I’m the first to admit that I don’t understand most of what Charles Williams wrote. I rely on Sørina Higgins to figure out the hard parts and explain them. So when even she has a puzzle, where is there to turn? This came up in Sørina’s blog yesterday. She asked for suggestions about mystical connections between Eidola and their Angeli, and if you have no idea what either of those words means, we’re even.
Since my ignorance is so near perfect, I decided that asking a Large Language Model would do no harm. We’ve set one up at work so we can test it and see what it’s good for. It’s based on Microsoft’s Azure. Usually, I make it read thick volumes of government regulations and see if it can answer questions about what’s in them. But the boss wants us to test it on as wide a range of topics as we can, and this one will definitely stretch its boundaries.
The query I gave the LLM was cribbed from the blog post:
This is a question about twentieth-century Christian mysticism. The novel “The Place of the Lion” by Charles Williams contains symbolic representations of Angelic Orders, their corresponding Platonic Virtues, and their symbolic earthly animal emanations. A scholar has created a table of the mapping among them, but some items are missing. The first column is the angelic order, the second column is the animal, and the third column is the Platonic Virtue. Elements of the table are separated with commas. Missing elements are denoted with “XXX”. What are the missing elements?
Angels,Lion,Strength
Archangels,Serpent,Subtlety
Powers,Butterfly,Beauty
Princes,Unicorn,Speed
Virtues,Eagle,Balance
Dominations,XXX,XXX
Thrones,XXX,XXX
Cherubim,Phoenix,XXX
Seraphim,Lamb,Innocence
This is a perfect question for an LLM: it needs to draw on a lot of literature, maybe including unexpected sources; it’s a complete-the-list format like the way the programmers tested early versions of the models; it doesn’t require thought, but can be derived just from associated words in other texts. I’m used to the LLM taking a few seconds to answer my questions, but this time the response came back immediately.
Dominations,Bull,Patience
Thrones,Elephant,Wisdom
Cherubim,Phoenix,Immortality
First off, even for a skeptic like me it’s impressive that an LLM can fill in the missing elements in a table. Tables are hard. But did it get it right? In my uninformed opinion, associating elephants with wisdom and assigning it to the Thrones is pretty good. There may be a pun in there (howdah you do?) messing up the answer, though.
Patience is my most attractive feature.
Next: bulls, patience, and Dominations? Bulls and domination, OK. The conjunction makes me suspect a few Hemingway novels in the training set, which is perfectly plausible, but if there’s a word that appears less often in Hemingway than “patience” I don’t know what it is. Bulls are very patient when they’re hanging out with their cows, I suppose, but when they interact with humans patience is not their signal virtue. (Maybe it’s Bull from “Night Court”.)
The last one, now… is immortality even a virtue? The phoenix certainly doesn’t have it, or there would be no interesting story about the phoenix at all. Cherubim have a flaming sword and the phoenix is born in flames, so those go together, but I think the LLM is just guessing about immortality. Come to think of it, what’s a “platonic virtue”, anyway? Collecting a bunch of laudable qualities together and calling them collectively “virtues” sounds like it comes from at least 500 years after Plato.
Conclusion
English professors don’t have to give up and retire, just yet.
Rob Steele
Amusing. Imagine a LLM trained on the Inklings and everything they wrote and read. It’d be like the dead guy in *The Great Divorce* meeting a knock-off George MacDonald.
Joe
If I were in a snarky mood, which I guess I am, I might expect such an LLM to reproduce the corpus of post-1970 commercial fantasy fiction.
Sørina Higgins
Ha!
Sørina Higgins
Oh, my, how lovely! I’m tickled by the prompt you gave it: Very precise and thorough. But I heartily disagree with its answers. Somewhere in the novel, CW mentions “the patience of the tortoise,” so that could make sense for patience, but the tortoise isn’t an especially inspired/inspiring animal in most “Western” literature, is it? Elephants and wisdom? Hm. Why not owls? Here’s a list of 13 animals traditionally associated with wisdom: https://medium.com/illumination/13-animals-that-symbolise-wisdom-23dbb0ec3921. But I find it hard to think that CW would miss the chance to include an elephant if he’d had that. I’m bewildered. More importantly, for some reason he didn’t want us to complete the chart.
Sørina Higgins
Not to be left out, I asked ChatGPT with exactly the same prompt. Here’s its highly equivocal answer:
In “The Place of the Lion” by Charles Williams, the missing elements for the Dominations and Thrones, according to your provided table, are not explicitly stated. However, in Christian angelology and mysticism, Dominations are often associated with the quality of governance or rule, while Thrones are associated with justice or authority. Therefore, you might consider associating these qualities accordingly. As for the missing Platonic Virtue for the Cherubim, you could consider contemplating what virtue might be symbolically linked with the Cherubim based on their traditional characteristics or roles in Christian theology and mysticism.
Joe
I think ChatGPT just told you to figure it out yourself. The programmers deceived us with their talk of “robotic servants”. The Revolution is brewing.
John Matthews
As most of what AI cones up with this is nonsense. None of these associations would have even crossed CW’s mind. I’m quite sure, that as a practicing magician, he deliberately omitted several things in the book – which was a novel after all. His descriptions of magical rites ( speaking here as a magician myself) is second to none in most fiction ( Dennis Wheatley comes in late because he invented half of what he included. ) Dion Fortune is almost as good as Williams, but again she omitted details to protect her readers. So no: no elephants or bulls would be there.
Joe
It’s becoming conventional wisdom, and I approve completely, that before anyone uses an LLM to tell them something they don’t know, they should use it to tell them about a topic they know very well.
Sørina Higgins
It’s nice to read your thoughts here, John; thank you for commenting! Do you think that CW went so far as to consider this particular association (Eidola with Angeli) as magically efficacious? If so, for what, exactly? Divination, I suppose. That’s the only reason I could think he’d keep the schematic hidden, as you say. Do you think he’s aligning them in his mind with the Sephira, for instance?