Now I know how the AI apocalypse would look like. GPT-42 would summon hordes of demons from the pit of Hell to bring about the end of days. Who need all that pesky nuclear codes when you can call upon Satan?
A lot of the imagery was inspired by the Orphic Phanes, a dual gendered being of creation and light that gestated in the cosmic egg of the universe.
There were groups that combined the idea of an eventual creator with naturalism such that you had the idea of an original dual gendered primordial 'man' which then brought forth a 'son of man' that ended up creating us in the images of that original.
They allegedly patterned this on the Phrygian mysteries of a spontaneous original being that was likened to a tumor springing into existence.
They even tied this all into concepts around the dependence of the soul on the body, suggesting an original physical world and a non-physical replica created by the demiurge where death was functionally escapable.
The later influence of Neoplatonism flips it all back to a perfect form original and corrupted physical incarnation - the version of Gnosticism most well known today.
But for a tiny slice of time in antiquity you had people talking about the ideas of a naturally occurring man in a physical world giving rise to a creator of light which then recreated the physical original man in a non-physical twin of the cosmos in order to effectively allow them to escape death.
Which is a pretty wild set of beliefs for the time, but less so in an age where we are moving towards humanity bringing forth AI literally in light (optoelectronics is a likely next hardware shift), creating digital twins of the world around us, and increasingly making that world inhospitable to our continued existence.
Some of the nuances of what they were thinking about are pretty wild to consider in modern contexts.
I put the design docs up just for posterity.
[1] project tombstone: https://orphanim.ai
[2] Design and Style Guide https://docs.google.com/document/d/1JsEeok9NmRGDAF3o0AX7h9oz...