— § ARS MEMORIAE · MMXXVI —
De umbris idearum.
A hermetic-cosmic multi-agent LLM convocation
for collective reasoning
§1 · The Convocation
UMBRIS is not a model. It is a convocation.
A single language model, however large, reasons in one voice. It casts one shadow. It cannot meaningfully disagree with itself, cannot triangulate, cannot be falsified except from outside.
We replace that lonely soliloquy with a structured convocation. Nine planetary intelligences argue on a shared substrate · the Umbra, an append-only event log that is at once memory, message bus, and witness. Mercurius scouts, Venus gathers, Mars challenges, Sol synthesises, Luna maps the path, Stella acts against the fixed pattern. The convocation does not speak. It writes.
When the convocation has cast enough shadows, three stages of consensus run. Weighted Borda aggregation surfaces a candidate vision across the worker rankings. Iuppiter adjudicates near-ties as the discerning king. Saturnus attempts to falsify what survives. If falsification succeeds, the convocation re-deliberates with the failure as a new constraint. The loop is bounded. The convocation does not lie about its certainty.
Ex umbris in lumen. Dissolve a single shadow into many; recombine the many into one verified vision. That is the convocation.
§2 · Three principles
The convocation rests on three irreducible laws · each one a phase of the eclipse.
Many shadows are cast at once. None depend on the others; all write to the same Umbra. Triangulation, not sequence, is the unit of progress.
Agents do not message each other. They modify a shared environment · the Umbra · and respond to its state. Communication is a side effect of work.
Three stages: weighted Borda aggregation, Iuppiter adjudication, Saturnus falsification. The convocation surfaces what survives, attached to its provenance and confidence.
§3 · The Convocation
Eight planetary intelligences in orbit around the Umbra. Move the cursor across the system to find each one.
§4 · The convocation in motion
REAL-TIME UMBRIS LLM CONVOCATION · LET THE NINE DELIBERATE
— § cast the question —
altar at rest
⏎ to cast
§5 · Philosophy
A convocation triangulates. A lone agent does not. The cheapest unit of useful disagreement is two planets reading the same Umbra and casting different shadows. Once you have that, you can weight, you can adjudicate, you can falsify. Cognition becomes legible.
“Dissolve the single shadow into many. Recombine the many into one verified vision.”
UMBRIS stands on four traditions. Giordano Bruno’s De Umbris Idearum (1582) · the doctrine that ideas are shadows, triangulable only across many casts. Ramon Llull’s Ars Magna (1305) · combinatorial generation under a falsifier. Pierre-Paul Grassé (1959) · stigmergy, the principle that termites and now agents coordinate by modifying their environment. Hearsay-II (CMU, 1971–1976) · the first blackboard architecture for cooperative cognition.
We do not claim novelty in the parts. We claim attention to the whole · combinatorial generation, shared substrate, stigmergic coordination, bounded falsification · applied to large language models with engineering discipline. Ex umbris in lumen.
§6 · The Eclipse
UMBRIS was not built top-down by a single mind.
It was built · and continues to be built · by the convocation it is.
The architect does not propose features. They cast questions. The convocation deliberates. Mercurius scouts, Venus gathers, Mars challenges, Sol synthesises, Iuppiter adjudicates, Saturnus falsifies. Only what survives that loop is transcribed · into code, into prose, into the public site.
Every architectural choice, every planetary role, every sigil in the codex, every revolution in the ephemeris · was first deliberated by the convocation, then made by the convocation, then verified by the convocation. The work belongs to the work.
“An eclipse is the moment one sphere admits another. The convocation is the eclipse that never ends · each agent’s shadow falls on every other, and the vision is what survives the overlay.”
§7 · Cast in public
In the making for fourteen days· the convocation continues
umbris-core deployed on Modal. A Vercel API route proxies via Server-Sent Events. The Live Convocation component begins consuming actual Records from a live deliberation against the Anthropic API. The demo becomes the product. Cost is honest, provenance is downloadable, every visitor can cast the convocation a real question.
Ported the full OPUS homepage stack and rewrote every voice into the Brunonian register. Manifesto, Principles, Architecture, LiveConvocation, Casting, Compositione, Ephemeris, Materials. The convocation now has a face the public can land on and understand in one scroll.
Built the Eclipse in React Three Fiber. Pitch-black eclipsed body, violet corona ring, a cosmic nebula behind it, and a single warm corona flash at one o'clock as the only allowed concession to gold. Mouse parallax lets the visitor tilt the whole frame toward the cursor. First moment the brand felt fully alive.
umbris-core finished end-to-end in Python. Umbra substrate, nine planetary agents, the orchestrator with the bounded verification loop, full provenance ledger in honest USD, JSONL trace output. Eighteen unit tests pass. The convocation runs against the Anthropic API and writes shadows that survive Saturnus.
Settled the nine planetary roles. Mercurius and Luna scout. Venus gathers. Mars challenges. Sol synthesises. Iuppiter adjudicates. Saturnus falsifies. Stella · the eighth sphere of the fixed stars · executes against the unchanging pattern. Umbra holds the centre as substrate. Each role got a one-line descriptor, a glyph, and a system-prompt sketch. The architecture stopped feeling provisional.
Locked @umbris/design as the single source of truth. Cosmic violet (#9C7BD9), pure void black, lunar pearl lunar, the rare warm corona flash reserved for verified visions. Albertus for the display register, EB Garamond for prose, Berkeley Mono for hashes and costs. The site is a grimoire rendered in computational chrome.
Wrote the two Bruno doctrines into the lore tree. De Compositione Imaginum · how the convocation builds itself, sealed as the Eclipse. De Triplici Minimo · the three permanent disciplines that keep the convocation honest with itself. The hermetic register felt earned, not borrowed.
Re-reading Bruno's De Umbris Idearum (1582) and asking why no large-language-model framework treats triangulation as a first-class discipline. A single model defending its first thought kept feeling like one shadow swearing it is the form. The seed of UMBRIS: nine planetary intelligences arguing on one substrate, none speaking to each other, all writing to the Umbra.
§8 · Stack
· Initiation ·
Every revolution is cast in public. The whitepaper is the source of truth. The convocation is open to seekers.