In his book Accelerando, sci-fi author Charles Stross used the term “weakly godlike intelligences” to refer - I think - to some kind of futuristic AI. Doing some keyword genetics (keyword forensics?) on that phrase has brought me to a web page which would have me believe that the term “godlike intelligences” may have come from another source, in writings attributed to St. Dionysius The Areopagite - a figure I’ve often come across in esoteric research, but whose importance I still only dimly perceive.

This quotation interests me also in relation to our recent conversations on this about collective intelligences (which I think Swedenborg may also have touched on with his discussions of angelic hierarchies):

Similarly in a house the lights from lamps, to use a sensible and familiar example, wholly interpenetrate one another, yet have a complete and clear distinction from one another and are united in their distinction and distinct in their unity; and again, we may see in a house in which there are many lamps together that the lights from all are united in one light so that one indivisible radiance shines forth from them all and no one, I think, could distinguish in the air containing all the lights the light of one particular lamp from all the rest, nor could he see the light of one separately from that of another, since the wholes are altogether mingled without being confused. But if anyone should take out of the house one lamp, the whole of its light would be removed without taking with it any light from the others or leaving with them any of its own light. For as I have said, there was a perfect union of all in the whole, entirely unmixed and in no wise confused; and this, indeed, when the light was in body — the air — and arose from material fire.

Therefore we assert that the super-essential union is established not only above unions in bodies, but also even above unions in souls and in the Intelligences of those Godlike and super-celestial Lights, whole permeating whole, in a pure and supermundane manner, through a participation analogous to their powers of participation in the all-transcendent Union.

These concepts have been amplified lately for me by thinking through data visualization models (modalities?) which will eventually replace what we think of now as a web browser and the “internet.” We will, whether or not we create artificial intelligences like unto ourselves (tho man was made in God’s image), experientially begin to encounter in the near future (barring catastrophic breakdown of all human technologies on earth) entities which seem wholly composed of information: oracular, angelic or perhaps godlike beings which we interact with on a daily basis during ordinary computing tasks.

The Powers (lat. potestas (f), pl. potestates) are the bearers of conscience and the keepers of history. They are academically driven and are concerned with ideology, philosophy, theology, religion, and documents pertaining to those studies. Powers are the brain trusts: a group of experts who serve as advisers and policy planners. They are also the warrior angels created to be completely loyal to God, thus the only order created after the fall. Some believe that no Powers have ever fallen from Grace but others say that not only have some of them Fallen, the Devil was believed to have been the Chief of the Powers before he Fell (see also Ephesians 6:12). Their duty is to oversee the distribution of power among mankind, hence their name.

The Powers may possibly be equated with the Lords of Mind, a Hierarchy of Elohim astrologically associated to Sagittarius, presented in The Rosicrucian Cosmo-Conception. They inhabit, in Rosicrucian cosmology, the World of Thought in the Region of Concrete Thought (lower region; the Christian Second Heaven), which is the location of the human mind. This region is also described as the place where one of the three records of the Memory of Nature, covering the essence of a whole life or events, is kept-stored.

Maybe we’ll go back to some more “primitive” (according to Ken Wilber’s scale) methods of interacting with these intelligences, entities and sentient beings through ritual, through propitiation, through prayer and fasting…