An Introduction To The Hermetic
Art Of Memory
John Michael Greer
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, &laqno; 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, &laqno; 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 Development3
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 &laqno;
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 &laqno; 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 &laqno; 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, &laqno; 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 &laqno;
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 &laqno; memory for things » and &laqno; 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 &laqno; streptococcus. » One approach might
be to turn this word into &laqno; 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 &laqno; Scarlett fever »-a videotape
labeled &laqno; Gone With The Wind » with a large thermometer
sticking out of it and an ice pack on top would serve, while
rheumatic fever-perhaps &laqno; 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 &laqno; 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.