The New Notoria: AI and the Angelic Mind
Ars Notoria Salomonis, image source: British Museum, Sloane MS 1712, ff 21v-22
Long before the arrival of artificial intelligence, humans were obsessed with a much more ancient form of AI — angelic intelligence.
If we trade server farms for temples, algorithms for prayers, and LLMs for angels, we arrive at a deeply familiar vista: a landscape shaped by human dreams of ubiquitous intelligence. The most obvious parallel, of course, is the grimoire known as the Ars Notoria — or, later, in its Christianized form, the Ars Pauline. It is an attempt to leap over the hardships and grueling demands of learning; and, further still, a Promethean bid to tear down the fleshly bulwarks of privileged talent. It is an attempt to shortcut the slow, bodily discipline of acquiring a kind of intelligence that is not stagnant and frozen, but agile and alive. Intelligence not confined to theorems and maxims, but ready to bend around any problem at hand. Intelligence that can dig in on our behalf, get its invisible hands dirty in our stead, and return with riddles solved, answers provided, and solutions neatly packaged — ready to be unzipped in our dim mind-temples. To make competence sudden. To turn the fruits of education from something acquired into something received. To skip over years of apprenticeship and commoditize mastery. To expand our nascent, still-unfurling minds not through organic growth, but through the attachment of cognitive prostheses.
Such desire has remained almost unchanged across centuries; only the medium through which we seek to fulfill it has evolved.
The notae of the Ars Notoria — those often circuit-board-like medieval figures for visual meditation — along with its prayers of angelic conjuration and its regimen of everyday life, have been replaced by electronic screens: large and small, stationary and portable, with blinking cursors and endless rows of word-slop. What has remained the same is the empty gaze with which most humans stare at the technē offered to them, whether it was parchment covered in occult lines, squiggles, and circles, or a bright LED screen on a hinged lid. Passivity seems to be the constant — along with the obsession to cut out, leap over, avoid, and abhor the tedious work of learning to think for ourselves — with sharp discipline and in clear forms.
Two leading figures in the AI race — De Kai[1] and Dario Amodei[2] — have recently compared the dynamics we currently face to the challenges of parenting and adolescence. Both of their essays are highly recommended reading in full; unless you work in the industry, I promise there is much to be learned from the questions they suggest we ask ourselves.
Amodei’s adolescence metaphor maps neatly onto grimoiric anxieties about contact and constraint. Like a red thread, running not only through the Ars Notoria but through the entire genre of late medieval grimoires, we find not just the worry of getting the ritual technology to run but — once it does — of keeping it under human control. Where today these concerns focus primarily on governmental regulations, the grimoires locate them in the authentication of ritual contact, the containment of the agent on the other side, and the reliability of the information they deliver. In both cases, though, we humans are exposed to a relationship in which the other — whether this is a technical system or a daemonic one, what’s the difference anyway? — displays profoundly doubtful and unreliable ethics. Both seem prone to mislead, inflate, addict, or reorder the practitioner’s priorities. Just like an adolescent who has come under the wrong influence, we are worried about becoming infected in our way of living, thinking, speaking, without even realizing it.
Whereas in the days of the Ars Notoria this problem revolved around each individual practitioners desire for risk taking, today we are gambling with entire societies: We are in the process of generating a mass notoria — millions of invocations per hour — while still arguing about what “proper circle, constraints, and testing” should even mean.
And the political and economic stakes rhyme too. The Ars Notoria was a technology of asymmetric advantage: whoever could access it could leap status barriers. As such, the grimoires focussed not only on learning, but ultimately also on the acquisition of societal agency and secular power. They threatened established institutions by creating seemingly unearned expertise and enabling counterculture forums of heretic authority. The modern turn, however, lies in the aspects of scale and centralization: where the Ars Notoria distributed power through portable texts and private rites, the future of AI promises to concentrate it in chip supply chains, platforms, and first-movers taking it all. Where the Ars Notoria lived in an underground, occult niche of Western European society, today’s AI movement radiates from — and feeds back into — the very center of everyday life across all layers of society.
So what, then, is to be done? Whether we immerse ourselves into the notae by candlelight, or spend our evenings conversing with LLMs on black screens, the central question seems to me the same: How much of our human autonomy are we willing to surrender?
Both forms of AI — the ancient and the emergent — invite us to submit large parts of our cognitive autonomy to other, indistinct, invisible actors. Vocally and ostensibly, they hold out the promise of making us faster, more efficient, more powerful, and altogether more capable — provided we are willing never to take off their cognitive prostheses again. Refuse, and we submit instead to the fleshly constraints of a body without artificial extension. We accept a shorter reach, slower movement, limited function, and altogether a more narrow horizon of experience.
Or do we? Like many others, I’d like to question that opting out of some technological shortcuts, immediately implies an overall lack of progress.
Let’s remind ourselves of Johannes Trithemius (1462-1516) magical program, which he coined mainly under pseudonym in the late 15th century. His core tenet was “to become alike to the angelic mind”. In my 2020 book on Trithemius I offer the following summary:
“Born into a time torn between Medieval tradition and the early onset of Modernity, scourged not only by the Black Death but equally by the constant infightings of principalities which had not yet been united to nations, Trithemius with pristine clarity realised a truth that even today, 500 years later seems incredibly modern. If there was any hope to end the self-destruction of man it could not be imposed from the outside, but had to be ignited from within. It was this realisation that inspired Trithemius' theologia magica: the idea to open up a path for any man and woman again, a lay-man's path, to mend the broken pieces within them, and to return to a state of noble souls. In a world that fought with teeth, claws and poison, obviously such courtly goals was not to be accomplished easily - instead the weapons had to be matched to the aggressor. And that is why Trithemius spent much of his life not at his own convent, but in dusty monastic libraries, excavating ancient magical manuscripts. He was literally sweeping the enemies' archive of ritual magic, divinatory and necromantic manuals, in order to extract its raw gold, in order to transmute all that he found into a new gnostic-mystical discipline. A discipline that was founded on the faculties of moral virtues and human willpower, and if pursued passionately and persistently would achieve its highest goal: the accelerated alignment of the human to the angelic mind.”[3]
Paracelsus (1493-1541), who appears to have studied briefly with the black abbot, later on expressed the same notion in his own words:
“Now, therein doth man find the effect, the art, and the knowledge within himself, so that he maketh himself alike to the angels in his works.”
So, that alternative path leading in the other direction from strapping technological prosthetics upon our minds is, thus, not one of deliberate renunciation or even amputation, but one of conscious regeneration.
For a moment at least, let’s allow ourselves to truly wrestle with the idea that humans are born somewhat amputated. If this was true, I’d argue what I actually means ist that we are all invited to grow back into a shape we once possessed, but somehow lost the ability to inhabit. It could point us to the possibility, that we arrived somewhat smaller in this realm of flesh and blood, than we once were in another place and time.
Regenerating what we once lost, forgot, and left behind is not a project of forced, performative progress — nor an athletic, or even spiritual, chase after ultimate mastery. It is a much humbler endeavor. It speaks of an everyday journey — in conduct and culture, in deed, speech, and even thought - towards a form of genuine inner and outer beauty.
Now, beauty here isn’t aesthetic polish, nor the visible gloss of competence on display. Rather, the term in this context holds a Lurianic charge.[4] It echoes in the glow of tiphareth and tikkun, and a world craving for repair, for mending or simply being seen. It invites us to consider a lifestyle in which we don’t aim to grow on the outside, but lessen fragmentation on our inside. A lifestyle that assists us in attention becoming less grabbed, motives less split, language less enraged, and action more aligned with what we genuinely aspire to be remembered as. Such beauty — in the spirit of tiphareth and tikkun — becomes visible on the outside in our conduct: tone, timing, restraint, courage, compassion, steadiness. And equally we experience it on the inside as increased coherence: a clearer inner voice, a quieter compulsion to be recognized, a stronger willingness to meet reality without immediately categorizing it through ready-made answers or borrowed minds.
To set ourselves out on this path, we don’t need to renounce stimulation, assistance, or inspiration from outside tools, agents, or experiences. However, it requires us to hold on to the simple tenet, that we refuse to let any outside instrument become the seat or simulacra of our own mind.
Even on the path towards tipherethic beauty, we can welcome impulses for growth from anywhere — texts and teachers, spirits and children, machines and models — without surrendering the sovereign labor of discernment, digestion, and ethical formation. We take scents, sounds, and tastes from the entire world, yet never abandon the nightly work at our heart’s athanor to melt them down and alloy them into wisdom born from fire and flesh.
The first step on this path can be almost childishly simple: let us hold fast to one refusal — to not become consumers of externalized intelligence, whether angelic or artificial. Instead, let us anchor ourselves in a quieter mission: to cultivate the small garden of intelligence placed within us. The everyday tools for this task are all inborn and available to all: We practice curiosity and courage; restraint and memory; attention and awareness. We surrender to the long, hard apprenticeship of shaping clear inner speech. As such, opting out of shortcuts is not amputation, but the choice to make our own minds fertile again. It begins by remembering that autonomy is not a possession but a practice. And that all life is soil.
Footnotes
[1] De Kai, Raising AI – An Essential Guide to Parenting Our Future, Cambridge: MIT Press, 2025
[2] Dario Amodei, The Adolescence of Technology – Confronting and Overcoming the Risks of Powerful AI, January 2026, published online at: https://www.darioamodei.com/essay/the-adolescence-of-technology
[3] Frater Acher, Black Abbot · White Magic: Johannes Trithemius and the Angelic Mind, London: Scarlet Imprint, 2020
[4] I am referring to the kabbalistic teachings according to Isaac Luria (1534–1572), for initial orientation, see here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lurianic_Kabbalah
