A little over a year ago, originally due to an interest in the deeper history of #compilers, I started diving deep into the #Talmud, studying #Aramaic, #gematria, and doing #DafYomi etc in what has become my deepest engagement with the rabbinic corpus yet -- the Talmud isn't a compiler but rather an extensible interpreter, compiled by compilers over the course of many centuries (build times have gotten significantly faster, my G-d), with novel extensions in the form of rabbinic commentary, glossia and the like being added nearly every century by publishers competing to compile the most elegant editions (Vilna Shaws being paradigmatic). And through studying Talmud and the greater body of rabbinic literature I've found myself encountering #magic/sorcery occasionally, and I just gotta say -- the #SICP metaphor of programming as pure magic, with the #hacker as a sorcerer, goes insanely deep when you start to dig into it.
A good deal of what constituted sorcery in ancient and medieval times consisted of elaborating early encryption methods. Even algorists, early computers who would sit at market stalls calculating costs, were portrayed as ascetics verging on the edge of the occult in most accounts and depictions of them. Gematria -- practices of elaborating symbolism through the association of values with numbers -- is fundamental to magic (as well as anti-magic mystical philosophical schools like rabbinic Judaism and most schools of Islam); it was one of the elementary tools of the trade.
#Programming is in many ways the representations of knowledge through the association of values with numbers, seeking to do so in as few steps as necessary, which as we know involves reducing some rich system of concepts to a more elementary representation, that is then translated into machine behaviour, replacing concepts with instructions, which may be thought of as a form of slight-of-hand.
For those with the same extremely niche set of interests (half my mutuals): gematria is like machine code, the Mishnah is like an assembler, the Gemara is like L1, the Rashi is like L2, and so on, with #kabbalah being for the talmud what graph theory is to register allocation. And Sefer Toyrah HaKoydesh is the reality their seeking to represent, an thus elaborating in the process.
The same could be elaborated together for Islam and the much larger variety of compilations of hadith literature, as well as most schools of Daoism -- all of which are ever-developing philosophical-spiritual traditions of compiled literature and subsequent non-apophantic doctrines of mystical jurisprudence. Vodun should also qualify although much of their ancient compilations of text were ravaged by colonialism and have yet to be re-assembled due to much of them being held in European archives far-and-away from the 40 million+ vodun practitioners around the world. I'm sure the same can be said for countless other elaborations of "the Way" that have been suppressed and destroyed.
@SmallOther fwiw, I think the easiest way to grasp the difference between the transcendental and transcendence is that a transcendental is an "object" that indexes a set of values in a hierarchy of concept-formation (similar to a subobject classifier in a topos), while transcendence is the movement from one level of a transcendental evaluation to another.
I really love that definition of transcendental! I've been struggling relating Kant's transcendental to a differential ontology and that's hecking helpful because this is in my 😎 category 😎.
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