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Occult books digitized and put online by Amsterdam’s Ritman Library
167 Anon84 75 8/15/2025, 4:03:36 PM 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…
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.
At any rate, this video might serve as a quick introduction to Penrose's three world idea for those interested.
1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9wLtCqm72-Y
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…
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).
For some speculative philosophical fiction that explores related ideas I highly recommend Neal Stephenson's Anathem.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44877076
All our AIs are already trained on these
https://web.archive.org/web/20240615044608/https://www.openc...
- programming is alchemy: combine, transmute
- prompt engineering is demonic evocation: bend the demon to your will through language play and gotchas
- 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
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.
We are looking for bitcoin uncles to help us get all this stuff digitized and translated now, like, last week.
I don’t know if it is important for AI, but I think it’s urgent, given the next two years.
80% of the Neo-Latin books in the library have not been translated
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...
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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pGpBQgZ5IsI&list=PLsfH1Ahi4S...
* future of computing, esoteric/future interfaces etc...
What if an LLM trained on that combines ancient spells with the name that must not be spoken?
> 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...
https://shwep.net/
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.