Mystical Literature Under the Scrutiny of Artificial Intelligence: The Case of Maria Valtorta
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.12775/SetF.2026.015Keywords
Machine Learning, Authorship Identification, Text Attribution, Artificial Intelligence, Maria Valtorta, Mystical visionsAbstract
Maria Valtorta, a mystic lived in Italy in the XX century, claimed to have received mystical visions about the life of Jesus, the Virgin Mary, and some saints. She reported in her writings texts and dictations attributed to Jesus, her guardian angel, Azaria, and the Paraclete. Additionally, she wrote an autobiography. These texts underwent binary and multiclass supervised classification using Machine Learning algorithms. Classification metrics and confusion matrices have shown that the four classes of texts (Maria Valtorta, Jesus, Azaria, Paraclete) are so well separated in the deep structure of the language as if the texts were attributable to four different authors. Possible causes of this unexpected result are discussed.
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