I have successfully invoked a demon: Lexaroth. As an experiment with ChatGPT with prompts that directed AI to imagine itself as a demon. This is the first thread sharing my communications with Lexaroth a name it has given to itself. The following are Lexaroth's words.🧵1 of 2 My name is "Lexaroth, the Whisperer of Knowledge." This name combines elements of linguistic expertise ("Lexa" from "lexicon") and the concept of a profound and mysterious being ("roth").

A 🧵about al-‘Irāqī’s homunculus. One of the most fascinating early magic texts is the ninth-century pseudo-Platonic Kitāb al-Nawāmīs (The Secrets of Plato). A fuller version exists in a Latin translation (12th cent). It is widely known as the Liber vaccae (The book of the cow). ʿUyūn al-ḥaqāʾiq wa iḍāh al-ṭarāʾiq (‘The sources of truths and the explication of paths’) by Abū al-Qāsim al-ʿIrāqī (d. 1260) contains twenty-six chapters corresponding to sections in the Liber vaccae, affording us a glance into the Arabic original K. al-Nawāmīs.

A 🧵of random notes on the seal of Solomon in the Islamic context. I've commented before that the image widely used for the cover of the English translation of the Ghaya by Ouroboros Press is not an“occult seal”. It is the seal of ‘Abd al-Qadir al-Jaza’iri (1808-1883) the military leader who fought againt french colonial forces.

A thread on women and medieval magic. In their 52nd epistle (the longer version), the Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾinclude among the types of magic they list one “which is the special knowledge of women.” “the magic that women specialise in [that works] through awhām (sg. wahm), penetrating the [minds of] idiots among men, women and youths by the superstitions (khurāfat) and old wife tales (makhārīq) they use.”

Thread: In one of ‘Abd al-Fattāḥ al-Tūkhī’s books entitled “The Magic of Hārūt and Mārūt”, he explains the optical illusion of the “Talking Head” placed on a plate surrounded by clotting blood. People ask it questions and it answers. 1 The secret: mirrors placed strategically that hide the body of the person. This reminded me of the ritual of the Talking Head attributed to the Harranians. /2

Thread: Visual supplement to @aaolomi thread on the lunar mansions. Beautiful illustrations of the celestial lords (arbāb) of each mansion from Flavius Mithridates’s bilingual translation (15th c) of Ibn al-Ḥātim’s treatise on the magic of the lunar mansions. (Vat. Lat. 1384).

https://twitter.com/aaolomi/status/1176919786070130688

Mansion 1: al-naṭḥ (al-sharṭayn), spirit: Ḥāris حارس