These sources cover magical traditions, ancient myth and religious ideas. Many are reference articles, and some are practitioners' own essays. Pages report what each source claims, not whether it is true. This page lists 18 sources, oldest first where dated.
The Key of It All (AL=L)
This is a numerological monograph from the 1990s with a sceptical 2016 foreword. It builds on the earlier keys of Charles Stansfeld Jones and Gerald Suster. Its evidence is arithmetic on letter values. The author later calls the results merely intriguing.
Liber Q: Tarot Symbolism & Divination
The PDF is a long reference and training text, not an essay. It revises a Golden Dawn manuscript called Book T. It gives each card a Qabalistic reading and a meditation schedule. The last chapter teaches two divination procedures.
Hru and Hua: A Secret Egregore of the A.A. and H.O.G.D.?
The essay follows two spirit names through Enochian magic, the Golden Dawn and Crowley. It proposes they point to a single hidden figure linked to Horus. The author calls the idea speculative and the evidence sparse.
User:Tomispev/Coffin Texts Spell 714
The page is a short working draft. It sets one ancient Egyptian spell beside the English of two scholars. The spell is a creation speech in which the speaker made itself. The page adds almost no commentary of its own.
Hymn to Babylon, missing for a millennium, has been discovered
The item reports a paper in the journal Iraq on a rediscovered hymn praising Babylon. It leans on quotes from the Assyriologist Enrique Jiménez. It prints a short excerpt in English and a photo caption for the tablet.
The Secret History of Knocking on Wood
The essay starts from a parent's observation of a toddler learning to knock on wood. It tests a 19th-century origin claim with a crowd-sourced list plotted on a globe. It then argues that unwritten gestures cannot be learned by AI from text.
Tablet of Destinies
The article is brief and mostly summarises how the tablet appears in four ancient texts. It cites a few scholarly works and translations. It adds that the common name Tablets of Destiny is a mistranslation.
Charaktêres
This is a Wikipedia stub of a few paragraphs. It defines charaktêres and reports one thesis that counted them. It gives their forms and where they appear, citing five scholarly works.
Bluesky post on the machine-checked logic of Nagarjuna, with replies
This is a Bluesky thread, not the essay it points to. The opening post claims a machine-checked result about Nagarjuna's logic. The poster answers questions in the replies. Commenters raise parallels, a validity objection and a consistency objection.
Assessors of Maat
The article describes the 42 Assessors of Maat and the Weighing of the Heart. Its main feature is a table of all 42 judges. The table compares Wilkinson's list of sins with the Papyrus of Ani's declarations. Evidence is citations to Egyptology books.
John Murray Spear
The article sketches the life of a Universalist minister who became a spiritualist. It centers on the machine called the New Motive Power. It is short and cites mostly a biography and archive documents.
The two Christian saints who are secretly the Buddha
The post retells the story of Barlaam and Josaphat. It traces the path from Sanskrit to Georgian. It then offers a brief reflection on religions borrowing from one another. It lists six footnotes but argues mainly by narrative.
Sol Ascendans - The Website of Alex Sumner
The front page shows recent posts in the author's voice. They mix book and gig reviews, an obituary, a scrying exercise and a ritual text. The author writes as a practising member of Golden Dawn and masonic groups. The evidence is personal experience and opinion.
Upaya
The article defines upaya and sets out how Buddhist traditions use it. It gives two teaching images, the burning house and the empty fist, with long quotations. It ends with a short note on mindfulness programs.
Picts
The article gathers what is known of the Picts. Sources include Roman writers, Bede, Irish annals, stones and metalwork. It stresses how much of Pictish history comes from outsiders. It reports scholarly disputes about the name, origins, kingship and language. It notes farming communities and no known towns before the 12th century.
Descent of Inanna into the Underworld
The article covers the Sumerian and Akkadian versions, the cast and the plot. It reviews how scholars reconstructed the text from tablets. It then surveys competing interpretations, later echoes and modern readings.
Foucault's Pendulum
The article covers Eco's novel with a plot summary, themes and comparisons. It reads the book as satire of conspiracy thinking. Evidence is citations to critics and interviews with Eco.
Sarah
This is a reference article, not an argument. It sets out the Genesis story, then later Jewish, Christian and Islamic portrayals of Sarah. It also reports the scholarly debate over whether the patriarchs were historical.
Connections to other subjects
These links are this wiki's own reading, not claims the sources make.
- Upaya and Effective harnesses for long-running agents, from Harnesses and agent loops. Upaya adapts a teaching to its audience, and the method need not be ultimately true. Young's team tells a model that removing tests is unacceptable. That sentence is chosen for its effect on the reader. Prompts may be the newest expedient means.
- Foucault's Pendulum and John Coltrane's Tone Circle, from Consonance and tuning. Eco's editors build a grand Plan from a note that proves a laundry list. Hollander collects many readings of one Coltrane drawing. They show how much meaning a pattern can carry once people want it.
- Assessors of Maat and Effective harnesses for long-running agents, from Harnesses and agent loops. Book of the Dead chapter 125 pairs each of 42 judges with a matching declaration. Young's feature list has over 200 items, all marked failing at first. Both are checklists for a verdict. The Egyptian scheme still weighs the heart. Young's agents marked items done until browser tests arrived.
- The two Christian saints who are secretly the Buddha and Layers of Memory, Layers of Compression, from File-based agent memory. The Buddha's story reached Christian saints through many retellings, and Bodhisattva became Budhasaf. Kellogg treats memory layers as lossy compression. The legend shows what can survive many hand-offs: plot, not provenance. Historians took centuries to accept the source.
- The Secret History of Knocking on Wood and What Heraldry and Japanese Mon Can Teach Us About Building Visual-Identity Generators, from Images made by rules. Breen weighs a tidy modern origin for knocking on wood against an older, messier one. Overmyer's question applies: which story came from the tradition, and which from its explainers? Gesture, Breen notes, is rarely written down.
- Hymn to Babylon, missing for a millennium, has been discovered and Just-In-Time Agent Memory with Runtime Agentic Research, from File-based agent memory. Yan and colleagues keep raw sessions because later questions may need discarded details. Babylon's hymn returned because many copies survived, and a platform found 30 more manuscripts. Nobody copying them knew the question. Raw copies let a later reader ask it.
- John Murray Spear and Viable Systems: How To Build a Fully Autonomous Agent, from Harnesses and agent loops. Spear and followers built the New Motive Power, a messianic machine, and staged its birth. Kellogg writes that identity and values seem to make agents come alive. The ritual failed, and the agents run. Still, both hopes concern what turns a mechanism into a someone.
Glossary
- Abramelin Operation
- A long ritual from a book of magic, meant to bring contact with an angel.
- Abzu
- The primeval sea below the earth in Mesopotamian myth.
- Agnatic seniority
- Succession passing among male relatives on the father's side, often to an older kinsman.
- AI alignment
- The effort to make AI systems act in line with human values.
- Aiwaz
- The being that Crowley said dictated the Book of the Law.
- Akkadian
- An ancient Mesopotamian language that replaced Sumerian in daily use.
- Ammit
- The monster called the Devourer, who ate hearts found too heavy.
- Anunna
- The judges of the Underworld, who condemn Inanna in the myth.
- Apotropaic
- Meant to turn away evil.
- Apotropaic magic
- Charms or acts meant to ward off evil or bad luck.
- Balavariani
- A Georgian text of the 10th century that tells the story of Barlaam and Josaphat.
- Binding of Isaac
- The Genesis story in which Abraham is told to sacrifice Isaac.
- Bodhisattva
- In Buddhism, a being on the path to becoming a Buddha.
- Cacodemon
- An evil spirit or demon.
- Catuskoti
- A four-part Buddhist logical scheme covering true, false, both and neither.
- Cipher
- A string of letters and numbers meant to hide a message.
- Coffin Texts
- A body of Egyptian funerary spells written on coffins in the Middle Kingdom.
- Crazy wisdom
- Unconventional behavior by a teacher said to serve a spiritual aim.
- Cuneiform
- A wedge-shaped writing system pressed into clay tablets in ancient Mesopotamia.
- Curse tablet
- A thin sheet, often lead, inscribed with a curse.
- Cylinder seal
- A small carved roller used to stamp a pattern into wet clay.
- De Buck
- Adriaan de Buck, whose 1956 edition is the source of the page's hieroglyphic text.
- Decanate
- One third of a zodiac sign, covering ten degrees.
- Dál Riata
- A Gaelic kingdom spanning western Scotland and Ireland.
- Egregore
- In occult writing, a group-made thought-being that takes on a life of its own.
- Electronic Babylonian Library
- An online platform that gathers cuneiform fragments and uses AI to match them.
- Embodiment
- Having a physical body that shapes how a being thinks and feels.
- Endonym
- A name a people uses for itself.
- Enochian magic
- A system of angel magic from the notes of John Dee and Edward Kelley.
- Enuma Elish
- A Babylonian epic about the rise of the god Marduk.
- Epigraphy
- The study of ancient inscriptions.
- Exonym
- A name for a people that outsiders use.
- Fortriu
- A Pictish kingdom whose core the article places in Moray.
- Foucault pendulum
- A swinging weight that shows the rotation of the Earth.
- Foundationalism
- The view that knowledge or reality rests on some basic, necessary ground.
- Gematria
- The practice of adding up letter values to link words with the same total.
- Genesis Rabbah
- A fifth-century collection of rabbinic commentary on the Book of Genesis.
- Golden Dawn
- A late-19th-century British magical order whose teachings shaped modern occult Tarot.
- HGA
- The Holy Guardian Angel, a higher self or guide in Thelema.
- Historicity
- Whether a person or event in a text really existed or happened.
- Hymn of praise
- A poem written to honor a god, ruler or place.
- Insular Celtic
- The Celtic languages of Britain and Ireland.
- Kether
- The highest sphere on the kabbalistic Tree of Life.
- Knights Templar
- A medieval Christian military order, central to many conspiracy stories.
- Lean
- A proof assistant, a program that checks formal proofs step by step.
- Liber AL vel Legis
- Crowley's Book of the Law, the holy text of Thelema.
- Lotus Sutra
- A major Mahayana Buddhist scripture.
- Maat
- The Egyptian goddess of truth, justice and cosmic order, often shown by an ostrich feather.
- Martyrology
- An official list of saints and martyrs, with feast days.
- Matriarch
- A founding mother of a people, here one of the wives of the biblical patriarchs.
- Me
- In Sumerian belief, divine powers or decrees that govern civilization and life.
- Memphis-Misraim
- A masonic rite that the post says has ninety-seven degrees.
- Midrash
- Rabbinic stories and commentary that expand on the biblical text.
- Modal logic
- A logic that adds notions such as necessity and possibility.
- Nagarjuna
- An Indian Buddhist philosopher who founded the Madhyamaka school.
- Negative Confessions
- The declarations of innocence the dead recited before the 42 judges.
- Nu
- The Egyptian name for the primeval waters before creation.
- Pali Canon
- The collection of scriptures of Theravada Buddhism.
- Papyrus of Ani
- An ancient Egyptian copy of the Book of the Dead.
- Perpetual motion machine
- A device claimed to run forever without an energy source.
- Phylactery
- A protective charm worn or carried to ward off harm.
- Pictish stones
- Carved standing stones and cross slabs bearing Pictish symbols.
- Psychostasia
- The ritual weighing of a soul.
- Qabalah
- A Jewish mystical system of letters and numbers, used here to read the Tarot.
- Querent
- The person who asks a question in a divination.
- Rosicrucian
- Linked to a seventeenth-century tradition of secret brotherhoods that blend alchemy and Christian mysticism.
- Scrying
- Gazing at a symbol or surface to bring on visions.
- Sefiroth
- The ten emanations of God in Kabbalah, a Jewish mystical tradition.
- Sephirah
- One of ten stages of manifestation on the Qabalistic Tree of Life.
- Significator
- A card chosen to stand for the querent.
- Sippar Library
- A famous collection of cuneiform tablets from the Babylonian city of Sippar.
- Spiritualism
- A 19th-century movement based on belief in contact with the dead.
- Telluric currents
- Imagined earth energies, used in the novel as the aim of The Plan.
- Transliteration
- Writing the sounds of one script in the letters of another.
- Universalist
- A member of a Christian church that taught salvation for all.
- Upaya-kaushalya
- Sanskrit for skill in means, the ability to choose a fitting method.
- Vanity press
- A publisher that charges authors to print their own books.
- Vintage LLM
- A language model trained only on texts from one past period.
- Voces magicae
- Strange words used in ancient spells, such as in the Greek Magical Papyri.
- Weighing of the Heart
- The afterlife trial where the heart is balanced against the feather of Maat.