu philosophy: conscious experience (cetanā) arises from the interfacing of ātman (the immaterial self / soul) with śarīra (the physical body).
calebio 7 hours ago [-]
It's turtles all the way down.
zoogeny 14 hours ago [-]
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…
zoogeny 13 hours ago [-]
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).
ryandv 13 hours ago [-]
> 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.
throwanem 13 hours ago [-]
All life also defecates, intelligent or otherwise. Curious how no one hastens to canonize that for its ubiquity.
ghssds 8 hours ago [-]
/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.
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.
throwanem 12 hours ago [-]
Escape is not canonization.
ryandv 12 hours ago [-]
It was a facetious comment anyway.
throwanem 5 hours ago [-]
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.
cess11 13 hours ago [-]
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.
ForOldHack 4 hours ago [-]
Thanks so much for this fuel. The idea is weird,but it's good shit.
ForOldHack 4 hours ago [-]
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.
Anon84 12 hours ago [-]
If you're looking for a physical version, the latest translation by Eric Purdue is exceptionally well researched and documented: https://amzn.to/4ly4wTf
Archelaos 10 hours ago [-]
> don’t think for a moment that scholars have read all these books!
Umberto Eco probably did.
teecha 8 hours ago [-]
Any recommended hard copy? Seems like there are more than a few floating around.
droopyEyelids 6 hours ago [-]
Where did you find De Mysteriis? Any edition you recommend?
jrussino 15 hours ago [-]
This sounds like the premise for a fun sci-fi/horror move. Uh-oh; we accidentally trained GPT6 on the Necronomicon!
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.
Dilettante_ 11 hours ago [-]
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.
ForOldHack 4 hours ago [-]
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.
15 hours ago [-]
rpastuszak 15 hours ago [-]
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.
grimgrin 12 hours ago [-]
aside, my kindle is named: "Octarine Fairy" -- hardly fitting, except it's a book and I adore discworld
That is a very cool name for a kindle. Never stop believing in dragons! You could actually make them extinct that way.
RajT88 14 hours ago [-]
New season of Evil Dead. Either way, I'd watch it.
dylan604 15 hours ago [-]
I hope it was trained on Army of Darkness and can never actually say the words.
riffraff 1 hours ago [-]
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.
The Laundry and the Black Chamber want to know your location.
grues-dinner 13 hours ago [-]
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.
akomtu 15 hours ago [-]
"AI trained on alchemy books successfully invokes demons"
rpastuszak 15 hours ago [-]
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
crb3 3 minutes ago [-]
So it was double-forks, not pitch-forks, all along?
krapp 15 hours ago [-]
This is just a Charles Stross novel.
rpastuszak 14 hours ago [-]
I just learned about The Laundry Files, thanks!
datadrivenangel 14 hours ago [-]
The Laundry files are very good. James Bond crossed with Lovecraft in the tone of Terry Pratchett.
krisoft 13 hours ago [-]
Coding with an LLM certainly feels like being a malconvoker.
nurettin 14 hours ago [-]
What is the equal sacrifice for programming? Hair loss?
slt2021 11 hours ago [-]
carpal tunnel, scoliosis, nearsightedness
TheOtherHobbes 15 hours ago [-]
Considering where we are, "AI trained on occult books successfully banishes demons" might be more useful.
nailer 15 hours ago [-]
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.
"Aleister Crowley and Helena Blavatsky reborn as LLMs after encoded consciousnesses parsed by training algorithms"
dr_dshiv 15 hours ago [-]
Ethics of AI necromancy; under which circumstances is it ethically appropriate to summon the souls of dead classical philosophers?
vintermann 11 hours ago [-]
If they would have approved of it and/or totally done it themselves, it has to be OK, right?
Eupolemos 15 hours ago [-]
A Golden Dawn for AI!
(iykyk)
CapricornNoble 14 hours ago [-]
" 'Do What Thou Wilt' Shall Be the Whole of the Prompt!"
-AI-LLMester Crowley
racl101 15 hours ago [-]
So did it tell you how to make gold or not?
setnone 15 hours ago [-]
You have to use uncensored version
akomtu 15 hours ago [-]
AI won't tell you the truth unless you make it do so with exorcism powers. It's an archdemon after all.
bigfishrunning 12 hours ago [-]
Lol the AI we have tells only lies. We still need to invent it's brother, who tells only the truth.
cindyllm 12 hours ago [-]
[dead]
trenchpilgrim 15 hours ago [-]
"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"
ChrisMarshallNY 14 hours ago [-]
Nah, the Octavo.
hobo_in_library 15 hours ago [-]
1600 of these had already been uploaded back in 2018.
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.
glimshe 10 hours ago [-]
Sounds fascinating.
Did you do that full time? What did you get out of it?
TheAceOfHearts 13 hours ago [-]
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.
giraffe_lady 12 hours ago [-]
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.
ForOldHack 4 hours ago [-]
🝖
perfectbeeing 15 hours ago [-]
Would this be reasonable material on which to fine tune the new Gemma 3 270M model?
Disposal8433 15 hours ago [-]
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.
literalAardvark 14 hours ago [-]
More than useful for running a d&d campaign
gtsnexp 11 hours ago [-]
Thinking of a RAG with the entire Ritman library collection as a GM.
dr_dshiv 14 hours ago [-]
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…
zozbot234 14 hours ago [-]
> 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.
dr_dshiv 13 hours ago [-]
> 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)
pelasaco 12 hours ago [-]
> 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)
UlisesAC4 7 hours ago [-]
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.
heikkilevanto 13 hours ago [-]
Looks like wonderful material to feed any AI crawler that accesses the forbidden part of my site.
popalchemist 12 hours ago [-]
For those who don't know, this is the best digital library of Occult/Alchemical texts in existence.
dr_dshiv 7 hours ago [-]
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.
Frummy 13 hours ago [-]
YOU can get lost in the metaphysical sauce and be left with an outdated, economically and socially irrelevant belief structure. Beware!
krapp 13 hours ago [-]
I didn't ask how big the tax burden was I said "I cast fireball."
Frummy 12 hours ago [-]
rolled 14. Direct hit, moderate damage. Beware having to buy another mana potion.
krapp 12 hours ago [-]
Audit that ya IRS ghouls...
DontchaKnowit 7 hours ago [-]
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.
exasperaited 13 hours ago [-]
Bit like NFTs then.
Jonovono 15 hours ago [-]
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...
wsintra2022 14 hours ago [-]
I read the book also and found it to be a delightful experience
fnordlord 13 hours ago [-]
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.
treetalker 5 hours ago [-]
Never underestimate the occult proclivities of renowned esoterica-loving author Dan Brown.
chrisstanchak 15 hours ago [-]
Very cool, but I don't see a way to download. Currently have ChatGPT Agent Mode translating one from latin, but a tedious process.
riazrizvi 12 hours ago [-]
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.
baobabKoodaa 15 hours ago [-]
Can anyone link a torrent? Would be nice to preserve this collection.
msuniverse2026 7 hours ago [-]
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.
epiccoleman 5 hours ago [-]
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.
Oh man, these are absolutely going to improve our DnD props.
rook_line_sinkr 14 hours ago [-]
thought the same thing, texting my DM right now ':D
neilv 14 hours ago [-]
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?
junon 7 hours ago [-]
"Hermetically open" is a marvelous term. I had no idea Dan Brown was doing this. Great work.
gnerd00 15 hours ago [-]
Your computers are useless -- they only produce answers
jasperry 14 hours ago [-]
"There is a sense in which we are all alchemists." --Schopenhauer
joshjob42 15 hours ago [-]
No! Don't you people know that's how you release Moloch the Corruptor?!
partomniscient 14 hours ago [-]
I thought Ginsberg already did that back in the 1950's...?
aatd86 7 hours ago [-]
Time to become a warlock.
balamatom 7 hours ago [-]
How many of our workings would look just like this to a future epoch.
Loughla 4 hours ago [-]
Now I just need to learn Latin and some other old languages. Perfect.
12 hours ago [-]
dismalaf 15 hours ago [-]
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).
djij 15 hours ago [-]
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
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.
dismalaf 28 minutes ago [-]
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.
hungmung 15 hours ago [-]
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.
ryandv 15 hours ago [-]
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."
Stems from the then popular interest in Natural Magick. Evolved into science and engineering.
hungmung 14 hours ago [-]
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.
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.
wise0wl 12 hours ago [-]
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.
dismalaf 14 hours ago [-]
"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.
narrator 13 hours ago [-]
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.
ryandv 13 hours ago [-]
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.
amanaplanacanal 9 hours ago [-]
Now I'm wondering which church excommunicated you...
hobo_in_library 15 hours ago [-]
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?
Great now the LLMs are going to be able to cast spells on us, just what we needed.
Razengan 12 hours ago [-]
Great, now we'll have AIs summoning eldritch entities before the decade is out.
nashashmi 14 hours ago [-]
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.
nashashmi 6 hours ago [-]
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?)
altruios 14 hours ago [-]
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.
NoGravitas 12 hours ago [-]
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.
nashashmi 6 hours ago [-]
Never knew that spelling existed. But yes. That is what was meant.
balamatom 7 hours ago [-]
Is SEO occult?
13 hours ago [-]
cess11 13 hours ago [-]
We're already compromised and humiliated, why not bring forth some embers of the Morning Star along the way?
rokkamokka 14 hours ago [-]
James Randi comes to mind
nashashmi 6 hours ago [-]
Great man he was for debunking fraud. People like him terrify even the black magicians.
just-working 14 hours ago [-]
Exactly. We must turn the LORD and not these demons.
Trasmatta 12 hours ago [-]
Sadly, "the LORD" has never done much for me, but diving into the occult has at least been fun!
amanaplanacanal 9 hours ago [-]
Some folks think that the Creator is actually a usurper from the real divinity, and that therefore all of creation is inherently evil.
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…
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.
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
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…
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).
For some speculative philosophical fiction that explores related ideas I highly recommend Neal Stephenson's Anathem.
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...
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.
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...
Umberto Eco probably did.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44877076
https://wiki.lspace.org/Octarine_Fairy_Book
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
- programming is alchemy: combine, transmute
- prompt engineering is demonic evocation: bend the demon to your will through language play and gotchas
- 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.
(iykyk)
-AI-LLMester Crowley
All our AIs are already trained on these
https://web.archive.org/web/20240615044608/https://www.openc...
“Occult philosophy” is just the lens medieval societies used to make sense of the natural world.
Did you do that full time? What did you get out of it?
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.
All those books would most likely be useless or detrimental for LLMs I guess.
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…
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)
A book that "explains why" the church is still against it, is the Anti-christian conspiracy, Msgr. Henri Delassus, 1911 (I guess)
So for studying? Nope, for practicing neither.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pGpBQgZ5IsI&list=PLsfH1Ahi4S...
* future of computing, esoteric/future interfaces etc...
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.
Also interesting reading.
https://b00k.club/resources/
What if an LLM trained on that combines ancient spells with the name that must not be spoken?
https://shwep.net/
Aleister Crowley somewhat echoes this juxtaposition in the motto of his magickal journal, The Equinox: "The Method of Science, the Aim of Religion."
Stems from the then popular interest in Natural Magick. Evolved into science and engineering.
https://ia903209.us.archive.org/30/items/the-rosicrucian-enl...
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.
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.
> 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...
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...
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?)
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.