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Occult books digitized and put online by Amsterdam’s Ritman Library

openculture.com

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Re: Occult books digitized and put online by Amsterdam’s Ritman Library

#112

Post by slt2021 »

nurettin wrote: post #40
rpastuszak wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

What is the equal sacrifice for programming? Hair loss?

carpal tunnel, scoliosis, nearsightedness

Re: Occult books digitized and put online by Amsterdam’s Ritman Library

#113

Post by gtsnexp »

literalAardvark wrote: post #37
Disposal8433 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Thinking of a RAG with the entire Ritman library collection as a GM.

Re: Occult books digitized and put online by Amsterdam’s Ritman Library

#114

Post by vintermann »

dr_dshiv wrote: post #36
pnemonic wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Aleister Crowley and Helena Blavatsky reborn as LLMs after encoded consciousnesses parsed by training algorithms"

Ethics of AI necromancy; under which circumstances is it ethically appropriate to summon the souls of dead classical philosophers?

If they would have approved of it and/or totally done it themselves, it has to be OK, right?

Re: Occult books digitized and put online by Amsterdam’s Ritman Library

#115

Post by Dilettante_ »

ted_bunny wrote: post #33
jrussino wrote: post #2

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.

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.

Re: Occult books digitized and put online by Amsterdam’s Ritman Library

#116

Post by Archelaos »

dr_dshiv wrote: post #55

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 b…

> don’t think for a moment that scholars have read all these books!

Umberto Eco probably did.

Re: Occult books digitized and put online by Amsterdam’s Ritman Library

#117

Post by weatherlight »

dismalaf wrote: post #6

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).

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.

Re: Occult books digitized and put online by Amsterdam’s Ritman Library

#120

Post by glimshe »

gtsnexp wrote: post #102

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?

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