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 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…
ryandv · 27m ago
> 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…
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.
zoogeny · 34m ago
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 for those interested.
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…
zoogeny · 1m ago
I was considering your explicit "material -> conscious -> ideas -> material" description. It feels more correct when you say he considers a range of possibilities that connect these, not explicit causality.
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).
ryandv · 10m ago
> 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…
For some speculative philosophical fiction that explores related ideas I highly recommend Neal Stephenson's Anathem.
throwanem · 10m ago
All life also defecates, intelligent or otherwise. Curious how no one hastens to canonize that for its ubiquity.
jrussino · 2h ago
This sounds like the premise for a fun sci-fi/horror move. Uh-oh; we accidentally trained GPT6 on the Necronomicon!
wrp · 23s ago
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.
New season of Evil Dead. Either way, I'd watch it.
literalAardvark · 1h ago
You jest, but that's already a pretty decent Buffy the vampire slayer episode
GuinansEyebrows · 1h ago
one of my favorites!
rpastuszak · 1h ago
I can't recall the title, but a friend was recommending to me a book in this genre. I'm probably misremembering, but here you go: a detective agency using an artificial intelligence to conjure demons.
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.
ChrisMarshallNY · 31m ago
Nah, the Octavo.
dylan604 · 1h ago
I hope it was trained on Army of Darkness and can never actually say the words.
Onavo · 1h ago
The Laundry and the Black Chamber want to know your location.
hobo_in_library · 1h ago
1600 of these had already been uploaded back in 2018.
"AI trained on alchemy books successfully invokes demons"
rpastuszak · 1h ago
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
krisoft · 24m ago
Coding with an LLM certainly feels like being a malconvoker.
krapp · 1h ago
This is just a Charles Stross novel.
rpastuszak · 1h ago
I just learned about The Laundry Files, thanks!
datadrivenangel · 50m ago
The Laundry files are very good. James Bond crossed with Lovecraft in the tone of Terry Pratchett.
nurettin · 1h ago
What is the equal sacrifice for programming? Hair loss?
TheOtherHobbes · 2h ago
Considering where we are, "AI trained on occult books successfully banishes demons" might be more useful.
nailer · 1h ago
OK that's an idea for a fun / silly movie.
- 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.
racl101 · 2h ago
So did it tell you how to make gold or not?
setnone · 1h ago
You have to use uncensored version
akomtu · 1h ago
AI won't tell you the truth unless you make it do so with exorcism powers. It's an archdemon after all.
pnemonic · 2h ago
"Aleister Crowley and Helena Blavatsky reborn as LLMs after encoded consciousnesses parsed by training algorithms"
dr_dshiv · 1h ago
Ethics of AI necromancy; under which circumstances is it ethically appropriate to summon the souls of dead classical philosophers?
Eupolemos · 1h ago
A Golden Dawn for AI!
(iykyk)
CapricornNoble · 1h ago
" 'Do What Thou Wilt' Shall Be the Whole of the Prompt!"
-AI-LLMester Crowley
trenchpilgrim · 1h ago
"HN commenters point out that top human warlocks are still capable of forming pacts with a wider variety of powerful entities such as djinn, archfey, celestials and the Great Old Ones"
TheAceOfHearts · 21m ago
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 highlight any artwork that's hidden beyond the first page.
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.
perfectbeeing · 1h ago
Would this be reasonable material on which to fine tune the new Gemma 3 270M model?
Disposal8433 · 1h ago
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.
literalAardvark · 1h ago
More than useful for running a d&d campaign
dr_dshiv · 1h ago
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 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…
zozbot234 · 41m ago
> I personally believe that these materials should definitely be part of large model training.
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.
dr_dshiv · 10m ago
> 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
chrisstanchak · 1h ago
Very cool, but I don't see a way to download. Currently have ChatGPT Agent Mode translating one from latin, but a tedious process.
heelix · 1h ago
Oh man, these are absolutely going to improve our DnD props.
rook_line_sinkr · 1h ago
thought the same thing, texting my DM right now ':D
nashashmi · 1h ago
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 towards a state where you humiliate yourself and put yourself in a compromised state. Addicted. Disconnected. Repulsed.
Exactly. We must turn the LORD and not these demons.
cess11 · 17m ago
We're already compromised and humiliated, why not bring forth some embers of the Morning Star along the way?
rokkamokka · 48m ago
James Randi comes to mind
altruios · 37m ago
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.
jasperry · 30m ago
"There is a sense in which we are all alchemists." --Schopenhauer
Jonovono · 1h ago
Somewhat related, but I randomly got suggested this video on Youtube when it only had a couple hundred views. He's turned it into a series, and I have quite enjoyed it. Somehow bridges user interfaces and occult stuff haha
Check out https://futureofcoding.org if you haven't. When I watched Liber Indigo, my first thought was that it would be a great intro to the type of problems that community is messing with*.
* future of computing, esoteric/future interfaces etc...
wsintra2022 · 40m ago
I read the book also and found it to be a delightful experience
neilv · 1h ago
Does digitizing not summon demons like human reading can?
What if an LLM trained on that combines ancient spells with the name that must not be spoken?
gnerd00 · 1h ago
Your computers are useless -- they only produce answers
joshjob42 · 1h ago
No! Don't you people know that's how you release Moloch the Corruptor?!
partomniscient · 1h ago
I thought Ginsberg already did that back in the 1950's...?
baobabKoodaa · 1h ago
Can anyone link a torrent? Would be nice to preserve this collection.
hobo_in_library · 1h ago
At the bottom of the page:
> 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?
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).
djij · 1h ago
The SHWEP (Secret History of Western Esotericism Podcast) is also great for getting into the esoteric from an academic bent, Highly recommended for those with the stomach to deep dive into obscure primary sources
Francis Yates is also a fun introduction to the history of hermeticism and alchemy through a historian's perspective, and how it contributed to the creation of science.
ryandv · 1h ago
It is sometimes said that Isaac Newton, godfather of modern science, was not the first scientist but rather the last magician. The majority of his scholarly output was in fact focused on alchemy and the occult.
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.
hungmung · 1h ago
I believe the Royal Society in particular had strong connections to the so-called Rosicrucians, or at least were very interested in the texts. It's likely no such group ever really existed, but the learned men of the day seem to have taken inspiration from the texts, which read very much like academics frustrated by the constraints of the Reformations. So they had a loose network which flew under the radar to avoid trouble. Eventually part of this becomes the Royal Society. There was even a short-lived monarchy in Bohemia which was essentially coopted Rosicrucian ideas to create what resembles a liberal monarchy which tried to insulate itself from the chaos of the reformations.
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 people of other Abrahamic faiths co-existed with and did not like these guys and the feeling was generally mutual.
dismalaf · 56m ago
"Occult" means hidden practices. So it covers both non-mainstream religious/mystical/magical practices, but it also covers "hidden" beliefs within religions.
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.
narrator · 9m ago
One of the interesting things I realize when I meet occult practitioners of the Hermeticist varieties is they refuse to acknowledge they are a religion and what they believe is only as true as any other religion. Like one adherent told me the universal consciousness has parts and I said, "that's fine that you believe that, but you acknowledge that is your religious belief?" and this person refused to even say that instead claiming that it was the absolute truth and not religion. I mean only the most bigoted religious zealot would claim that all other religions are false and his was the absolute truth and not a religion because it was absolutely true.
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.