91–100 of 214 posts
YOU can get lost in the metaphysical sauce and be left with an outdated, economically and socially irrelevant belief structure. Beware!
I didn't ask how big the tax burden was I said "I cast fireball."
This sounds like the premise for a fun sci-fi/horror move. Uh-oh; we accidentally trained GPT6 on the Necronomicon!
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.
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…
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…
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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.
Most of the books are the outcomes of the Renaissance. The relationship between “science” and spirituality was much closer then than now. 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…
A book that "explains why" the church is still against it, is the Anti-christian conspiracy, Msgr. Henri Delassus, 1911 (I guess)
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).
IMHO, the occult is just pre-modern social psychology and propaganda. How to get people to join your religion and fight, do bad stuff, and die for you is really old technology. Before modern psychology "Spellcasting" was saying something to someone for the effect it would have on them to manipulate their psychology to get them to do the thing you wanted them to do. It was a sort of pre-modern NLP. Christians and peop…
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.
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All life also defecates, intelligent or otherwise. Curious how no one hastens to canonize that for its ubiquity.
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…