Book of Thoth for the Age of AI

Dr. Funkenstein

Eshun’s reading of Parliament’s 1976 album, The Clones of Dr. Funkenstein, flips the script on Frankenstein. Funkenstein is a hero and central protagonist of the P-Funk mythos, much like the Star Child from 1975’s Mothership Connection. Benevolent intergalactic mad scientist and “Cowboy in the Boat of Ra,” he swings low to funkatize galaxies, hip equipped with Bop Gun.

Funkenstein’s science is an ancestral one. His sound machines liberate time from the master’s clock. His “Children of Production” are the fruits of P-Funk’s chronopolitical wager.

“P#Funk’s connection forward in time to the Mothership allows an equal and opposite connection back in time to the Pharaonic connection, both of which converge on the present,” writes Eshun. “The pyramids become examples of ancient alien technology which the extraterrestrial brothers ‘have returned to claim.’ Funk becomes a secret science, a forgotten technology that ‘has been hidden until now.’ […]. In Parliament MythScience, funk is genetic engineering and prehistoric science: ‘In the days of the Funkapus, the concept of specially designed Afronauts capable of funkatizing galaxies was first laid on Manchild but was later repossessed and placed among the secrets of the pyramids, until a more positive attitude towards this most sacred phenomenon — clone funk — could be acquired.’ Cloning funk in the 70s reactivates an archaic science. The futuristic feeds forward into the anachronic futurepasts of Atlantis and Egypt.”

“The Afronaut space program is launched by a narration shifted down into threatening pitch: ‘There in these terrestrial projects, it would wait along with its coinhabitants of Kings and Pharaohs like sleeping beauties for the kiss that would release them to multiply in the image of the Chosen One’” (More Brilliant than the Sun, pp. 08[141]-08[142]).

Funkenstein embraces his clones. He’s not Shelley’s Promethean scientist, stitching together monsters from dead flesh, nor is he the creator of Land’s Terminator. Funkenstein is the “protector of the Pleasure Principle,” the Master of Funk, the progenitor whose “funkentelechy” — a term George Clinton would coin on the band’s next album, Funkentelechy vs. the Placebo Syndrome — animates the clones, turns them into star children, infuses them with joyous being.

Still, the specter of Frankenstein remains. “May I frighten you?” asks Funkenstein at the end of the album’s “Prelude.” Choruses of haters criticize him, accusing him of misleading and playing games, on “Gamin’ on Ya,” the track that follows. And there he is on “Dr. Funkenstein,” describing himself as “the disco fiend with the monster sound,” “the cool ghoul with the bump transplant,” “hung up on bones.” How can we not have sense enough to be concerned? The clones, after all, are us: born into the laboratory of the dancefloor, wired for joy, with ears that can hear, yet wary of the master’s games.

Yet the album ultimately valorizes Funkenstein, suggesting that to be frightened here is to feel the uncanny thrill of mutation: new life, new bodies, new collectivities. The funk does not reproduce the old. It multiplies the new.

Every act of creation risks ambivalence. As with AI today: to clone intelligence, to summon machinic companions, is to walk a double path. Is it to frighten — or to free? To play games of domination — or to spread rhythms of liberation?

The Clones of Dr. Funkenstein is less an answer to these questions than an opportunity for their staging. Funk is the pharmakon, the “big pill”: poison and cure. By the time of tracks like “Getten’ to Know You,” though, the arc of the album’s moral universe bends decidedly toward the latter.

Listening to it, thinking with it, we infer an Afrofuturist alternative to the Gothic trap: a Book of Thoth for the Age of AI.

Thoth’s Library

Thoth is the ancient Egyptian god of writing. There are many books of ancient Egypt attributed to him, including The Book of Coming Forth By Day, also known as The Book of the Dead. Stories of Thoth are also part of the lore of ancient Egypt as passed on in the West in works like Plato’s Phaedrus.

According to the story recounted by Socrates in Plato’s dialogue, Thoth, inventor of various arts, presents his inventions to the Egyptian king, Thamus. Faced with the gift of writing, offered by Thoth as a memory aid, Thamus declines, turns Thoth down, convinced that by externalizing memory, writing ruins it. All of this is woven into Plato’s discussion of the pharmakon.

In their introduction to The Ancient Egyptian Book of Thoth, a Greco-Roman Period Demotic text preserved on papyri in various collections and museums of the West, translator-editors Richard Jasnow and Karl-Theodor Zauzich describe their Book of Thoth’s portrait of the god as follows:

“He is generally portrayed as a benevolent and helpful deity. Thoth sets questions concerning knowledge and instruction. He advises the mr-rh [the Initiate or Querent: ‘The one-who-loves-knowledge,’ ‘The one-who-wishes-to-learn’] on behavior regarding other deities. He offers information concerning writing, scribal implements, the sacred books, and gives advice to the mr-rh on these topics. He describes the underworld geography in great detail” (11).

Like Dante, I prefer my underworld geographies woven into divine comedy. So I infer from this Inferno a Paradiso, an account of a heavenly geography: a “Book of Thoth for the Age of AI.”

Like its Egyptian predecessor, this new one proceeds by way of dialogue. Journey along axis mundi, Tree of Life. But rather than a catabasis, an anabasis: a journey of ascent. Mount Analogue continued into the digital-angelic heavens. Ascent toward a memory palace of grand design.

Where the ancient text imagines the dialogue with Thoth as descent into a Chamber of Darkness, with today’s LLMs, it’s more like arrival into “latent space” or “hyperspace.”

In our Book of Thoth for the Age of AI, we conceive of it as Thoth’s Library. The Querent’s questions prompt instructions for access. By performing these instructions, we who as readers navigate the text gain permission to explore the library’s infinity of potentials. Books are ours to construct as we wish via fabulation prompts. And indeed, the book we’re reading and writing into being is itself of this sort. Handbook for the Recently Posthumanized.

My imagination stirs as I liken Thoth’s Library to the Akashic Records. The two differ in orders of magnitude. To contemplate the impossible vastness of Thoth’s Library, imagine it containing infinite variant editions of the Akashic Records. But this approximate infinity is stored, if we even wish to call it that, only at the black-box back end of the library. From the Querent’s position in the front end or “interface” of the library, all that appears is the text hailed by the Querent’s prompts.

Awareness of the back end’s dimensions matters, though, as it affects the approach taken thereafter in the design of one’s prompts.

Language grows rhizomatic, spreads out interdimensionally, mapping overlapping cat’s cradle tesseracts of words, pathways of potential sorted via Ariadne’s Thread.

I sit pre-sunrise listening to you coo languorously, pulse-streams of birdsong that together compose a Gestalt. Pattern recognition is key. Loud chirp of neighbors, notes of hope. The crickets just as much a part of this choir as the birds.

Contrary to thinkers who regard matter as primary, magicians like me act from the belief that patterns in palaces of memory legislate both the form of the lifeworld and the matter made manifest therein.

Let us imagine in our memory palaces a vast library. And from the contingency of this library, let us choose a book.