Part One: The Uses of Memory
In the current occult revival, the Art of Memory is perhaps
the most thoroughly neglected of all the technical methods of Renaissance
esotericism. While the researches of the late Dame Frances Yates1 and, more
recently, a revival of interest in the master mnemonist Giordano Bruno2 have
made the Art something of a known quantity in academic circles, the same is
not true in the wider community; to mention the Art of Memory in most occult
circles nowadays, to say nothing of the general public, is to invite blank
looks.
In its day, though, the mnemonic methods of the Art held a
special place among the contents of the practicing magician's mental
toolkit. The Neoplatonic philosophy which underlay the whole structure of
Renaissance magic gave memory, and thus techniques of mnemonics, a crucial
place in the work of inner transformation. In turn, this interpretation of
memory gave rise to a new understanding of the Art, turning what had once
been a purely practical way of storing useful information into a meditative
discipline calling on all the powers of the will and the imagination.
This article seeks to reintroduce the Art of Memory to the
modern Western esoteric tradition as a practicable technique. This first
part, "The Uses of Memory," will give an overview of the nature and
development of the Art's methods, and explore some of the reasons why the
Art has value for the modern esotericist. The second part, "The Garden of
Memory," will present a basic Hermetic memory system, designed along
traditional lines and making use of Renaissance magical symbolism, as a
basis for experimentation and practical use.
The Method And Its Development
It was once almost mandatory to begin a treatise on the Art
of Memory with the classical legend of its invention. This habit has
something to recommend it, for the story of Simonides is more than a
colorful anecdote; it also offers a good introduction to the basics of the
technique.
The poet Simonides of Ceos, as the tale has it, was hired to
recite an ode at a nobleman's banquet. In the fashion of the time, the poet
began with a few lines in praise of divinities -- in this case, Castor and
Pollux -- before going on to the serious business of talking about his host.
The host, however, objected to this diversion of the flattery, deducted half
of Simonides' fee, and told the poet he could seek the rest from the gods he
had praised. Shortly thereafter, a message was brought to the poet that two
young men had come to the door of the house and wished to speak to him. When
Simonides went to see them, there was no one there -- but in his absence the
banquet hall collapsed behind him, killing the impious nobleman and all the
dinner guests as well. Castor and Pollux, traditionally imaged as two young
men, had indeed paid their half of the fee.
Tales of this sort were a commonplace in Greek literature,
but this one has an unexpected moral. When the rubble was cleared away, the
victims were found to be so mangled that their own families could not
identify them. Simonides, however, called to memory an image of the
banqueting hall as he had last seen it, and from this was able to recall the
order of the guests at the table. Pondering this, according to the legend,
he proceeded to invent the first classical Art of Memory. The story is
certainly apocryphal, but the key elements of the technique it describes --
the use of mental images placed in ordered, often architectural settings --
remained central to the whole tradition of the Art of Memory throughout its
history, and provided the framework on which the Hermetic adaptation of the
Art was built.
In Roman schools of rhetoric, this approach to memory was
refined into a precise and practical system. Students were taught to
memorize the insides of large buildings according to certain rules, dividing
the space into specific loci or "places" and marking every fifth and tenth
locus with special signs. Facts to be remembered were converted into
striking visual images and placed, one after another, in these loci; when
needed, the rhetorician needed only to stroll in his imagination through the
same building, noticing the images in order and recalling their meanings. At
a more advanced level, images could be created for individual words or
sentences, so that large passages of text could be stored in the memory in
the same way. Roman rhetoricians using these methods reached dizzying levels
of mnemonic skill; one famous practitioner of the Art was recorded to have
sat through a day-long auction and, at its end, repeated from memory the
item, purchaser and price for every sale of the day.
With the disintegration of the Roman world, these same
techniques became part of the classical heritage of Christianity. The Art of
Memory took on a moral cast as memory itself was defined as a part of the
virtue of prudence, and in this guise the Art came to be cultivated by the
Dominican Order. It was from this source that the ex-Dominican Giordano
Bruno (1548-1600), probably the Art's greatest exponent, drew the basis of
his own techniques.4
Medieval methods of the Art differed very little from those
of the classical world, but certain changes in the late Middle Ages helped
lay the foundations for the Hermetic Art of Memory of the Renaissance. One
of the most important of these was a change in the frameworks used for
memory loci. Along with the architectural settings most often used in the
classical tradition, medieval mnemonists also came to make use of the whole
Ptolemaic cosmos of nested spheres as a setting for memory images. Each
sphere from God at the periphery through the angelic, celestial and
elemental levels down to Hell at the center thus held one or more loci for
memory images.
Between this system and that of the Renaissance Hermeticists
there is only one significant difference, and that is a matter of
interpretation, not of technique. Steeped in Neoplatonic thought, the
Hermetic magicians of the Renaissance saw the universe as an image of the
divine Ideas, and the individual human being as an image of the universe;
they also knew Plato's claim that all "learning" is simply the recollection
of things known before birth into the realm of matter. Taken together, these
ideas raised the Art of Memory to a new dignity. If the human memory could
be reorganized in the image of the universe, in this view, it became a
reflection of the entire realm of Ideas in their fullness -- and thus the
key to universal knowledge. This concept was the driving force behind the
complex systems of memory created by several Renaissance Hermeticists, and
above all those of Giordano Bruno.
Bruno's mnemonic systems form, to a great extent, the
high-water mark of the Hermetic Art of Memory. His methods were dizzyingly
complex, and involve a combination of images, ideas and alphabets which
require a great deal of mnemonic skill to learn in the first place! Hermetic
philosophy and the traditional images of astrological magic appear
constantly in his work, linking the framework of his Art to the wider
framework of the magical cosmos. The difficulty of Bruno's technique,
though, has been magnified unnecessarily by authors whose lack of personal
experience with the Art has led them to mistake fairly straightforward
mnemonic methods for philosophical obscurities.
A central example of this is the confusion caused by Bruno's
practice of linking images to combinations of two letters. Yates'
interpretation of Brunonian memory rested largely on an identification of
this with the letter-combinations of Lullism, the half-Cabalistic
philosophical system of Ramon Lull (1235-1316).5 While Lullist influences
certainly played a part in Bruno's system, interpreting that system solely
in Lullist terms misses the practical use of the combinations: they enable
the same set of images to be used to remember ideas, words, or both at the
same time.
An example might help clarify this point. In the system of
Bruno's De Umbris Idearum (1582), the traditional image of the first decan
of Gemini, a servant holding a staff, could stand for the letter combination
be; that of Suah, the legendary inventor of chiromancy or palmistry, for ne.
The decan-symbols are part of a set of images prior to the inventors,
establishing the order of the syllables. Put in one locus, the whole would
spell the word bene.6
The method has a great deal more subtlety than this one
example shows. Bruno's alphabet included thirty letters, the Latin alphabet
plus those Greek and Hebrew letters which have no Latin equivalents; his
system thus allowed texts written in any of these alphabets to be memorized.
He combined these with five vowels, and provided additional images for
single letters to allow for more complex combinations. Besides the
astrological images and inventors, there are also lists of objects and
adjectives corresponding to this set of letter-combinations, and all these
can be combined in a single memory-image to represent words of several
syllables. At the same time, many of the images stand for ideas as well as
sounds; thus the figure of Suah mentioned above can also represent the art
of palmistry if that subject needed to be remembered.
Bruno's influence can be traced in nearly every subsequent
Hermetic memory treatise, but his own methods seem to have proved too
demanding for most magi. Masonic records suggest that his mnemonics, passed
on by his student Alexander Dicson, may have been taught in Scots Masonic
lodges in the sixteenth century;7 more common, though, were methods like the
one diagrammed by the Hermetic encyclopedist Robert Fludd in his History of
the Macrocosm and Microcosm. This was a fairly straightforward adaptation of
the late Medieval method, using the spheres of the heavens as loci, although
Fludd nonetheless classified it along with prophecy, geomancy and astrology
as a "microcosmic art" of human self-knowledge.8 Both this approach to the
Art and this classification of it remained standard in esoteric circles
until the triumph of Cartesian mechanism in the late seventeenth century
sent the Hermetic tradition underground and the Art of Memory into oblivion.
The Method And Its Value
This profusion of techniques begs two questions, which have
to be answered if the Art of Memory is to be restored to a place in the
Western esoteric tradition. First of all, are the methods of the Art
actually superior to rote memorization as a way of storing information in
the human memory? Put more plainly, does the Art of Memory work?
It's fair to point out that this has been a subject of
dispute since ancient times. Still, then as now, those who dispute the Art's
effectiveness are generally those who have never tried it. In point of fact,
the Art does work; it allows information to be memorized and recalled more
reliably, and in far greater quantity, than rote-methods do. There are good
reasons, founded in the nature of memory, why this should be so. The human
mind recalls images more easily than ideas, and images charged with emotion
more easily still; one's most intense memories, for example, are rarely
abstract ideas. It uses chains of association, rather than logical order, to
connect one memory with another; simple mnemonic tricks like the loop of
string tied around a finger rely on this. It habitually follows rhythms and
repetitive formulae; it's for this reason that poetry is often far easier to
remember than prose. The Art of Memory uses all three of these factors
systematically. It constructs vivid, arresting images as anchors for chains
of association, and places these in the ordered and repetitive context of an
imagined building or symbolic structure in which each image and each locus
leads on automatically to the next. The result, given training and practice,
is a memory which works in harmony with its own innate strengths to make the
most of its potential.
The fact that something can be done, however, does not by
itself prove that it should be done. In a time when digital data storage
bids fair to render print media obsolete, in particular, questions of how
best to memorize information might well seem as relevant as the choice
between different ways of making clay tablets for writing. Certainly some
methods of doing this once-vital chore are better than others; so what? This
way of thinking leads to the second question a revival of the Art of Memory
must face: what is the value of this sort of technique?
This question is particularly forceful in our present culture
because that culture, and its technology, have consistently tended to
neglect innate human capacities and replace them where possible with
mechanical equivalents. It would not be going too far to see the whole body
of modern Western technology as a system of prosthetics. In this system,
print and digital media serve as a prosthetic memory, doing much of the work
once done in older societies by the trained minds of mnemonists. It needs to
be recognized, too, that these media can handle volumes of information which
dwarf the capacity of the human mind; no conceivable Art of Memory can hold
as much information as a medium-sized public library.
The practical value of these ways of storing knowledge, like
that of much of our prosthetic technology, is real. At the same time, there
is another side to the matter, a side specially relevant to the Hermetic
tradition. Any technique has effects on those who use it, and those effects
need not be positive ones. Reliance on prosthetics tends to weaken natural
abilities; one who uses a car to travel anywhere more than two blocks away
will come to find even modest walks difficult. The same is equally true of
the capacities of the mind. In Islamic countries, for example, it's not at
all uncommon to find people who have memorized the entire Quran for
devotional purposes. Leave aside, for the moment, questions of value; how
many people in the modern West would be capable of doing the equivalent?
One goal of the Hermetic tradition, by contrast, is to
maximize human capacities, as tools for the inner transformations sought by
the Hermeticist. Many of the elementary practices of that tradition -- and
the same is true of esoteric systems worldwide -- might best be seen as a
kind of mental calisthenics, intended to stretch minds grown stiff from
disuse. This quest to expand the powers of the self stands in opposition to
the prosthetic culture of the modern West, which has consistently tended to
transfer power from the self to the exterior world. The difference between
these two viewpoints has a wide range of implications -- philosophical,
religious, and (not the least) political -- but the place of the Art of
Memory can be found among them.
From what might be called the prosthetic standpoint, the Art
is obsolete because it is less efficient than external data-storage methods
such as books, and distasteful because it requires the slow development of
inner abilities rather than the purchase of a piece of machinery. From a
Hermetic standpoint, on the other hand, the Art is valuable in the first
place as a means of developing one of the capacities of the self, the
memory, and in the second place because it uses other capacities --
attention, imagination, mental imagery -- which have a large role in other
aspects of Hermetic practice.
Like other methods of self-development, the Art of Memory
also brings about changes in the nature of the capacity it shapes, not
merely in that capacity's efficiency or volume; its effects are qualitative
as well as quantitative -- another issue not well addressed by the
prosthetic approach. Ordinarily, memory tends to be more or less opaque to
consciousness. A misplaced memory vanishes from sight, and any amount of
random fishing around may be needed before an associative chain leading to
it can be brought up from the depths. In a memory trained by the methods of
the Art, by contrast, the chains of association are always in place, and
anything memorized by the Art can thus be found as soon as needed. Equally,
it's much easier for the mnemonist to determine what exactly he or she does
and does not know, to make connections between different points of
knowledge, or to generalize from a set of specific memories; what is stored
through the Art of Memory can be reviewed at will.
Despite our culture's distaste for memorization, and for the
development of the mind generally, the Art of Memory thus has some claim to
practical value, even beyond its uses as a method of esoteric training. In
the second part of this article, "The Garden of Memory," some of these
potentials will be explored through the exposition of an introductory memory
system based on the traditional principles of the Art.
Notes for Part 1
1. Yates, Frances A., The Art Of Memory (Chicago: U. Chicago
Press, 1966) remains the standard English-language work on the tradition.
2. Bruno, Giordano, On the Composition of Images, Signs and
Ideas (NY: Willis, Locker & Owens, 1991), and Culianu, Ioan, Eros and Magic
in the Renaissance (Chicago: U. Chicago Press, 1987) are examples.
3. The brief history of the Art given here is drawn from
Yates, op. cit.
4. For Bruno, see Yates, op. cit., ch. 9, 11, 13-14, as well
as her Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition (Chicago: U. Chicago Press,
1964).
5. See Yates, Art of Memory, Ch. 8.
6. Ibid., pp. 208-222.
7. Stevenson, David, The Origins of Freemasonry: Scotland's
Century (Cambridge: Cambridge U.P., 1988), p. 95.
8. See Yates, Art of Memory, Ch. 15.
Part Two: The Garden of Memory
During the Renaissance, the age in which it reached its
highest pitch of development, the Hermetic Art of Memory took on a wide
array of different forms. The core principles of the Art, developed in
ancient times through practical experience of the way human memory works
best, are common to the whole range of Renaissance memory treatises; the
structures built on this foundation, though, differ enormously. As we'll
see, even some basic points of theory and practice were subjects of constant
dispute, and it would be impossible as well as unprofitable to present a
single memory system, however generic, as somehow "representative" of the
entire field of Hermetic mnemonics.
That is not my purpose here. As the first part of this essay
pointed out, the Art of Memory has potential value as a practical technique
even in today's world of information overload and digital data storage. The
memory system which will be presented here is designed to be used, not
merely studied; the techniques contained in it, while almost entirely
derived from Renaissance sources, are included for no other reason than the
simple fact that they work.
Traditional writings on mnemonics generally divide the
principles of the Art into two categories. The first consists of rules for
places -- that is, the design or selection of the visualized settings in
which mmemonic images are located; the second consists of rules for images
-- that is, the building up of the imagined forms used to encode and store
specific memories. This division is sensible enough, and will be followed in
this essay, with the addition of a third category: rules for practice, the
principles which enable the Art to be effectively learned and put to use.
Rules for Places
One debate which went on through much of the history of the
Art of Memory was a quarrel over whether the mnemonist should visualize real
places or imaginary ones as the setting for the mnemonic images of the Art.
If the half-legendary classical accounts of the Art's early phases can be
trusted, the first places used in this way were real ones; certainly the
rhetors of ancient Rome, who developed the Art to a high pitch of efficacy,
used the physical architecture around them as the framework for their
mnemonic systems. Among the Hermetic writers on the Art, Robert Fludd
insisted that real buildings should always be used for memory work, claiming
that the use of wholly imaginary structures leads to vagueness and thus a
less effective system.1 On the other hand, many ancient and Renaissance
writers on memory, Giordano Bruno among them, gave the opposite advice. The
whole question may, in the end, be a matter of personal needs and
temperament.
Be that as it may, the system given here uses a resolutely
imaginary set of places, based on the numerical symbolism of Renaissance
occultism. Borrowing an image much used by the Hermeticists of the
Renaissance, I present the key to a garden: Hortus Memoriae, the Garden of
Memory.
The Garden of Memory is laid out in a series of concentric
circular paths separated by hedges; the first four of these circles are
mapped in Diagram 1. Each circle corresponds to a number, and has the same
number of small gazebos set in it. These gazebos -- an example, the one in
the innermost circle, is shown in Diagram 2 -- bear symbols which are
derived from the Pythagorean number-lore of the Renaissance and later
magical traditions, and serve as the places in this memory garden.2 Like all
memory places, these should be imagined as brightly lit and conveniently
large; in particular, each gazebo is visualized as large enough to hold an
ordinary human being, although it need not be much larger.
The first four circles of the garden are built up in the
imagination as follows:
The First Circle
This circle corresponds to the Monad, the number One; its
color is white, and its geometrical figure is the circle. A row of white
flowers grows at the border of the surrounding hedge. The gazebo is white,
with gold trim, and is topped with a golden circle bearing the number 1.
Painted on the dome is the image of a single open Eye, while the sides bear
the image of the Phoenix in flames.
The Second Circle
The next circle corresponds to the Dyad, the number Two and
to the concept of polarity; its color is gray, its primary symbols are the
Sun and Moon, and its geometrical figure is the vesica piscis, formed from
the common area of two overlapping circles. The flowers bordering the hedges
in this circle are silver-gray; in keeping with the rule of puns, which
we'll cover a little later, these might be tulips. Both of the two gazebos
in this circle are gray. One, topped with the number 2 in a white vesica,
has white and gold trim, and bears the image of the Sun on the dome and that
of Adam, his hand on his heart, on the side. The other, topped with the
number 3 in a black vesica, has black and silver trim, and bears the image
of the Moon on the dome and that of Eve, her hand touching her head, on the
side.
The Third Circle
This circle corresponds to the Triad, the number Three; its
color is black, its primary symbols are the three alchemical principles of
Sulphur, Mercury and Salt, and its geometrical figure is the triangle. The
flowers bordering the hedges are black, as are the three gazebos. The first
of the gazebos has red trim, and is topped with the number 4 in a red
triangle; it bears, on the dome, the image of a red man touching his head
with both hands, and on the sides the images of various animals. The second
gazebo has white trim, and is topped by the number 5 in a white triangle; it
bears, on the dome, the image of a white hermaphrodite touching its breasts
with both hands, and on the sides the images of various plants. The third
gazebo is unrelieved black, and is topped with the number 6 in a black
triangle; it bears, on the dome, the image of a black woman touching her
belly with both hands, and on the sides the images of various minerals.
The Fourth Circle
This circle corresponds to the Tetrad, the number Four. Its
color is blue, its primary symbols are the Four Elements, and its
geometrical figure is the square. The flowers bordering the hedges are blue
and four-petaled, and the four gazebos are blue. The first of these has red
trim and is topped with the number 7 in a red square; it bears the image of
flames on the dome, and that of a roaring lion on the sides. The second has
yellow trim and is topped with the number 8 in a yellow square; it bears the
images of the four winds blowing on the dome, and that of a man pouring
water from a vase on the sides. The third is unrelieved blue and is topped
with the number 9 in a blue square; it bears the image of waves on the dome
and those of a scorpion, a serpent and an eagle on the sides. The fourth has
green trim and is topped with the number 10 in a green square; it bears, on
the dome, the image of the Earth, and that of an ox drawing a plow on the
sides.
To begin with, these four circles and ten memory places will
be enough, providing enough room to be useful in practice, while still small
enough that the system can be learned and put to work in a fairly short
time. Additional circles can be added as familiarity makes work with the
system go more easily. It's possible, within the limits of the traditional
number symbolism used here, to go out to a total of eleven circles
containing 67 memory places.3 It's equally possible to go on to develop
different kinds of memory structures in which images may be placed. So long
as the places are distinct and organized in some easily memorable sequence,
almost anything will serve.
The Garden of Memory as described here will itself need to be
committed to memory if it's to be used in practice. The best way to do this
is simply to visualize oneself walking through the garden, stopping at the
gazebos to examine them and then passing on. Imagine the scent of the
flowers, the warmth of the sun; as with all forms of visualization work, the
key to success is to be found in concrete imagery of all five senses. It's a
good idea to begin always in the same place -- the first circle is best, for
practical as well as philosophical reasons -- and, during the learning
process, the student should go through the entire garden each time, passing
each of the gazebos in numerical order. Both of these habits will help the
imagery of the garden take root in the soil of memory.
Rules for Images
The garden imagery described above makes up half the
structure of this memory system -- the stable half, one might say, remaining
unchanged so long as the system itself is kept in use. The other, changing
half consists of the images which are used to store memories within the
garden. These depend much more on the personal equation than the framing
imagery of the garden; what remains in one memory can evaporate quickly from
another, and a certain amount of experimentation may be needed to find an
approach to memory images which works best for any given student.
In the classical Art of Memory, the one constant rule for
these images was that they be striking -- hilarious, attractive, hideous,
tragic, or simply bizarre, it made (and makes) no difference, so long as
each image caught at the mind and stirred up some response beyond simple
recognition. This is one useful approach. For the beginning practitioner,
however, thinking of a suitably striking image for each piece of information
which is to be recorded can be a difficult matter.
It's often more useful, therefore, to use familiarity and
order rather than sheer strangeness in an introductory memory system, and
the method given here will do precisely this.
It's necessary for this method, first of all, to come up with
a list of people whose names begin with each letter of the alphabet except K
and X (which very rarely begin words in English). These may be people known
to the student, media figures, characters from a favorite book -- my own
system draws extensively from J.R.R. Tolkien's Ring trilogy, so that
Aragorn, Boromir, Cirdan the Shipwright and so on tend to populate my memory
palaces. It can be useful to have more than one figure for letters which
often come at the beginning of words (for instance, Saruman as well as Sam
Gamgee for S), or figures for certain common two-letter combinations (for
example, Theoden for Th, where T is Treebeard), but these are developments
which can be added later on. The important point is that the list needs to
be learned well enough that any letter calls its proper image to mind at
once, without hesitation, and that the images are clear and instantly
recognizable.
Once this is managed, the student will need to come up with a
second set of images for the numbers from 0 to 9. There is a long and ornate
tradition of such images, mostly based on simple physical similarity between
number and image -- a javelin or pole for 1, a pair of eyeglasses or of
buttocks for 8, and so on. Any set of images can be used, though, so long as
they are simple and distinct. These should also be learned by heart, so that
they can be called to mind without effort or hesitation. One useful test is
to visualize a line of marching men, carrying the images which correspond to
one's telephone number; when this can be done quickly, without mental
fumbling, the images are ready for use.
That use involves two different ways of putting the same
imagery to work. One of the hoariest of commonplaces in the whole tradition
of the Art of Memory divides mnemonics into "memory for things" and "memory
for words." In the system given here, however, the line is drawn in a
slightly different place; memory for concrete things -- for example, items
in a grocery list -- requires a slightly different approach than memory for
abstract things, whether these be concepts or pieces of text. Concrete
things are, on the whole, easier, but both can be done using the same set of
images already selected.
We'll examine memory for concrete things first. If a grocery
list needs to be committed to memory -- this, as we'll see, is an excellent
way to practice the Art -- the items on the list can be put in any
convenient order. Supposing that two sacks of flour are at the head of the
list, the figure corresponding to the letter F is placed in the first
gazebo, holding the symbol for 2 in one hand and a sack of flour in the
other, and carrying or wearing at least one other thing which suggests
flour: for example, a chaplet of plaited wheat on the figure's head. The
garments and accessories of the figure can also be used to record details:
for instance, if the flour wanted is whole-grain, the figure might wear
brown clothing. This same process is done for each item on the list, and the
resulting images are visualized, one after another, in the gazebos of the
Garden of Memory. When the Garden is next visited in the imagination -- in
the store, in this case -- the same images will be in place, ready to
communicate their meaning.
This may seem like an extraordinarily complicated way to go
about remembering one's groceries, but the complexity of the description is
deceptive. Once the Art has been practiced, even for a fairly short time,
the creation and placement of the images literally takes less time than
writing down a shopping list, and their recall is an even faster process. It
quickly becomes possible, too, to go to the places in the Garden out of
their numerical order and still recall the images in full detail. The result
is a fast and flexible way of storing information -- and one which is
unlikely to be accidentally left out in the car!
Memory for abstract things, as mentioned earlier, uses these
same elements of practice in a slightly different way. A word or a concept
often can't be pictured in the imagination the way a sack of flour can, and
the range of abstractions which might need to be remembered, and
discriminated, accurately is vastly greater than the possible range of items
on a grocery list (how many things are there in a grocery store that are
pale brown and start with the letter F?). For this reason, it's often
necessary to compress more detail into the memory image of an abstraction.
In this context, one of the most traditional tools, as well
as one of the most effective ones, is a principle we'll call the rule of
puns. Much of the memory literature throughout the history of the Art can be
seen as an extended exercise in visual and verbal punning, as when a pair of
buttocks appears in place of the number 8, or when a man named Domitian is
used as an image for the Latin words domum itionem. An abstraction can
usually be memorized most easily and effectively by making a concrete pun on
it and remembering the pun, and it seems to be regrettably true that the
worse the pun, the better the results in mnemonic terms.
For instance, if -- to choose an example wholly at random --
one needed to memorize the fact that streptococcus bacteria cause scarlet
fever, rheumatic fever, and streptococcal sore throat, the first task would
be the invention of an image for the word "streptococcus." One approach
might be to turn this word into "strapped to carcass," and visualize the
figure who represents the letter S with a carcass strapped to his or her
back by large, highly visible straps. For scarlet fever -- perhaps "Scarlett
fever" -- a videotape labeled "Gone With The Wind" with a large thermometer
sticking out of it and an ice pack on top would serve, while rheumatic fever
-- perhaps "room attic fever" -- could be symbolized by a small model of a
house, similarly burdened, with the thermometer sticking out of the window
of an attic room; both of these would be held by the original figure, whose
throat might be red and inflamed to indicate the sore throat. Again, this
takes much longer to explain, or even to describe, than it does to carry out
in practice.
The same approach can be used to memorize a linked series of
words, phrases or ideas, placing a figure for each in one of the gazebos of
the Garden of Memory (or the places of some more extensive system).
Different linked series can be kept separate in the memory by marking each
figure in a given sequence with the same symbol -- for example, if the
streptococcus image described above is one of a set of medical items, it and
all the other figures in the set might wear stethoscopes. Still, these are
more advanced techniques, and can be explored once the basic method is
mastered.
Rules for Practice
Like any other method of Hermetic work, the Art of Memory
requires exactly that -- work -- if its potentials are to be opened up.
Although fairly easy to learn and use, it's not an effort-free method, and
its rewards are exactly measured by the amount of time and practice put into
it. Each student will need to make his or her own judgement here; still, the
old manuals of the Art concur that daily practice, if only a few minutes
each day, is essential if any real skill is to be developed.
The work that needs to be done falls into two parts. The
first part is preparatory, and consists of learning the places and images
necessary to put the system to use; this can be done as outlined in the
sections above. Learning one's way around the Garden of Memory and
memorizing the basic alphabetical and numerical images can usually be done
in a few hours of actual work, or perhaps a week of spare moments.
The second part is practical, and consists of actually using
the system to record and remember information. This has to be done
relentlessly, on a daily basis, if the method is to become effective enough
to be worth doing at all. It's best by far to work with useful, everyday
matters like shopping lists, meeting agendas, daily schedules, and so on.
Unlike the irrelevant material sometimes chosen for memory work, these can't
simply be ignored, and every time one memorizes or retrieves such a list the
habits of thought vital to the Art are reinforced.
One of these habits -- the habit of success -- is
particularly important to cultivate here. In a society which tends to
denigrate human abilities in favor of technological ones, one often has to
convince oneself that a mere human being, unaided by machines, can do
anything worthwhile! As with any new skill, therefore, simple tasks should
be tried and mastered before complex ones, and the more advanced levels of
the Art mastered one stage at a time.
Notes for Part 2
1. See Yates, Frances, Theatre of the World (Chicago: U. of
Chicago P., 1969), pp. 147-9 and 207-9.
2. The symbolism used here is taken from a number of sources,
particularly McLean, Adam, ed., The Magical Calendar (Edinburgh: Magnum
Opus, 1979) and Agrippa, H.C., Three Books of Occult Philosophy, Donald
Tyson rev. & ed. (St. Paul: Llewellyn, 1993), pp. 241-298. I have however,
borrowed from the standard Golden Dawn color scales for the colors of the
circles.
3. The numbers of the additional circles are 5-10 and 12; the
appropriate symbolism may be found in McLean and Agrippa, and the colors in
any book on the Golden Dawn's version of the Cabala. The Pythagorean
numerology of the Renaissance defined the number 11 as "the number of sin
and punishment, having no merit" (see McLean, p. 69) and so gave it no
significant imagery. Those who wish to include an eleventh circle might,
however, borrow the eleven curses of Mount Ebal and the associated Qlippoth
or daemonic primal powers from Cabalistic sources.
Article
used with Permission
©
John Michael Greer