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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

#151

Post by dismalaf »

weatherlight wrote: post #117
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.

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.

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

#152

Post by crb3 »

rpastuszak wrote: post #21
akomtu wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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

So it was double-forks, not pitch-forks, all along?

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

#154

Post by vixen99 »

just-working wrote: post #59
nashashmi wrote: post #52

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 tow…

Exactly. We must turn the LORD and not these demons.

Which/Whose Lord?

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

#156

Post by DANmode »

balamatom wrote: post #133
NoGravitas wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Is SEO occult?

Only if you work at Google.

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

#157

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

dr_dshiv wrote: post #72
zoogeny wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 fo…

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…

The idea that ideas are primary is exactly what you'd expect from an Oxford academic.

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?

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

#158

Post by johtso »

TheAceOfHearts wrote: post #70

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 highl…

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

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

#159

Post by nashashmi »

vixen99 wrote: post #154
just-working wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. We must turn the LORD and not these demons.

Which/Whose Lord?

Lord is a word used to describe a personal relationship , like “save me my Lord” and “Ask your Lord”. Even when the Lord is being referred to the same God.

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.

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

#160

Post by johtso »

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...

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