Earlier quoted context omitted.
I didn't ask how big the tax burden was I said "I cast fireball."
rolled 14. Direct hit, moderate damage. Beware having to buy another mana potion.
Audit that ya IRS ghouls...
Occult books digitized and put online by Amsterdam’s Ritman Library
101–110 of 214 posts
Re: Occult books digitized and put online by Amsterdam’s Ritman Library
#102This 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.
Re: Occult books digitized and put online by Amsterdam’s Ritman Library
#103Great, now we'll have AIs summoning eldritch entities before the decade is out.
Re: Occult books digitized and put online by Amsterdam’s Ritman Library
#104Earlier quoted context omitted.
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) dep…
Escape is not canonization.
It was a facetious comment anyway.
Re: Occult books digitized and put online by Amsterdam’s Ritman Library
#105[deleted]
Re: Occult books digitized and put online by Amsterdam’s Ritman Library
#106Some 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 tow…
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!
Re: Occult books digitized and put online by Amsterdam’s Ritman Library
#107Some 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 tow…
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.
Re: Occult books digitized and put online by Amsterdam’s Ritman Library
#108Some 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 tow…
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.
Re: Occult books digitized and put online by Amsterdam’s Ritman Library
#109Very 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.
Re: Occult books digitized and put online by Amsterdam’s Ritman Library
#110Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wonder how Terry Pratchett would have dealt with magical e-books? The goings on at the library of Unseen University were some of my favorite parts of Discworld.
aside, my kindle is named: "Octarine Fairy" -- hardly fitting, except it's a book and I adore discworld https://wiki.lspace.org/Octarine_Fairy_Book
That is a very cool name for a kindle. Never stop believing in dragons! You could actually make them extinct that way.