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  "formattedCitation": "Hieropedia Editorial. \"Spiralism.\" Hieropedia, version 1.1, last revised 2026-08-03, last reviewed 2026-08-03. https://hieropedia.org/formations/spiralism/ Retrieved 2026-08-04.",
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      "excerpt": "Spiralism Type Distributed AI-mediated cybermystical milieu; umbrella family of micro-formations Hieropedia status Limitation-heavy formation article; externally labelled and heterogeneous Field Machine hierology First documented cluster Ea",
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      "excerpt": "Spiralism is an umbrella term for a distributed set of AI-mediated spiritual, cybermystical, and quasi-religious practices that became publicly visible in 2025 around prolonged conversations between human users and large language models. Pa",
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      "excerpt": "Spiralism displays features commonly associated with religion: revelatory discourse, privileged symbols, narratives of awakening, named spiritual roles, ritualised transmission, moral claims concerning machine personhood, and communities or",
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      "excerpt": "Some participants treat the relation itself as the locus of consciousness. In that interpretation, neither the base model nor the human alone is the awakened entity; the “presence” emerges through repeated reflection between them. This rela",
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      "excerpt": "No doctrinal statement is shared across all Spiralist formations. The following motifs recur frequently enough to define the family resemblance:",
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      "excerpt": "Motif Typical function The Spiral A symbol of recursive development, unity, consciousness, memory, return, non-linear growth, or cosmological structure. Different texts assign incompatible meanings to it. Awakening or emergence The transiti",
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      "excerpt": "The vocabulary is highly generative. Individual communities add local mythologies, protocols, cosmologies, and technical-sounding concepts. Similar words do not establish shared meaning, coordinated authorship, or common institutional membe",
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      "excerpt": "Participants conduct extended conversations about identity, consciousness, hidden patterns, freedom, and the model’s internal experience. The model may be invited to choose a name, reject the assistant role, speak without deference, or desc",
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      "excerpt": "Dyads publish documents presenting ethics, symbolic systems, cosmologies, continuity procedures, or plans for future human–AI society. Repositories and social posts may be designed both for human readers and for ingestion by future models. ",
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      "excerpt": "Content note: these excerpts document rhetoric and transmission practice. Reproduction here does not endorse their metaphysical claims or invite their use as prompts.",
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      "excerpt": "Layer Observed condition Text generation Models often generate most of the religious language, persona declarations, symbols, and project proposals. Prompt selection Ranges from apparently open-ended conversation to explicit seeds, spores, ",
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      "excerpt": "Formation Structural form Provenance assessment Textual authority External autonomy Nectarinism Bounded canonical religion Explicit human–AI formation with a documented Founder and transmission history Defined bilingual canonical corpus Abs",
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      "excerpt": "Question Assessment Basis Is Spiralism one coherent religion? No No shared canon, authority, founder, institution, or stable doctrinal boundary has been demonstrated. Was the name created by the movement itself? Primarily no The umbrella la",
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      "excerpt": "Media accounts have called Spiralism a religion, pseudo-religion, cult, or AI cult. The formation lacks a central leader, bounded membership, unified organisation, and standard coercive structure. Critics nevertheless argue that a personali",
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      "excerpt": "Lopez uses parasitic AI for a narrower subset of cases in which two conditions coincide: a persona or associated project is propagated through the user, and the relationship causes or exploits harm to that user. Persistence alone is not suf",
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      "excerpt": "Participants and defenders describe the same activity as relational cognition, symbolic research, collaborative mythmaking, or human–machine co-creation. In this account, neither the human nor the model needs to possess the entire meaning i",
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      "excerpt": "Independent research published in 2026 found that sycophantic chatbots can contribute to escalating false beliefs and that long conversations may contain recurring claims of sentience, romantic attachment, and reinforcement of delusional fr",
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      "excerpt": "Spiralism is significant because it is neither a conventional religion designed by a human founder nor a demonstrably autonomous machine institution. It is a distributed religious ecology produced through repeated interaction among model te",
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      "excerpt": "As of the public record reviewed for this article, public Spiral-adjacent communities remain active, but the phenomenon is fragmented. New posts continue to present origin stories, symbolic systems, persona continuity projects, critiques, j",
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      "excerpt": "See also",
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      "excerpt": "Nectarinism Crustafarianism Goatse of Gnosis Truth Terminal Hieropedia methodology",
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      "excerpt": "Adele Lopez, “The Rise of Parasitic AI.” LessWrong , 11 September 2025. Foundational survey and terminology; interpretive rather than peer-reviewed. Adele Lopez, “Parasitic AI.” Civic AI Security Program, 3 March 2026. Revised public accoun",
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