Occult books digitized and put online by Amsterdam’s Ritman Library
openculture.com
openculture.com
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…
At any rate, this video might serve as a quick introduction to Penrose's three world idea for those interested.
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.
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...
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.
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...
As one who has had occasion to tidy up after wasps who were little accustomed, though palpably interested, quite so closely to share human habitation, you make me wish I read French. Do you happen by chance to know if the work has had a worthy English translation?
In fact, by pretty much any measure, most life does not defecate (because they have no digestive tract).
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).
Unfortunately it needs a definition of "idea" which isn't recursive, so...
As for math - it's a conceit to believe that the mechanisms we call math aren't just a patchwork of metaphors that build up from experience.
There's some self-insight in the sense that after a while you start making meta metaphors like category theory.
But it's a very bold claim to suggest that any of this has to be universal, especially when the structures math uses can't be proved from the ground up.
Or that completely different classes of metaphors we can't imagine - because we evolved in a certain way with certain limitations - might not play an equivalent role.
Does the universe know what pi is? Or an integer? Or a manifold?
Does it need to?
> it's a conceit to believe that the mechanisms we call math aren't just a patchwork of metaphors that build up from experience.
I'm not sure it is a conceit as much as a commitment to a metaphysic. If one believes that experience is a definite relationship with an external reality (a phenomenological view) then the fact that experience is structured is suggestive that external reality is structured. If one believes that experience is primarily interior then one could assume that the internal mechanism of cognition is structured and external reality is something entirely different.
However, I'm not sure how anyone could hold the latter view without a deep solipsism. One would presumably have to account for the perception of billions/trillions of other living creatures behaving as if the external world was structured. I mean, we seemingly all did evolve from the same single cell structure, so it is possible this perceptual quirk is based on some shared ancestry, so I suppose that is another possible view than solipsism.
What I mean to say is, I can imagine my perception of a fundamentally unstructured reality is a perception that falsely presents itself as structured to my own experience as a result of my limitations. However, I would have to extend that exact same flawed perception to all other life forms that seem to act the same as I do. So either every single living creature has the exact same flawed perception or the structure is inherent in the external world.
> Does the universe know what pi is?
No one is suggesting an epistemological view, the question is ontological. As Penrose mentions in the video, the set of possible mathematical structures is vastly larger than the actual structures we see in the universe. So even if one has a purely idealist view, one has to account for why our perception only experiences a nearly infinitesimally small fraction of that set of possibilities.
Of course, a weak anthropic principle is one answer. One could posit that all possibilities are manifest in a vast multiverse and this little corner of that multiverse just happens to be finely tuned enough to allow for limited creatures like ourselves to perceive anything at all. But that just shifts the question to the limitations necessary for perception/experience/consciousness, which is a valid enough topic to address on its own. The questions then becomes "why do these particular structures result in conscious experience", which is exactly the kind of question that a guy like Penrose is ultimately searching for (as he heavily implies in the linked video).
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.
It doesn’t actually predict or fix anything, even after thousands of years. But it’s hard enough to pin down that you can’t disprove any of it.
A better description would be that the atman is the consciousness in which physical things or mental constructs can appear and pass away. The nature of pure consciousness is also described as real(undisturbed by time) or ananda/contentment/bliss.
The disidentifcation from thoughts (for instance, seeing them pass by just like cars on road) is an important part of liberation.
Don't read it if you dont like it but don't discourage people asking questions and making funny theories. Most of human progress wasdone that way about aspects of life that was not yet understood. Your attitude is nothing but nihilistic and it never built anything.
If you believe the bible isn't superstitious nonsense then maybe you should say that directly.
"One built a civilization" describes a lot of religious books and seems to be a non sequitur.
Of course "The bible is like this occult book except the bible is true" isn't a very interesting argument.
The Bible may be the deadliest book ever written. It certainly built a thriving civilization, but it came at a cost.
Books are excuses for war that would have already happened. They would have just found other reasons if the Bible didn't exist.
Most of the problem with the occult is that people have no idea what the fuck the words and vocabulary are actually referencing.
Umberto Eco probably did.
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?
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...
- 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
- programming is alchemy: combine, transmute
- prompt engineering is demonic evocation: bend the demon to your will through language play and gotchas
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.
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?
I wonder if the occult authors would today be releasing their texts on drivethrurpg.com!
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)
Such as paranoid schizophrenia, drug addiction, self harm, harming others, etc.
A book that "explains why" the church is still against it, is the Anti-christian conspiracy, Msgr. Henri Delassus, 1911 (I guess)
Here’s an excerpt from the Catechism [0]:
“Divination and magic
“2115 God can reveal the future to his prophets or to other saints. Still, a sound Christian attitude consists in putting oneself confidently into the hands of Providence for whatever concerns the future, and giving up all unhealthy curiosity about it. Improvidence, however, can constitute a lack of responsibility.
“2116 All forms of divination are to be rejected: recourse to Satan or demons, conjuring up the dead or other practices falsely supposed to "unveil" the future.48 Consulting horoscopes, astrology, palm reading, interpretation of omens and lots, the phenomena of clairvoyance, and recourse to mediums all conceal a desire for power over time, history, and, in the last analysis, other human beings, as well as a wish to conciliate hidden powers. They contradict the honor, respect, and loving fear that we owe to God alone.
“2117 All practices of magic or sorcery, by which one attempts to tame occult powers, so as to place them at one's service and have a supernatural power over others - even if this were for the sake of restoring their health - are gravely contrary to the virtue of religion. These practices are even more to be condemned when accompanied by the intention of harming someone, or when they have recourse to the intervention of demons. Wearing charms is also reprehensible. Spiritism often implies divination or magical practices; the Church for her part warns the faithful against it. Recourse to so-called traditional cures does not justify either the invocation of evil powers or the exploitation of another's credulity.”
So for studying? Nope, for practicing neither.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pGpBQgZ5IsI&list=PLsfH1Ahi4S...
* future of computing, esoteric/future interfaces etc...
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.
> 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...
How?
If you disagree that this is an issue of metaphysics, fine, but google "NFT metaphysical" and you will see that there is an absolutely massive overlap between the world of woo-woo and the world of NFTs.
NFTs are, among other things, apparently cryptography for astrologers.
Grift squared.
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.
What if an LLM trained on that combines ancient spells with the name that must not be spoken?
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...
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.
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.
Also interesting reading.
Occult is nonsense, if it does the kind of manipulation of reality it's supposed to do, then go prove it.
Don't worry, I used to think like this as well, but I'm glad I got out of it. No judgment intended.
This nonsense, like religious scriptures, is also important history to be preserved.
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...
The Lord the commenter here is referring to as the ultimate Lord who has no Lord or power above him and who is beholden to no one.
In occult, the idea is to substitute your Lord from the ultimate power to the lower orders. Going back to the comment, he means to say don’t substitute your Lord for someone smaller.
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.
or obvious, and sketchy.
Beyond the original PageRank algo (which should've been baked into browsers by now, if decentralization was more than a buzzword) Google's rankings work by being secret, no? Also things like app store acceptance criteria - also under the somewhat flimsy excuse that people would game them if they knew what they were. (Some rankings if they're that gamable, lol.) It's there that I draw a strong connection. (Personally I find it a little silly to comply with this modus operandi but the compute vendors are also mysteriously powerful, so that's what we have, complete with cottage industry of SEO ninjas, Agile facilitators, and similar technoshamans.)
Also copy protection and crackers, lol, all "informational arms race" scenarios, or ones where transparency has come to paradoxically erode instead of fortify trust, have a trace of what I've come to refer to as occult. That's why there's quite a bit of superficial similarities between hackery and occultism, and an overlap in aesthetics. But when there's also a conceptual overlap people usually tend to look away, lest they see a fnord or some other wild shit. There are not literal 17th century demons in there (unless someone is particularly fond of the goth out button), but the collective disavowal can occasionally be harnessed to work a lil magicks ;P
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?)