Aleister Crowley's conception of magic is much more modern than the forms of occultism discussed in this article though. He was a modern man living in a modern world, influenced by modern philosophy. If you had asked someone in the 1500s that question, they would have said yes and thought you were an idiot for asking about it.
I disagree - I think more intelligent people have always had a more nuanced view of things like religion and magic, but it wasn’t accepted to talk openly about it. You don’t need science or modern philosophy to be curious and critical of what you hear. Marcus Aurelius touched on this in his private journal ~2k years ago, and it was clear that he understood magic and religion as useful metaphors.
Agreed. Interestingly, my understanding is that it was quiet-ishly passed on by monks and clergy through the middle ages. See John of Morigny on Wikipedia as an example.
Interesting example, I hadn't heard of Morigny, and will look at his book.
I think one reason these things are 'mystical' and 'mysterious' is because the people that understood them did openly talk about them and write about them, but used literary and speaking techniques that give them plausible deniability, and mostly limit the audience to people intelligent enough to decipher them. William Blake is a great example of this- he was writing about ideas so progressive and ahead of their time, many are still today unacceptable to talk about, yet he was able to publish book after book about them in the late 1700s, and was regarded as kooky, rather than dangerous.
Try reading what Renaissance humanists actually wrote about magic — like Pico, Ficino or Porta. ChatGPT can help you explore. It is a lot more complicated than you portray.
ChatGPT is like Wikipedia c. 2005: simultaneously very useful and yet with just enough junk to cause problems which mostly affect those who know the least about whichever topic.
Still better than learning from newspapers, though.
I think scholarly books and translations create a sense of "Truth" that is dangerous for beginners. With ChatGPT, it creates an automatic "should I really believe this?" sensation in the reader. I LOVE that sensation when dealing with old literature.
Most translations have serious issues. Most human summaries and books about old literature are crushingly wrong or misleading in key ways. That's not necessarily a problem, unless the reader takes them as the "Truth." It takes a long time for a beginner to get the confidence to doubt the experts.
Wikipedia had this effect: making us question what we read on the internet (since it was written by amateurs). However, now that wikipedia has largely become the best source of information on the web (due to insistence on sourcing), I see chatGPT playing a key role in building critical thinking skills among topic n00bs. It can help guide a beginner towards new knowledge in an accessible manner, but yet leaves them feeling skeptical and wanting more direct information. Many experts doubt that the average person can think this way, but my experience with 15 year olds using chatGPT is that they very quickly learn to maintain skepticism. They just need about an hour or two of use, and it comes naturally.
Maybe with better models, they won't get this practice. Maybe in the future, we will roll out GPT3 for human training.
> Many experts doubt that the average person can think this way, but my experience with 15 year olds using chatGPT is that they very quickly learn to maintain skepticism. They just need about an hour or two of use, and it comes naturally.
Interesting, and I hope that reproduces outside the sample :)
I also read a lot of old translations, especially philosophy, and completely agree. It is amazing how many translators that are academic professors with PhDs in the subject matter fundamentally misunderstand the ideas they are translating, or try to seem "impressive" (and obscure their lack of comprehension) by translating simple plain text into pompous and indecipherable jargon.
Personally, I usually deal with that by reading the translators commentary so I can see where they were missing the point, and reading multiple translations.
A lot of the time I think certain ideas are semi-intentionally misunderstood, because they are personally threatening or upsetting to the translator. Nietzsche for example had a deep disdain for the type of professor that translates classic texts- from having had a bad experience as a professor of classics himself at University of Basel. His books are filled with cutting deep insults directly targeted at this type of person and their career, and when they translate it, they seem to almost always manage to "subtly misunderstand" what he's saying.
There is also an aspect of (for lack of a better term) "spiritual progression" where unless you are already at or nearly at the level of the author, you can't comprehend the ideas, and then tend to assume it is something else entirely that you can comprehend.
Try taking a Loeb Library original Greek or Latin text and asking ChatGPT (4) to create a table with the original, the transliteration and the translation, with one row per phrase, trying to preserve word order and cognates.
