The Culpeper Séance: An Offline RAG Séance with Nicholas Culpeper

Description and use

An offline chatbot that channels Nicholas Culpeper using a public‑domain book, local RAG, and open‑source models to provide accurate herbal information with verified modern safety verdicts.

Problem

Provide accurate, grounded herbal information from a historical text while ensuring modern safety warnings and preventing hallucinations.

Outcome

An offline, privacy‑preserving herbal chatbot that delivers historically grounded answers with verified modern safety verdicts, built entirely with open‑source components.

Workflow

• Clone repo and set up environment
• Run "make ingest" to download, parse, chunk, embed the Gutenberg text into Chroma
• Start Flask API and Vite UI with "make dev"
• Interact via UI or POST /api/ask, receiving streamed ghost text and verdict metadata
• Optionally swap chat or embed models via .env without code changes

Evidence

The Culpeper Séance is an offline séance that channels Nicholas Culpeper (1616–1654)—the English herbalist and astrologer—so you can ask him about plants in the voice of a gentle, slightly eerie ghost.

Source

When the ghost names a dangerous herb, a Beyond the Veil panel stamps a modern verdict: Folklore, Plausible, Harmful, or Deadly. Those toxicity claims come from a hand‑curated verdicts.json file—they are never generated by the model at runtime.

Source

The UI is a candlelit séance circle with streaming ghost text, a browsable grimoire of parsed herbs, and a poison cabinet for the scary ones.

Source

The ghost’s system prompt forbids herbs, doses, or facts not present in retrieved passages. A separate grade step asks the model yes/no whether the passages could answer the question; if not, the graph rewrites the query into 17th‑century herbal vocabulary or falls back to a polite “the veil is too thick” refusal.

Source