Magic Monday
Mar. 30th, 2025 09:55 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ecosophia
Midnight is almost here and so it's time to launch a new Magic Monday. Ask me anything about occultism, and with certain exceptions noted below, any question received by midnight Monday Eastern time will get an answer. Please note: Any question or comment received after that point will not get an answer, and in fact will just be deleted. If you're in a hurry, or suspect you may be the 341,928th person to ask a question, please check out the very rough version 1.3 of The Magic Monday FAQ here. Also: I will not be putting through or answering any more questions about practicing magic around children. I've answered those in simple declarative sentences in the FAQ. If you read the FAQ and don't think your question has been answered, read it again. If that doesn't help, consider remedial reading classes; yes, it really is as simple and straightforward as the FAQ says. And further: I've decided that questions about getting goodies from spirits are also permanently off topic here. The point of occultism is to develop your own capacities, not to try to bully or wheedle other beings into doing things for you. I've discussed this in a post on my blog.
The image? I field a lot of questions about my books these days, so I've decided to do little capsule summaries of them here, one per week. This is my seventy-second published book and the beginning of a new fiction series. I'd spent years being frustrated by the way that fantasy fiction ignored real magic and fixated on Harry Potter absurdities instead. Once I finished my tentacle novels, that had the inevitable result and gave rise to the first of a series of novels in which all the magic is the stuff real human beings in the real world can encounter. Ariel Moravec, the protagonist of the series, is an eighteen-year-old girl who goes to spend the summer with her grandfather, an occult initiate who spends his time investigating paranormal happenings. Before long she's caught up in one of his investigations, centering on legends of a colonial-era witch and a cascade of very real and vicious spells in the present day...
There are two more novels in the series already in print, a third in press, and a fourth currently being written. It's turning into a very entertaining series to write and, I hope, to read. If you're interested, you can get copies of The Witch of Criswell here if you live in the US and here if you live elsewhere.
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***This Magic Monday is now closed, and no further comments will be put through. See you next week!***
Re: The spiritual nature of money
Date: 2025-04-01 12:52 am (UTC)Re: Asexuals
Date: 2025-04-01 12:55 am (UTC)One might also consider that not all cultures have been as obsessed with sex as contemporary Western culture seems to be. In many cultures it is routine to have times during which one is expected to refrain from sexual contact. In fact, we are in the last weeks of one such, Lent. Sometimes it was a particular partner--one's pregnant, post-partum or nursing partner and menstruating women were commonly avoided. Orthodox Jews still follow such restrictions. Of course, this left males in some cultures free to resort to the other wives or concubines or to lovers or paid partners or even male partners depending on the culture in question. However, some taboos covered all the possibilities: refraining from sex during or before ceremonies or important tasks such as hunting, fishing (especially at sea), boat building, making or working on hunting or war weapons are examples. And it wasn't that long ago that high school and college coaches advised their male players against sexual activity before a game--some may still do so. I think most people these days assume that celibacy is the greatest challenge of the Catholic priesthood, but I have read some who claim that obedience is more difficult.
Of course, earlier cultures did not have commercialized images of sexualized bodies constantly available.
Rita
Re: Litany of the Tree
Date: 2025-04-01 01:06 am (UTC)Re: When the great shift reaches the lower astral
Date: 2025-04-01 01:09 am (UTC)Re: Internal Monologue
Date: 2025-04-01 01:11 am (UTC)Pennsylvania Storm
Date: 2025-04-01 01:11 am (UTC)Re: Pennsylvania Storm
Date: 2025-04-01 01:13 am (UTC)Re: When the great shift reaches the lower astral
Date: 2025-04-01 01:21 am (UTC)Re: Question about causation
Date: 2025-04-01 01:28 am (UTC)Re: Question about causation
Date: 2025-04-01 01:33 am (UTC)Re: Neptune-Saturn conjunction
Date: 2025-04-01 01:37 am (UTC)Patrick
Re: When the great shift reaches the lower astral
Date: 2025-04-01 01:38 am (UTC)Re: Neptune-Saturn conjunction
Date: 2025-04-01 01:39 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2025-04-01 01:40 am (UTC)LLM's are nothing more than statistics and pattern matching, and some that we've known for a few decades now. (Neural networks are a statistical model from the 30's) It's actually not that complicated even, its just that the scale is huge given that we have the infrastructure.
The black-box thing has been heavily inflated by the media with the party line "not even them know how it works", that sells very well. The fact the we can't tell through which pipe it decided to go, doesn't mean that we don't know with a lot of detail the topology of the whole piping system its built on, so to speak.
That said, that is relevant only for the people that develop them, outside of that, mostly by corporations, its treated heavily as a superstitious thing, which is why many are dropping them and its being used for what it is actually useful for (search and pattern matching).
That said, tech is easily influenced by magic too, anything that involves randomness is, so I can see it intersecting.
Re: When the great shift reaches the lower astral
Date: 2025-04-01 01:44 am (UTC)Re: Pennsylvania Storm
Date: 2025-04-01 01:47 am (UTC)Re: Why must they stare so loudly
Date: 2025-04-01 01:52 am (UTC)Dense etheric forms
Date: 2025-04-01 02:08 am (UTC)In one of the early comments, you mentioned that dense etheric forms can interact with the material world, of which the Poltergeist is the most common.
Are their forms of magic that can cause something like this to happen, or is it something outside conscious human control?
J.L.Mc12
Re: Dense etheric forms
Date: 2025-04-01 02:14 am (UTC)Re: Dense etheric forms
Date: 2025-04-01 02:20 am (UTC)Re: Suicide of a lefthand path occultist
Date: 2025-04-01 02:25 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2025-04-01 02:28 am (UTC)How would a Sphere of Protection adapted to work with alchemical symbolism look like? My guess would be:
- Opening: above - Sulphur, below - Salt, middle - Mercury
- Invocations: Air - Gold, Fire - Iron, Water - Mercury, Earth - Copper, Spirit Below - Lead and Nigredo, Spirit Above - Tin and Albedo, Spirit Within - Silver and Rubedo.
Or is it an ill-begotten idea to use abstract concepts instead of spiritual powers for SoP?
Re: Graduating from human life
Date: 2025-04-01 02:36 am (UTC)I have a related question regarding humans in a school who pass on to the next life, and choose to stay and help with the school’s inner workings.
Is it essential for these humans to work to develop a “body of light”, or the equivalent, to a. Survive into the next life, and b. Be able to work effectively with the members of the school that were left behind?
Thanks!
(no subject)
Date: 2025-04-01 02:39 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2025-04-01 02:42 am (UTC)I would call LLM training alchemical. (Or at least some material analogue of alchemical, if you define "alchemy" as coming to practical terms with non-material principles which you couldn't reductively understand even in principle, but which are still somewhat reproducibly accessible and manipulable and non-agentic.) There are a very large number of tendencies in the training data "materia", it's hard to even find a solid way of talking about what the tendencies would be or what the distinctions between them would be, the tendencies still sometimes have intelligibly reproducible net consequences as a gestalt nonetheless, and different manipulations affect different tendencies or pairings of tendencies in sometimes-intelligibly-reproducible ways (according to discoverable meta-tendencies possessed by those tendencies).
I would also call plant and animal breeding mostly alchemical, with the genes as the "materia". But on the continuum between "alchemical" and "scientific", it's less alchemical than LLM training, because there are relatively clearly-recognizable larger causal units like genes and paired chromosomes, and not just an opaque mishmash of nucleotides. Zymurgy is a bit more alchemical than plant breeding since yeast genomes are more confusing.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/09/13/the-omnigenic-model-as-metaphor-for-life is an exploration of how to cope with matters that are alchemical in this sense (though he doesn't call it "alchemical"). The essay starts from the concept of "polygenic traits" in genetics and then generalizes.
> One possible lesson here is that the sciences where progress is hard are the ones that have what seem like an unfair number of tiny interacting causes that determine everything. We should go from trying to discover “the” cause, to trying to find which factors we need to create the best polycausal model. And we should go from seeking a flash of genius that helps sweep away the complexity, to figuring out how to manage complexity that cannot be swept away.
(The businessman-generalist Jim Manzi has termed this concept "causal density", e.g. https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/05/what-is-causality/257193/ .)
A closer analogue for "magic" in this context would be LLM prompting techniques, which have some points in common with magical practice. For example, if you specify in the text prompt of an image model "no elephants" in a context where it would have been surprising for an elephant/not-elephant distinction to come up at all, only sophisticated image models will reliably manage to avoid depicting an elephant. This is like the situation with affirmations.
Short-term political strategy in a democracy might qualify as "magical", but long-term strategy would come closer to being "alchemical", if the strategist is following the polls and cultural demographics to guess what actions had what long-term effects (without quite knowing why it had to be that long-term effect and not some other one). Perhaps "magic" is almost to "alchemy" what "engineering" is to "science": you're introducing a novel element of artificial control into a system you don't otherwise control to create a persistent effect, and there are enough recurring phenomena surrounding the fact of your intentional perturbation and the difficulties of creating a persistent desired effect that you might as well call it its own field of study. And often you need to do engineering to make instruments for science, just as many forms of alchemy-like study require magic-like manipulations. (I suppose magic and engineering are also somewhat more about purposive phenomena other than the practitioner, relative to alchemy and science respectively.)
In case this helps to understand the distinctions I'm trying to point to, I might associate alchemy with Netzach and science with Hod. (And then I suppose magic with Yesod, and engineering with Malkuth.) I think of Hod as being about structures of relationships between more-exchangeable and more-reproducible elements like letters or atoms or lambda-expressions, where that latent possibility of exchangeability and reproducibility had to be isolated by the work of Netzach and wasn't previously exposed.
If I actually knew more about alchemy, I might be able to come up with alchemical operations that LLM training would correspond to. However, it is notably already standard in the field to describe the operation of training a smaller, faster model, using information about the intermediate operations of a larger model, as "distillation". It's an operation that sometimes, for some purposes, improves the model's ability to generalize to unseen cases without retaining random inessential accidents from the materia, but sometimes instead just adds wonkiness and takes away the capacities with which the model might have grasped the point of a given pattern. Also, in a way, all LLMs are "distillations" of the training data in this sense, if you think of the training data as being a very primitive model consisting of a brute-force memorized version of itself.
As for reproducibility and determinism: you're not going to get the exact same parameters on the output end without making sure the initial random starting parameters and the digital approximate-arithmetic order of operations during the training process are exactly the same on the input end. That'd be like asking two communities of deaf children to come up with the same sign language, or two honey locust or contorted beech trees to come up with the same snaggles. What we would call "irreproducibility" is if different experimenters got consistently different performance using the same techniques on data gathered the same way.