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As we are all learning in the 21ˢᵗ century, language evolves over time. Irrespective of politics, "man" and "woman" no longer appear to quite mean what they used to, as an example. There was once a study conducted by the Department of Energy on the topic of "nuclear semiotics" exploring how to communicate warnings about radioactive waste sites on atomic timescales, tens of thousands of years into the future, in such a manner that they would not be misconstrued as blinds to deter tomb raiders from discovering hidden riches underneath:

To one not initiated into the mysteries of modern science, this message could very well be construed as false by a 37ᵗʰ century scavenger, assuming we even make it that far. The words themselves are useless; there needs to be an out-of-band exchange first defining what those words mean (learning the language), explaining their import & origin (these originated from a nuclear waste disposal project, not the tomb of an ancient king), & assuring the recipient that the words are authentic and true - an exchange of trust. In some respects, this last step is a leap of faith - how can one be so sure, if I cannot go down into the "nuclear waste disposal site" and see so for myself? And in this respect, it is perhaps unsurprising that ideas even as outlandish as a "nuclear priesthood" were proposed by Thomas Sebeok, another researcher in this space: a group of people initiated in matters of radioactive decay who could communicate these esoteric truths intelligibly to the public and, more importantly, secure their trust.

Vilmos Voigt proposed creating concentric rings of translated warning signs, with each new language or generation translating the previous ones', ensuring the message could be faithfully carried forward into the future, while also being able to trace its origin. There is an occult concept in western esoterica of "the Formula of IAO," expressing the cycles of creation, destruction, and rebirth, through a mythology superimposed upon the substrate of the Hellenic Greco-Egyptian mythological extensions of Isis, Apophis, and Osiris. "The king is dead; long live the king!" is the mundane expression for this broader ideological tradition of renewing the teachings of the last generation so that they remain applicable & intelligible to the current one. This is what each ring of Voight's circle aims to accomplish - to take the words of the last generation, understand them, and form them into one's own.

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Computer networking is like mailing a letter, except with several more envelopes involved: you have a web request to YouTube, which needs to get wrapped in a wax-sealed TLS envelope for security, then packaged into a bubble-wrapped TCP envelope for transport, labelled with an IP packing slip with routing and address information, and finally shoved into the back of an Ethernet or 802.11 truck for physical transport down the "information superhighway." Entire books could be, and have been, written for each one of the acronyms I have named, and no one could possibly read them all. Modern web developers need not understand 4-way TCP handshakes or TLS key exchanges to deploy a website, but nor are the people & technologies working towards the lower levels of this stack, the OSI Model, so-called, aware of what is going on above. The outer envelopes cannot see into the contents of the inner ones - one of them is in fact sealed with a blob of wax and industrial-grade cryptography! This is the nature of abstraction - the primitive building blocks of the lower layers may be recombined and assembled into novel ways previously unforeseen in order to be "applied" towards a certain purpose - this is the "application layer," the top of the OSI model or stack, where HTTP and YouTube and Google and Meta live. TCP/IP only tells information where to go; it is the app that superimposes content, a purpose, an "application" onto the lower layers, which, without this content, would be inert.

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We are, in many ways, still beholden to the legacies of the OSI model, the lower layers of the stack or the outermost envelopes. Peer-to-peer networking, Napster, KaZaA, LimeWire, even torrenting, has fallen out of favour, partly due to IPv4 address exhaustion and CG-NAT - we can't print any more IP packing slips, so we need someone to take them & reuse them, erasing & rewriting some of the routing information to make sure letters still make it to their destination. This sort of works, but that person's hand is starting to cramp from all the IP label writing & rewriting, and it would be nice to give them a break - but alas, we only have 4 billion IPs in the world, and so we must patch over some of the historical constraints we are subject to with hacks in the upper layers - rewriting and Network Address Translation. Arguably, this damages the conceptual purity & internal consistency of the original design, hence the dysfunction of P2P networking in 2026, but we cannot take down the internet and put it on hold while we build out the future - the plane must be re-assembeld in-flight, at 50,000 ft.

The OSI model, Voigt's concentric rings of translation, the "Formula of IAO" are all quite similar in some ways - the progressive stacking of layers, each layer speaking a different language than the last, yet still dependent on & deeply influenced by it, as the peer-to-peer apps, way up in the heights of the application layer of the OSI model, were so deeply hamstrung by the IPv4 shortage. So too are we burdened with our own psychological legacy, the inheritance of our own biological software. The cultural import & legacy of 20 centuries of scholarship does not disappear because a few redditors watched a YouTube video (but perhaps not this one, where even the great Christopher Hitchens, rest his soul, fails to adequately address Dr. Craig's deployment of the cosmological argument, still one of the most enduring & persuasive arguments for a First Cause). Yet, neither do the teachings of antiquity make as much sense in the 21ˢᵗ century era of AI. What are we to do - throw them out? No; this crashes the plane. While there are many who may wish to 9/11 religion once and for all, even atheists may be brought into the fold through the evolution of language.

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The Lesser Key of Solomon is said to be a text on goetia, or the practice of evoking demons. An immediate word of caution here, for we ought to be very clear with what we mean by the word "demon." In the introduction to his own edition of the Lesser Key of Solomon, Aleister Crowley writes:

Elsewhere, in an instructional manual for ceremonial magick, he similarly cautions the reader, almost dismissing not just the language of, but the entire practice as irrelevant or even fictional:

There is the noumenal, and then there is the phenomenal; a western esotericist may describe the distinction in terms of the macrocosm & the microcosm; there is the enormity of the external world, the universe as it "actually is," versus our limited, imperfect, sensate apprehension of it - the microcosm of our phenomenological experience, whose "cause lies in your brain." While the brain is often regarded as a passive observer and mere conduit for raw sensory data, it is also involved in substantial interpretation or even outright modification of that data, as any book of optical "illusions" will readily demonstrate.

Recursive Self-Improvement, current Holy Grail & Quarterly Goal™ of the AI cyber-cult, has already existed in biological form for aeons; interpreted as broadly as possible, this is the path of the esotericist and the magickian, as opposed to the passive mystic - the active principle of the brain's capacity to modify its own microcosmic, phenomenal world, applied to itself. The most direct form of this is the brain willing itself to alter and profoundly distort its sensory experience through entheogenic usage, referred to by later postmodernist and chaos magickal practitioners such as Peter J. Carroll as "chemognosis" - willful, self-directed self-modification through the use of chemicals to gain ineffable insights into the nature of sensory experience, or even outright manipulate one's own microcosm to willfully effect change in one's own mind - the practice of magick.

Thus, we have an example of how chemically altering the body alters our phenomenological experience - the mind. What of the converse? Can one alter the body by first altering the mind? Crowley continues in his Book of the Goetia:

Thus, the practice of goetia is in fact the practice of manipulating the components of one's mind, which in turn affects one's body and their surrounding environment. We now arrive at the image of the taijita, the serpent eating its own tail - of spectral opposites locked in a dance of mutual, unbounded recusion, forming something far greater than either half could on its own, a being far greater than the sum. The Hermeticists, disciplies of Hermes Trismegistus, the Thrice Great and instructor of Abraham, characterize this in their own way:

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As in the mind, so with the body; as with the body, so with the mind - the same mutually recursive dance of the yin and yang, the macrocosm and microcosm, noumena and phenomena. Before you dismiss all this talk of capital-T "Transmutation" as edgy goth fiction, let me point out that society is dependent on several fictions for its day-to-day operation, including law and fiat currency (literally, "let there be currency," and it shall be so):

Most apropos of this discussion on magick would be this example of intersubjectival co-creation given by Daniel M. Ingram, former emergency department physician, in his book Fire Kasina, in which practitioners hone their attention on retinal afterimages in order to gain insight into the relationship between attention and perception:

Thus we can see that intersubjectivity need not limit itself to "social constructs" such as law or currency (both of which are very "real," despite their fictitiousness), or otherwise - though one such social construct is of particular interest, and often the first object to which one applies their "magickal operations" - the identity.

That's all for now.