“The fact is that very few of us know what words mean; fewer still take the trouble to enquire. We calmly, we carelessly assume that our minds are identical with that of the writer, at least on that point; and then we wonder that there should be misunderstandings!”

Aleister Crowley, Magick Without Tears, p196

I was more surprised than I should have been to discover that old Uncle Aleister (a.k.a. the Great Beast 666 himself) was a real stickler for etymological exactitude. He was also citing Korzbyski at people waaaay before the pomo theory mob got a grip on his general semantics.

(Other folk way out in front on the latter topic included Borges and Burroughs. Make of that what you will!)

As I noted over at Worldbuilding Agency a few weeks back, this is exactly why I’ve been drawn back to occult studies in recent years: far from being the mystic mumbo-jumbo it’s assumed to be, the core of magickal thinking is in fact an insistence on seeing through illusions, and disciplining one’s own imagination in order to construct narratives that will help you survive the discursive battlefield.

The consequences of failure are everywhere to see. This morning I found myself castigating an academic librarian on LinkedIn for jabbering on about the apotheosis of “AGI”, and the deskilling he claims he can feel from the “AI” gimmicks that he is nonetheless proudly using and extolling every day. I told him he sounded like a junkie lecturing on the seductive horrors of opioids, and I meant it.

It’s genuinely shocking, the sheer number of apparently well-qualified professional people who are deep in the silicon-god cult right now. Del Toro’s Frankenstein was well timed, but as Matt Cardin has noted, the reading in which the eponymous inventor is a simple figure of scientific hubris falls short of the mark:

His “monster” is the banished half of his own soul, the poetic and visionary depth he refused to honor. Denied and abandoned, that power inevitably turns destructive when he tries to actualize it in an act of creation. These pages feel especially relevant now, when not only has del Toro reimagined the story for a new generation, but daemonic fury is pretty evidently running rampant around the world outside the confining artistic boundary of a movie or television screen.

Magickal thinking is something of a prophylactic here, I reckon. I recall someone decrying us skeptics as falling back on an essentially demonological model of thinking with regard to LLMs, and thinking “well, yes, exactly“. After all, demons, somewhat like LLMs, simply mirror us back at ourselves. But in the case of LLMs, the mirrored unconscious—both individual and collective—is warped and remediated by the priorities and agendas of the corporate forms that have productised them: profit, and behavioural stickiness as a means to that end.

Dealing with demons you’ve summoned yourself is risky enough; making use of summoning-as-a-service, provided by people so thoroughly high on their own supply, is psychological Russian roulette. I’m reminded of Crowley’s gag about the guy on the train with an invisible mongoose, and wonder what the equivalent countermeasure might be for the chatbot junkies seeing snakes.