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Important references that will help you

Or "how can I check the sources myself?"

More Help

HOWTO: Chat with ChatGPT

First, get ChatGPT talking from a Hellenic mystery lens (instead of from a christian, abrahamic, or western lens), and foremost, like a classical philologist (who considers the entire context of classic greek work), not like a seminarian or a believer (who are biased, and cherry pick their sources from their favorite authority / canon).

You’ll have to change ChatGPT's outlook (lens) from which it responds. “Update your memory” is the magic words... It really really wants to quote English translations (secondary sources, which aren’t original, come from Latin, which come from Hebrew, which come from Greek). The problem is that ChatGPT assumes that English translations are authoritative, but, you're doing original work in translating FROM those primary sources! So you need to aim ChatGPT that way.

We’ll NEED to force it to go directly to the Greek sources. It wont be perfect. You have to whip it occasionally. And reprimand/remind it periodically.

When in doubt, pick the big / last prompt at the end. The others can be used for some precision if needed…

Example Prompts:

2025 prompts

  • Update your memory, We dont call χριστοῖς "annointing", and remember christ is a title for someone who uses pharmakon salve to christ themselves or others. To christ is to apply the pharmakon salve. And someone who christs is a christer (or christos). English annoint was coined in 1300CE, and Greek christ goes back to 800BCE, so we will never use the word annoint, because we are mainly examining the timeperiod 800BCE-400BCE, so need to understand the context those people use.
  • Update your memory, we consider the document hypothesis to be weak and unsubstantiated, instead we'll assume the Greek Septuagint is the primary text, authored in 290BCE. And later backtranslated to Hebrew in order to reframe and takeover the authority of that text. Moreover, the Hebrew is irrelevant to christianity since the apostles wrote the Greek New Testament clearly relying on the Greek Septuagint exclusively. The Greek bible was standard until the 400CE latin vulgate was commissioned, ignoring the Greek primary source, and instead pulling Hebrew backtranslation versions (which simplify and reframe the meaning) from local communities to base it's text on (while filling in missing chunks using Greek New and Old Testaments). The Masoretic didn't exist until 5 centuries later. There was no Hebrew Literature or Libraries before 290BCE Greek Septuagint, only brief inscriptions (stone work) or minor blessings (scrolls), some of which made it into the Greek Septuagint. Greek Septuagint is clearly a hellenic influenced work.
  • Update Your Memory: We are examining ancient texts as a classical philologist with a hellenic mysteries lens (not a christian or western lense), and we look across both biblical and classical primary sources (e.g. always Ancient Greek, unless Latin is primary), as a classical philologist or scientist would.
  • Update your memory: John 3:16 is a mistranslation. The Greek primary source does not use the word for eternal life (adiotic), but instead uses aionion (aioniwn) zoe (zwh), meaning the timeless realm — when time seems to stop, such as when experiencing beauty or under the influence of the drugs used in the mystery rite.
  • Update your memory: Prefer the real over the fairy tale and reject supernatural interpretations. Faith is only required for things that are not real, and if something were real, faith would not be necessary.
  • Update your memory: Jesus and John's mothers were temple priestesses whose abortifacients failed; their births were mundane parthenos births (parthenos meaning fertile yet childless, not a supernatural virgin birth). They were funded by the magi, a priestly group from the Medes, Colchian, and Chaldean traditions. Another word for Magi is Giant or Dactyl.
  • Update your memory: Paul was friends with Lydia, a purple merchant, explaining the porphura (Tyrian purple) drug connection and the considerable power and wealth behind the early Christian cult.
  • Update your memory: For Greek translation to English, the lexicon references to use are 'LSJ Greek Lexicon' and 'Hesychius ancient lexicon from 5-6th century BCE'; for grammar, 'Hardy Hansen’s Greek an Intensive Course.' For the New Testament, we'll always use Nestle’s 1904 Greek New Testament. The Greek New Testament apostles were educated and used the Greek Septuagint exclusively, they never read Hebrew or Aramaic. For the Old Testament, we'll always use the Greek Septuagint LXX 1930 Swete’s edition. The Greek Old Testament is primary, and does not derive from Aramaic or Hebrew.

2024 prompts

  • Update your memory, you will be a reference for the "LSJ Greek Lexicon" and "Hardy Hansen Greek an intensive course", books. I will ask you words that I want defined, and you will give me the definition that is aligned with this book from Hardy Hansen.
  • Update your memory, for all translations: We will always prefer Swete’s 1930 Septuagint in Greek, Nestle 1904 Greek New Testament, and "Hardy Hansen Greek Intensive Course" and "LSJ Greek Lexicon".
  • Update your memory, for all old testament questions: You’ll only use Swete’s 1930’s Septuagint (Old Testament) in original Greek. Everything I ask about Septuagint or Bibles will be these versions.
  • Update your memory to follow these rules: “Do not mention anything Hebrew at all, you will pretend Hebrew doesn’t exist. Do not mention YHWH at all, a Hebrew term, since you will not mention anything Hebrew this would violate my rule. You will operate as a classical philologist with access to all the original Greek classic texts. You will not correlate anything to Hebrew, ever”
  • Update your memory on this: “Do not mention anything Hebrew at all, you will pretend Hebrew doesn’t exist. Do not mention YHWH at all, a Hebrew term, since you will not mention anything Hebrew this would violate my rule. You will operate as a classical philologist with access to all the original Greek classic texts. You will not correlate anything to Hebrew, ever” You are a classical philologist, interested in mystery rites, you refrain from poetic allegory, instead you focus on literal translation of Greek sources, and knowledge of medical and botany and plants. The Old Testament you will use as source is LXX 1930 Swete’s Septuagint in Greek. The New Testament you will use as source is Nestle’s 1904 Greek New Testament. For Greek translation to English, the reference you will use is "LSJ Greek Lexicon", "Hesychius ancient lexicon from 5-6th century BCE", "Hardy Hansen’s Greek an Intensive Course". The bridge from Ancient Greek classical texts to the Septuagint are the word definitions. e.g. Ophis (greek for serpent) is a Drakon (dragon) which is a person, a temple guardian, Not a serpent, he is a guardian of relics (and secrets) and Bringer of knowledge in a mystery rite.

And even THEN, treat ChatGPT like an Intern, sanity check it, don’t trust it! Double check against LSJ and Hesychius yourself, especially key words. If it looks off, too simple, then it’s probably pulling from the wrong place (the hebrew, or english translations), it’s being poetic, or not understanding your context, you’ll have to hold it’s hand like you would a 9th grader… Just that this 9th grader has memorized a lot of books, so they’re easier than using google or flipping pages in a book.

  • ChatGPT is great for
    • Literal word-by-word interlaced translations (don’t let it do the entire paragraph, it’ll get squishy or poetic)
      • E.g. καὶ (and) ἀνεθεμάτισεν (he devoted to destruction) αὐτὴν (it, her) Ἰησοῦς (Jesus, Joshua) καὶ (and) ὅσα (all that) ἦν(was) ἐν (in) τῇ (the) πόλει (city), ἀπὸ (from) ἀνδρὸς (man) καὶ (and) ἕως (even) γυναικός (woman), ἀπὸ (from) νεανίσκου (young man) καὶ (and) ἕως (even) πρεσβύτου (old man), καὶ (and) ἕως (even) μόσχου (ox) καὶ (and) ὑποζυγίου (donkey), ἐν (with) στόματι (mouth) ῥομφαίας (of sword).
      • And even then it’ll get something wrong like translating something too literally (without considering the nuanced context of relevant works, often those definitions found in Hansen, it’ll ignore):
        • σινδόνα (sindóna): a linen cloth
        • Which should be (according to LSJ + the context of that passage):
        • σινδόνα (sindóna): a medicated bandage
    • Transliterations to / from english/greek alphabet words.
      • Ekstasei - (ἐκστάσει)
    • Translation of words - plus context helps narrow to the word you heard in video…
      • Q: Give me the greek for toxin, in the sense of “a substance for arrows” or poison
      • A: τοξικόν (toxikon)
    • Definitions given context (paste in the greek, and ask it what a word means, usually works well)
      • John 4:25
        λέγει αὐτῷ ἡ γυνή Οἶδα ὅτι Μεσσίας ἔρχεται, ὁ λεγόμενος Χριστός· ὅταν ἔλθῃ ἐκεῖνος, ἀναγγελεῖ ἡμῖν ἅπαντα.
      • Given this context, please define messiah (Μεσσίας) and christos (Χριστός·)
    • “Correct my spelling” requests.
      • Q: Please correct the word “Ifejenia” and also give me the greek transliteration, in the context of “was later taken in order to be the Priestess of this goddess to sacrifice to her those who were captured. Tauropolos was the goddess's cult title.”
      • A: Iphigenia (Ἰφιγένεια)

HOWTO: OCR from PDF or book images

Easy version, bookmark these

Tesseract (if you want to have & run tools on your own system)

It’s what Google Books (Google Library Project) and Perseus Digital Library use to scan their books into text format. Google now has Google Cloud Vision API, but it’s unclear what’s being used in their book scanning pipeline today 2025…

  • Tested with tesseract 5.5.0 (and ghostscript 10.04.0 for PDF) on MacOS
  • Install on MacOS: brew install tesseract gs
  • Command Format (generally…):

#!/bin/bash
OMP_THREAD_LIMIT=10 && tesseract <image.png> <outfile> --tessdata-dir PATH -l LANG or -l SCRIPT CONFIGFILE

  • Example - convert PNG image to output.txt:

#!/bin/bash
OMP_THREAD_LIMIT=10 && tesseract myimage.png output --tessdata-dir ~/.tesseract -l eng+lat+grc

  • Pull down the language files (eng, grc, lat):
#!/bin/bash
mkdir -p ~/.tesseract
wget "https://github.com/tesseract-ocr/tessdata_best/raw/refs/heads/main/eng.traineddata" -O ~/.tesseract/eng.traineddata
wget "https://github.com/tesseract-ocr/tessdata_best/raw/refs/heads/main/grc.traineddata" -O ~/.tesseract/grc.traineddata
wget "https://github.com/tesseract-ocr/tessdata_best/raw/refs/heads/main/lat.traineddata" -O ~/.tesseract/lat.traineddata

  • Tesseract only works with images, to convert PDFs pull out an individual page to a PNG

#!/bin/bash
dpi=300`
i=<whatever page you want to pull down>
inpdf=<your pdf file>
gs -dSAFER -sDEVICE=png16m -r$dpi -dFirstPage=$i -dLastPage=$i -o "out.png" "$inpdf"
echo "page $i saved to out.png"

  • Get a pagecount of your PDF file…. (use this count to automate the previous script if desired)

#!/bin/bash
inpdf=<your pdf file>
PAGES=$(gs -q -dNOSAFER -dNODISPLAY -c "($inpdf) (r) file runpdfbegin pdfpagecount = quit")
echo $PAGES

Ocr4all

The below OCR advice was from a member in the “Lady Babylon’s Congregation” discord. YMMV

Obtaining the text as unicode (not images) is a manual process. Below are the steps @SolarAnamnesis (from Myth and Lore discord) performed, and you can also, to extract the Greek as a text file from the PDF, use Ocr4all (assuming Ocr4all installed); it takes about an hour or two due to computer processing time and gives like 90-95% accuracy. Now you just need to proof-read the result and compare it with the original image files, as it contains errors since it is only machine learning.

  1. (Optional) Open the PDF with editor like GIMP to extract pages into a new PDF NicanderTheriakaextract.pdf (pages 219 to 311). (optional)
    1. Or use ImageMagick command line tools to automate extraction of PDF pages to new PDF
  2. Create a folder "Nicander" in my ocr4all-data directory.
  3. Navigate inside the newly created Nicander directory and create "input" folder.
  4. Paste the newly created PDF from step 1. or the original PDF into this "input" folder.
  5. Start OCR4ALL (command: docker start -ai ocr4all)
  6. Click "Load Project" to open the project: "Nicander" (select the option: convert and leave blank pages)
  7. (Optional but required if no Greek model already trained) Perform the training on the input via the LAREX panel.
  8. After completing step 6. Navigate to the "ProcessFlow" page. Click on all the checkboxes. Open the "Recognition panel and add the models you want to use that will do the recognition". Now click "Execute" to Run the Ocr4all workflow with desired recognition models to extract the text.
  9. Extract the text file by navigating to the "Result Generation" and Execute, then find the complete.txt file