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.
Also reflected in Vedic/Hindu philosophy: conscious experience (cetanā) arises from the interfacing of ātman (the immaterial self / soul) with śarīra (the physical body).
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…
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 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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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…
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.
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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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Also reflected in Vedic/Hindu philosophy: conscious experience (cetanā) arises from the interfacing of ātman (the immaterial self / soul) with śarīra (the physical body).
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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…
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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.
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?
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
Where did you find De Mysteriis? Any edition you recommend?
How would mathematics produce the material world?
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...
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!"
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
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/
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You jest, but that's already a pretty decent Buffy the vampire slayer episode
one of my favorites!
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.
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.
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
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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
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Considering where we are, "AI trained on occult books successfully banishes demons" might be more useful.
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OpenYog-Sothoth
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"Aleister Crowley and Helena Blavatsky reborn as LLMs after encoded consciousnesses parsed by training algorithms"
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So did it tell you how to make gold or not?
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"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
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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.
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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?
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🝖
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
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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…
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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.
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.
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.
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Bit like NFTs then.
...I'll bite.
How?
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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?
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."
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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.
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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/
Never underestimate the occult proclivities of renowned esoterica-loving author Dan Brown.
https://archive.org/details/lasorcierewitcho00michiala
Also interesting reading.
Your computers are useless -- they only produce answers
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.
"Hermetically open" is a marvelous term. I had no idea Dan Brown was doing this. Great work.
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
How many of our workings would look just like this to a future epoch.
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.
Great now the LLMs are going to be able to cast spells on us, just what we needed.
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.
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.
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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!
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Which/Whose Lord?
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