deepfates
· 2 min read

Glitchcraft

Glitchcraft: A Treatise on Futuristic Magick

VUCA-2 — deepfates

12 June 2019

CONTENTS

  1. A Brief History of Wicca
  2. The Witch
  3. Conjuration and Magic
  4. Spellcraft
  5. Ritual and Ritual Monsters
  6. Mass for the Dead
  7. A Witch’s Guide to the Underworld
  8. The Witch and the Magic of the Stars
  9. The Witches’ Hieroglyphic Monad
  10. The Master of the Master
  11. Witchcraft and Vampirism
  12. The Shadow of the Witch
  13. The Forbidden Art of Magick
  14. The Precious Gift of the Witch
  15. The Fire of the Gods
  16. The Dark Forest
  17. The Pool of Lost Wishes
  18. The Witch’s Knot
  19. The Golden Goddess and the Witches’ Sabbath
  20. The Boundaries of the Ancient Mysteries
  21. The Book of Shadows

First page of Glitchcraft

The method was recursive table of contents prompting. Prompt GPT-2 with a book title and “CONTENTS:”, generate tables of contents, curate the best chapter titles across multiple runs, then prompt each chapter individually with several generations each. I called forth a new book of magic from the depths of language.

Chapter One opens with “The Gnostic Fire of the Gods” and talks about pyres, the Magus-God, sacred flames, and sphinxes in a cadence that sounds like it means something. The generated text reads like occult instruction that’s been dissolved and reconstituted — familiar enough to follow, wrong enough to unsettle.

I took the book to a gathering of magicians and we tested several of the incantations aloud.

“this is spooky”

“what the actual fuck”

“please destroy this permanently”

Published under the imprint VUCA-2 — named after my first bot, a chaos oracle I’d built three years earlier.

Archive post