Demonology, LARP and Rituals. A study into if the world has become more disenchanted.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Has our world become more disenchanted, and overall become less weird, as the study and belief in magic becomes more uncommon, is it safe to assume that society as a whole has become more scientific and that the influences, ideas, and practises of magic are something of the past. This research would argue against this, suggesting instead that ideas about magic are still very present and influential in today’s society. Looking at popular cultural and the influences that ideas about magic have had on it. This paper looks into how the practice of demonology has been represented, with specific focus on live action role play (LARP) systems. Looking into how demonology has been represented in these systems, and how similar or different it is. If inspiration for elements of the LARP system have been taken from real elements of demonology. To conduct this research first a content analysis was done, using a variety of sources from both demonology and LARP systems. Such things as interviews, writings, and photos. Allowing the second part of this research, which was to conduct a ritual. As rituals are a key part in both demonology and LARP this felt like the best method to understand them by gaining firsthand experience through conducting a ritual using elements of both ideas. From this it has been seen that gaining firsthand experience through conducting a ritual allowed the expansion of knowledge gathered during the content analysis. The findings of which are that the world still is very much a weird and odd place, elements of magical beliefs and practises are still very much alive and well, and their influences can be seen upon our popular culture. The similarities between demonology and LARP systems demonstrates that magic is something that is very much alive in today’s society.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.051 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.009 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.008 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".