The AI Chat and the Summoning Circle

I. What's going on with all those AI essays, anyway

Like many others, I recently read the accounts of peer-reviewed [sic?] academic papers containing clear evidence of having been AI-generated with a sort of grim resignation. We have all heard stories of undergraduate papers¹ which display that sort of bizarre, stilted language which tells you from about sentence number two that you're dealing with a student that has outsourced a certain amount of their academic life to crafting AI prompts. I don't necessarily want to minimize the pedagogical impact of such ubiquitous cheating – the old cliché about students only harming their own internal development by cheating is a cliché for a reason. But I couldn't help but think a bit more about the implications of summoning a super-intelligence [again, sic?] to write your 5-7 page paper about the impact of the printing press on Europe. Even while respecting that we seem to be cresting into uncharted waters when it comes to "calling forth all of the information stored on the internet more quickly," I'm not sure that this is as wholly novel as people might want it to be. I am alluding here to the age-old tradition of summoning various entities to give you occult knowledge you otherwise would not (should not?) have.

I should clarify that getting at occult knowledge – I really mean here in the literal sense of knowledge which is "occulted," and not necessarily with some of the immediate, cultural implications of "the occult" that occasionally get brought up² – can be done in all sorts of ways. This is not just a tarot deck, or your friendly, neighborhood seer, those these do both fit the bill. You can always open your favorite holy book, up to and including the Divan of Hafez, to a random page as a form of divination,³ or engage in geomancy, or chiromancy, or any other preferred -mancy. These strike me, though, as different subsets of the occult, in which you are reading signs which are indeed present, but hidden from the naked eye. The phenomenon to which I am referring is when you actually request a supernal being to come down and provide you with a sort of instant download of knowledge into your person that you can then use for whatever mundane or sublime purpose you see fit. The procedures for such summonings tend to be pretty rigidly codified, based on the due diligence concerns that the entity you are bringing into your living room summoning circle might not necessarily have your best interests in mind. Selectivity is also recommended in such cases: not all supernal entities have the same subfields.

II. Mainlining the Secret Truth of the Universe: The Sar Torah Praxis

Incidentally, I recently came across exactly one of these highly specialized entities, namely, the Sar Torah, the "Prince of the Torah," from whom can be learned the entirety of Jewish textual knowledge (and then some). Don't worry if you aren't particularly concerned with having an impeccable knowledge of the Tanakh and its attendant commentaries – there is more than meets the eye on this one.

If you happen to have spent any amount of time in a religious tradition that places a significant emphasis on a core religious text and the vast apparatus of exegeses and interpretations which have sprung up around it, you will know intuitively that getting to know all of this stuff will have moments where it is mostly a drag. For all of the momentary flashes of fulfillment and understanding, a lot of the day-to-process involves closely reading a great deal of material that might not seem to be intuitively interesting. This is not itself a bad thing, as trudging through a tedious text can lead to moments of inspiration in the most unexpected moments, but it undeniably requires time and effort. If you happen to be in a cultural context where there are tangible rewards in the form of both social status, as well as, presumably, a heightened spiritual state as a result of your hours of youth spent in a library instead of out enjoying yourself, the end results of this path might start to look particularly attractive.

With this path of drudgery in mind: for the enterprising young semi-scholar – or someone who had some scholarly chops, but wasn't in the world of Officially Sanctioned Scholar – it might even start to seem worth the effort to find the correct set of diligently-followed spells that get you to the final destination without the decades of tedium. Your motivations are pure, after all, and those years of pain are really just a hindrance to all of the things you can accomplish once you can understand the entirety of the scriptural work.⁴ As it turns out, maybe you could spend a couple weeks in pious isolation reciting a clearly-outlined spiritual praxis that will quickly resolve your concerns.

To summarize before diving in: the Sar Torah is a spell you can recite after days of intense prayer and fasting that will conclude with you properly summoning the Prince of the Torah and receiving instant, perfect knowledge of the Jewish religious tradition. It requires a certain amount of technical information to complete the spell, but it doesn't require a lifetime of study. As the authors themselves emphasize, you don't even have to be particularly intelligent, yourself, for this thing to work. This would seem to be a hard deal to pass up.

Bracketing for one moment the question of what might result when you get to know the "Torah," our modern-day editors of the text of the Sar Torah have made a number of somewhat cynical observations about who would have been the most interested in crafting such an incantation. They were apparently from "scribal circles who knew the Bible and some rabbinic traditions," but of a set who "envied the superior power an social status of the rabbis."⁵ Now we're getting somewhere: a group of intellectuals who probably know a thing or two themselves, but who are without the access to texts and accordant societal prestige that comes with being someone who is socially sanctioned as a mentor and guide to the community at large. There are likely some on-the-nose modern-day parallels to make; I will let those flow naturally from the reader.

We all know that knowledge never comes for free,⁶ but when compared to a nearly endless wellspring of information and understanding, one might still think that the demanded ritual ends up being worth it in the cost-benefit analysis. You will have to be ritually pure, sure, and you will have to isolate yourself for 12 days. The dietary restrictions are pretty restrictive: clean bread you make from scratch, clear water, and absolutely no vegetables. You will also have to spend pretty much the entirety of those 12 days praying, and some of the prayers might involve finding someone who can fill in the internal vowels for you:

These are their names. He must say: SQDHWZY'Y YHWH the prince; NHBRDYW'LW YHWH the prince; 'BYR GHWRYRY'L YHWH the prince – and there are some who say, GHWRYDYHW'L YHWH the prince; 'SRWYLY'Y'L YHWH the prince; ZBWDY'L YHWH the prince; 'ZGKWHR'Y YHWH the prince; TWTRWSY'Y YHWH the prince; PLYTRYH YHWH the prince; WHWB'RY YHWH the prince; MRGYWY'L YHWH the prince; RHDBYRWRWN YHWH the prince; W'DYRYWDWN YHWH the prince. Thirteen.

Don't ask me to pronounce those for you, because I can't. It's possible, really, that no one still living could fill those in (though the more esoterically advanced are welcome to email me that, in fact, there are dozens of sages out there who would share them with the worthy). This is also just a taste, as there are a few other obscure magical renderings that fill out the spell – but anyone trying to summon the Sar Torah will surely have the wherewithal to seek out the additional internal vowels of the final incantations. The point is that when you have done all this for 12 days, the spell is completed, and you have free rein to "go forth to all the principles of Torah...whether to Bible or to Mishnah, or to the vision of the chariot[!]" in perfect and complete knowledge.

In other words, any enterprising seeker who has some scribal chops, but has been excluded from the teachings of the elect, might naturally want to make sure his 12 days in restrictive isolation (most of which is spent chanting) will actually pay off. The compilers of the tradition certainly seem confident that this could work on anyone (even a "certain dullard!"), so you will at least be sure that the injection of knowledge will definitely result from your not-quite-two-weeks of anti-social behavior.

You might get a more definitive answer than what is currently available.

About that payoff. While some people will naturally gravitate towards such spells for a variety of spiritual and social reasons (it never hurts to be the synagogue Torah hotshot), others might not be filled with the passionate desire to know inwards and outwards the legal prescriptions for when you, say, burn a pile of grass that accidentally had one of your neighbor's possessions hidden inside it. It turns out that you have the opportunity to get both of those, and then some. You do receive "an abundance of Torah and a tumult of Talmud," and sure, you "multiply laws like the sand of the sea." But once you are done declaring what is pure and impure, there are a few other perks:

To fasten crowns onto your heads

and garlands of kingship onto the heads of your sons;

to compel kings to abase themselves before you

and to oblige potentates to prostrate themselves before you;

to chisel your name on every rock

and your remembrance in the sea towns;

to enlighten your faces like the shining of the day

and your forehead like the star of dawn.

This strikes me as a slightly different measure of mastery than ensuring that you never have a misstep in your Torah trope. One might be tempted to write this off as simple hyperbole for literary effect, and maybe so. I wouldn't be so quick to land on that judgment though. Reflexive cynicism is no more well-founded as an interpretive method than reflexive credulity. The idea of textual mastery meaning that you can manipulate all sorts of things in what otherwise might be considered the mere physical (secular? (Is there such a thing?)) world is not exactly outside the bounds of esoteric discussion. This is flirting with anachronism, but there are certainly examples later on in Judaism of perfect knowledge of the manipulation of the (endlessly-manipulable) letters of the Torah leading to all sorts of tangible benefits.⁷ To go beyond flirting with anachronism into the heavy petting of comparative religion, this sort of thing is all over Islamic political theory in the aftermath of the Mongol invasion. There's a reason some of the most powerful people in the world at that time were trying to figure out how to outflank the messiahs coming out of the countryside⁸ and hiring geomancers at the court.⁹ Everyone makes hay of the CIA Project Gateway documents - which, let's be honest here, are more of an offhanded literature review than a proper astral projection guide – but the powers that be tend to be curious about, well, various powers that they or their competitors might have at their disposal.

It's time to put a finer point on this. It is true that there are all sorts of ways to read the Sar Torah praxis as subverting social expectations, and our editors have dutifully noted the ways that this might be true. But the text itself is not shy about the fact that it's about to save you a boatload of hard work:

All your academies are like calves of the stall; you no longer learn with labor and not with toil, but rather by the means of this seal and by the invocation of the crown.

Set aside all of the markers that make this a text particularly relevant to the Jewish tradition. Typologically, what you have here are people who have not (or have not yet) distinguished themselves in a scholarly tradition who are able to invoke a more-knowledgeable power that bestows upon them instantly, and with a comparatively small amount of effort, a body of knowledge that is able to speak to not only arcane and occult subjects, but is the sort of thing that leads to actual social and political benefits in your day-to-day life.

I believe this is the point in the sitcom where the beloved protagonist gives a knowing look at the camera so that the captive audience can know they are also in on the joke.

III. Reasonable Objections

I can think of a handful of reasonable objections to this line of thought, though there may be more:

1) People are using AI for tasks that are mindless – up to and including some percentage of undergraduate writing assignments and corporate emails – so the stakes aren't nearly as high as trying to learn the secrets of the universe!

I would partially agree. To the first point, I'm willing to be cautiously optimistic that mass AI automation is not prima facie a bad thing. If fewer people are scanning lines of Excel for corporate due diligence thanks to a program doing it for them, that might be a positive result on net. For the people who say that undergrads are using Chat GPT to write things to which they didn't feel inspired to give much thought in the first place, I understand the concern educationally (and more on that in a moment), but there are at least time-tested solutions in the world of humanity like, say, the oral or handwritten exam – what innovations! Knowing the pretty grinding realities of undergraduate education (not least of which is pressures from outside the academy itself), I realize this may be verging into the realm of impossibility, but there's an idealized vision of the humanities where you present to your students an essay question that an LLM by definition could not answer. But now we are truly getting into fantasy.

2) The AI doesn't actually work as well as an otherworldly spell – haven't you seen the Twitter threads of it misfiring?

Also reasonable, though maybe this is just because the Sar Torah takes so much more work, or it has better, you know, "engineers." Either way, this seems like something to think about before outsourcing your own intellectual output to Claude as it currently exists. The question is whether in 24 months, the calculus would change if we start getting outputs which increasingly resemble known human speech.¹⁰ I'm not sure it would, given that humans keep stubbornly coming up with new and strange interpretations of things.

3) Why are you bringing up some spell which is beyond human understanding (or, for those so inclined, a bunch of nonsense) in comparison to a testable and auditable technology? AI is actually real/tangible/immediately accessible/etc.

This isn't an unfair point, though I think the baseline analogy still holds. Whether you believe in spiritual realms or not, in terms of the essential structure of an invocation like the Sar Torah, what you have is a relatively accessible user interface – if you check the citation above, it does spell out just about everything you have to do – with a highly-complex backend. The backend in this case is just a spiritual infrastructure where human understanding happens to be severely limited except for, maybe, those who are highly intelligent and esoterically inclined.¹¹

That being said, let's set aside for a moment the issue of whether or not the Enochian language of the angels is open source. The point I'm aiming at here is not really "about" generative AI in the first place, nor would I want to encourage the mystification of these tools by giving them a sort of divine status. The fundamental archetype is, to return to the primary source text, an individual lacking specialized knowledge of a certain field who draws upon the nearly instantaneous delivery of information from a source he does not fully understand. I would argue that in the case of the average user pulling up an AI tool to list diagnoses for medical symptoms, or to put together a quick essay on the Crusades, we are working with the same general interaction of forms despite the discrepancies in specifics.

This does also raise the issue of the source of information upon which the AI tools are themselves drawing to provide their tidy, antiseptic readouts. If we are believing that these tools are drawing upon an enormous body of human information – at least, that which has been fed into the learning models – and generating a sort of Ideal Type of Human (more than human?) Response, I think we are also veering more into mystification than people might like to admit.

IV. Hard to resist a shortcut

A young Chat GPT user might find a certain solace in the fact that she would hardly be the first person to journey down the path of, "hey, can't I just pull down a lot of this stuff from someone/something who has already done the work?" It is likely unsurprising that people whose religious practice involved reading an incredible amount of information had also wondered whether they could produce the correct incantation (sorry, prompt) which would result in an entity (sorry, generative AI) which would cut down on the misery of actually having to work through thousands of pages of interpretive gloss to get to the final conclusion which would result from all of that struggle. Though we have been looking at the Sar Torah spell, this is hardly limited to esoteric Judaism. I would bet that enterprising young sages-to-be in other religious traditions could find just what they are looking for when it comes to asking an entity (whose requisite demands you certainly understand fully, right?) to hand over the extracted .zip drive of data about all those tedious questions as to who we are, why we do what we do, on and on and on.

The reality is that becoming the sort of person that people in a religious tradition might consider "learned" is an enormous pain. It is, yes, hard to contradict certain instances where the gears of the great wheels of fate align, and there are individuals able to pierce the veil with apparent ease, but these would strike me as exceptions sharpening the rule. By and large, you are talking about years of your life spent mostly sitting in a dim room reading and memorizing a wide range of texts, while ideally forming the natural connections in your mind that allow you to cite many of them at will when a pertinent point is raised. That footnote above about how sometimes knowledge only gives you a part of herself while you devote your whole self to her turns out to have some legs. If, all things being equal, this could be avoided – why wouldn't you fast for 12 days, master your prompts, or do whatever else was required?

V. Might not be a bad idea to think about the personal consequences

I would feel confident saying that one question among many in this area is not a sort of grand meditation on the Meaning of Education, but the palpable, personal matter of what happens to your inner states when you start learning and internalizing all sorts of information.

On a more practical level: grinding through a bunch of little factoids is never going to be fun, but that doesn’t mean it has no purpose. If you want to be the sort of person to whom people look for mastery of the so-called American canon, you have to read all of that canon (probably some parts more than once) and be able to make all sorts of of-the-cuff observations about the ways the texts speak to each other – intentionally or unintentionally. As a party trick, you might recite a line from Moby Dick,¹² or Emily Dickinson, and then muse about the admitted shortcomings of the "canon" as a concept and the ways in which this might be rectified. But even that challenging of the canon requires knowledge of what the things in the supposed canon say, as well as the works which are outside of the canon but which have a valid argument for being included. It is an obvious but necessary point that all of those hours spent grappling over these things will have a deep effect on you as a person and your ability to develop these lines of thought.

Whether you are invoking the perfect knowledge of the sacred text (which, recall, brings with it all sorts of advantages in this world) or the perfect knowledge of the extent of human understanding which has been recorded in a form particular to your preferred AI client – once you've attained all of this unlimited understanding, you still end up being, well, the same you. In the more religio-mystical sense, maybe you could at least hope that the descent of inimitable inner perception would necessarily bring with it emotional and psychological changes, but that doesn't seem to me to be a guarantee.¹³ Sure, there are all sorts of advantages to be gained by having supernatural or cutting edge technical (which is to say, vaguely supernatural) abilities as you go about your day to day life. But one must certainly admit this raises all sorts of thorny questions about why, exactly, you wanted this in the first place, and whether these new attainments are going to give you what you want. What did you actually want? Do you know? If you get what you wanted without effort, is the result the same as if you had had to put in all the hours?

I realize this is getting into somewhat moralistic territory, but there's actually a pragmatic question about how humans are going to deal with something that seems to be approaching being able to imitate human communication. If these AI tools become as impactful and ubiquitous as some of their proponents imagine, they are likely to have a significant effect on the psyche of human beings as a whole, whether because of direct experience themselves, or the indirect experience of suddenly being surrounded by other people generating a lot more content through their use. More than 60 years ago, one could already find McLuhan observing that the–

penetrative powers of the new electric technology, as they invade every level of thought and action, have the power to impose their own assumptions.¹⁴

The observation that an ostensibly external-to-us technology can have an effect on our internal states is obvious, but remember also Mcluhan's point about how a new technology is, in some sense, an extension of human processes: the telephone an extension of the voice, automobiles an extension of running and walking, etc. But with every extension also comes a figurative amputation, as a previous method – which past method would itself have had a penetrative effect on the human psyche – is either reduced in significance or fades from society altogther. People still write things out by hand, from time to time, and there were surely people who found typewriters, or the word processor of a personal computer, alienating or unpleasant to use as their use ramped up. But the influence of the more recent developments have had a profound enough effect on human work, communication, and thought processes that it is difficult from our standpoint to imagine a world without them.

This will appear to be Ludditism, but it is a genuine question: by extending communication (thought?) out into Claude/ChatGPT/Gemini, etc., what exactly is being amputated? Is it always data entry, or does it sometimes encompass constructing an argument and developing an individualized voice in writing? It is possible that many might still find the cost-benefit calculation worthwhile, but this would seem to be something worth considering before asking your AI interlocutor to put together an essay for you.

1. Or even undergraduate emails. Though, to be fair, maybe pro forma email correspondence is the sort of thing where AI outsourcing might not be so unforgivable?

2. To both positive and negative, for that matter. When what is occult is defined as just sort of vaguely spooky and witchy, that ends up being a useful working definition for both people who find such apparent transgression empowering, as well as those who view it as wholesale demonic. I'm somewhat sceptical of both of these, really.

3. https://farsifal.ir is one, if you’d like to try.

4. Which, as we know, is never only scriptural. More on that momentarily.

5. The primary source references and block quotes throughout will all be drawn from: James R. Davila, ed., “Sar Torah: The Prince of the Torah,” in Hekhalot Literature in Translation: Major Texts of Merkavah Mysticism, Supplements to The Journal of Jewish Thought and Philosophy 20 (Leiden; Boston: Brill, 2013), 159-185.

6. العلم: شيء لا يعطيك بعضه حتى تعطيه كلك ، وأنت إذا أعطيته كلك ، من إعطائه لك البعض على خطر. (Really need to find a workaround on the Substack Arabic text editor for that لا.) Rendered in translation in the epigraph for Rosenthal’s Knowledge Triumphant as, “knowledge is something that will not give part of itself to you until you give your all to it, and when you give your all to it, then you stand a chance; but you cannot be sure that it will give you that part.”

7. Which, again, in most cases, would be a moot point based on the fact that all of the intense learning and spiritual practice you did in the lead-up would make you disinclined from a pile of money or mere political favor. But the authors of the incantation emphasize that anyone can break out the Sar Torah – even the craven!

8. Surely not the only iteration of the phenomenon of established political leaders trying to outflank and co-opt more radical fringe movements, but for a tidy pre-modern example: İlker Evrim Binbaş, “Timurid Experimentation with Eschatological Absolutism: Mīrzā Iskandar, Shāh Niʿmatullāh Walī, and Sayyid Sharīf Jurjānī in 815/1412,” in Unity in Diversity: Mysticism, Messianism and the Construction of Religious Authority in Islam, ed. by Orkhan Mir-Kasimov, vol. 105, Islamic History and Civilization: Studies and Texts (Leiden: Brill, 2014), 277–303.

9. Cornell Fleischer, “Shadows of Shadows: Prophecy in Politics in 1530s Istanbul,” International Journal of Turkish Studies 13, no. 1–2 (2007): 51–62.

10. From a bit of prompting, it seems notable how often these AI models finish the output with a hedging of their bets: "it is essential to remember that both x and y have points for and against them, and it is important to do further research on sensitive topics." But this is not a very sophisticated way of approaching such sensitive topics – people enjoy reading the articles/books/essays of certain writers because the writer actually make a point – which I wish I could say makes me more confident that AI models will not be hamfistedly used to "replace" human writing. The more worrying fact is that some number of people read canned AI outputs and think, "this could replace human writing!", which is more likely to lead to a contraction in opportunities for human creative ventures than the AI outputs themselves.

11. I'm not going to stretch this analogy to such limits as to start assigning engineers at Anthropic to various places in the angelic hierarchy. I would say, though, that the Sar Torah is described in the texts as having been bestowed upon humans by God (in large part as a response to human requests). When I see people discuss technology in terms of sort of inevitable march of forward progress and development (as a quick, popular press example: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/may/07/rise-of-artificial-intelligence-is-inevitable-but-should-not-be-feared-father-of-ai-says), I also start to wonder if we have moved beyond a materialist reading of things into the invocation of a higher power.

12. Insert your own preferred canonical American work here. I just put my finger on the scale here for texts which include a discussion of cetology.

13. On the contrary, it might be the case that to even achieve the results you had truly sought, you already had to have all sorts of mental and emotional states, which themselves would have required years (or decades) of contemplation, self-restraint – those qualities you usually don't find in people who want to recite a prayer as a shortcut to perfect knowledge. The unfortunate reality may well be that, per the bumper sticker, sometimes the journey is the destination.

14. Marshall McLuhan, “Effects of the Improvements of Communication Media,” The Journal of Economic History 20, no. 4 (December 1960), 570.