Frances Yates
The Art of Memory
(1966)
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'Enough has been said of places', continues the author of Ad Herennium, 'now we turn to the theory of images.' Rules for images now begin, the first of which is that there are two kinds of images, one for 'things' (res), the other for 'words' (verba). That is to say 'memory for things' makes images to remind of an argument, a notion, or a 'thing'; but 'memory for words' has to find images to remind of every single word.
I interrupt the concise author here for a moment in order to remind the reader that for the rhetoric student 'things' and 'words' would have an absolutely precise meaning in relation to the five parts of the rhetoric. Those five parts are defined by Cicero as follows:
Invention is the excogitation of true things (res), or things similar to truth to render one's cause plausible; disposition is the arrangement in order of the things thus discovered; elocution is the accomodation of suitable words to the invented (things); memory[9]
is the firm perception in the soul of things and words; pronunciation is the moderating of the voice and body to suit the dignity of the things and words.'Things' are thus the subject matter of the speech; 'words' are the language in which that subject matter is clothed. Are you aiming at an artificial memory to remind you only of the order of the notions, arguments, 'things' of your speech? Or do you aim at memorising every single word in it in the right order? The first kind of artificial memory is memoria rerum; the second kind is memoria verborum. The ideal, as defined by Cicero in the above passage, would be to have a 'firm perception in the soul' of both things and words. But 'memory for words' is much harder than 'memory for things'; the weaker brethren among the author of Ad Herennium's rhetoric students evidently rather jibbed at memorising an image for every single word, and even Cicero himself, as we shall see later, allowed that 'memory for things' was enough.
...the psychological reasons which the author gives for the choice of mnemonic images. Why is it, he asks, that some images are so strong and sharp and so suitable for awakening memory, whilst others are so weak and feeble that they hardly stimulate memory at all? ...
Now nature herself teaches us what we should do. When we see in every day life things that are petty, ordinary, and banal, we generally fail to remember them, because the mind is not being stirred by anything novel or marvellous. But if we see or hear something exceptionally base, dishonourable, unusual, great, unbelievable, or ridiculous, that we are likely to remember for a long time. Accordingly, things immediate to our eye or ear we commonly forget; incidents of our childhood we often remember best. Nor could this be so for any other reason than that ordinary things easily slip from the memory while the striking and the novel stay longer in the mind. A sunrise, the sun's course, a sunset are[10]
marvelous to no one because they occur daily. But solar eclipses are a source of wonder because they occur seldom,...We ought, then, to set up images of a kind that can adhere longest in memory. And we shall do so if we establish similitudes as striking as possible; if we set up images that are not many or vague but active (imagines agentes); if we assign to them exceptional beauty or singular ugliness; if we ornament some of them, as withcrowns or purple cloaks, so that the similitude may be more distinct to us; or if we somehow disfigure them, as by introducing one stained with blood or soiled with mud or smeared with red paint, so that its form is more striking, or by assigning certain comic effects to our images, for that, too, will ensure our remembering them more readily. The things we easily remember when they are real we likewise remember without difficulty when they are figments. ...
Our author has clearly got hold of the idea of helping memory by arousing emotional affects through these striking and unusual images, beautiful or hideous, comic or obscene. And it is clear that he is thinking of human images, of human figures wearing crowns or purple cloaks, bloodstained or smeared with paint,... Quintilian's anchor and weapon as memory images, though much less exciting, are easier to understand than the weirdly populated memory to which the author of Ad Herennium introduces us.
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The student wishing to acquire 'memory for words' begins in the same way as the 'memory for things' student; that is to say he memorises places which are to hold his images. But he is confronted with a harder task for far more places will be needed to memorise all the words of a speech than would be needed for its notions. The specimen images for 'memory for words' are of the same type as the 'memory for things' image, that is to say they represent human figures of a striking and unusual character and in striking dramatic situations—imagines agentes.
We are setting out to memorise this line of verse:
Iam domum itionem reges Atridae paran (And now their homecoming the kings, the sons of Atreus are making ready)The line is found only in the quotation of it in Ad Herennium and was either invented by the author to exhibit his mnemonic technique or was taken for some lost work. It is to be memorised through two very extraordinary images.
One is 'Domitius raising his hands to heaven while he is lashed by the Marci Reges'. The translator and editor of the text in the Loeb edition (H. Caplan) explains in a note that 'Rex was the name of one of the most distinguished families of the Marcian gens; the Domitian, of plebeian origin, was likewise a celebrated gens'. The image may reflect some street scene in which Domitius
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of the plebeian gens (perhaps bloodstained to make him more memorable) is being beaten up by some members of the distinguished Rex family. It was perhaps a scene which the author himself had witnessed. Or perhaps it was a scene in some play. It was a striking scene in every sense of the word and therefore suitable as a mnemonic image. It was put on a place for remembering this line. The vivid image immediately brought to mind 'Domitius-Reges' and this reminded by sound resemblance of 'domum itionem reges'. It thus exhibits the principles of a 'memory for words' image which brings to mind the words which the memory is seeking through their sound resemblance to the notion suggested by the image.
We all know how, when groping in memory for a word or a name, some quite absurd and random association, something which has 'stuck' in the memory, will help us to dredge it up. The classical art is systematising that process.
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Reflecting on the 'memory for words' images, we note that our author seems now concerned not with the rhetoric students' proper business of remembering a speech, but with memorising verse in poems or plays. To remember a whole poem or a whole play in this way one has to envisage 'places' extending one might almost say for miles within the memory, 'places' past which one moves in reciting, drawing from them the mnemonic cues. And perhaps that word 'cue' does give a clue to how the method might be workable. Did one really learn the poem by heart but set up some places with 'cue' images on them at strategic intervals?
Our author mentions that another type of 'memory for words' symbol has been elaborated by the Greeks. I know that most of the Greeks who have written on the memory have taken the course of listing images that correspond to a great many words, so that persons who wished to learn these images by heart would have them ready without expending effort in a search for them.' It is possible that these Greek images for words are shorthand symbols or notae the use of which was coming into fashion in the Latin world at this time16. As used in mnemonics, this would presumably mean that, by a kind of inner stenography, the shorthand symbols were written down inwardly and memorised on the memory places. Fortunately our author disapproves of this method, since even a thousand of such ready-made symbols would not begin to cover all the words used. Indeed, he is rather lenient about 'memory for words' of any kind; it must be tackled just because it is more difficult than 'memory for things'. It is to be used as an exercise to strengthen 'that other kind of memory, the memory for things, which is of practical use . Thus we may without effort pass from this difficult training to ease in that other memory.'
The memory section closes with an exhortation to hard work.
16 Cicero is said by Plutarch to have introduced shorthand to Rome; the name of his freedman, Tiro, became associated with the so-called 'Tironian notes'. ... There may be some connection between the introduction of Greek mnemonics into the Latin world, reflected in Ad Herennium, and the importation of stenography at about the same time.
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'In every discipline artistic theory is of little avail without unremitting exercise, but especially in mnemonics, theory is almost valueless unless made good by industry, devotion, toil, and care. You can make sure that you have as many places as possible and that these conform as much as possible to the rules; in placing the images you should exercise every day.'
We have been trying to understand inner gymnastics, invisible labours of concentration which are to us most strange, though the rules and examples of Ad Herennium give mysterious glimpses into the powers and organisation of antique memories. We think of memory feats which are recorded of the ancients, of how the elder Seneca, a teacher of rhetoric, could repeat two thousand names in the order in which they had been given; and when a class of two hundred students or more spoke each in turn a line of poetry, he could recite all the lines in reverse order, beginning from the last one said and going right back to the first. Or we remember that Augustine, also trained as a teacher of rhetoric, tells of a friend called Simplicius who could recite Virgil backwards. We have learned from our text-book that if we have properly and firmly fixed our memory places we can move along them in either direction, backwards or forwards. The artificial memory may explain the awe inspiring ability to recite backwards of the elder Seneca and of Augustine's friend. Pointless though such feats may seem to us, they illustrate the respect accorded in antiquity to the man with the trained memory.
Very singular is the art of this invisible art of memory. It reflects ancient architecture but in an unclassical spirit, concentrating its choice on irregular places and avoiding symmetrical orders. It is full of human imagery of a very personal kind; we mark the tenth place with a face like that of our friend Decimus; we see a number of our acquaintances standing in a row; we visualise a sick man like the man himself, or if we did not know him, like someone we do know. These human figures are active and dramatic, strikingly beautiful or grotesque. They remind one more of figures in some Gothic cathedral than of classical art proper. They appear to be completely amoral, their function being solely to give an emotional impetus to memory...
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[19]Cicero has provided a highly condensed little Ars memorativa treatise bringing in all the points in their usual order. ...
Nor is it true as unskilled people assert (quod ab inertibus dicitur) that memory is crushed beneath a weight of images and even what might have been retained by nature unassisted is obscured : for I have myself met eminent people with almost divine powers of memory (summos homines et divina prope memoria), Charmadas at Athens and Metrodorus of Scepsis in Asia, who is said to be still living, each of whom used to say that he wrote down what he wanted to remember in certain places in his possession by means of images, just as if he were inscribing letters on wax. ...From these concluding words of Cicero's on the art of memory we learn that the objection to the classical art which was always raised throughout its subsequent history—and is still raised by everyone who is told of it—was voiced in antiquity. There were inert or lazy or unskilled people in Cicero's time who took the common sense view, to which, personally, I heartily subscribe—as explained earlier I am a historian only of the art, not a practitioner of it—that all these places and images would only bury under a heap of rubble whatever little one does remember naturally.
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... Various new departures were credited to this evidently brilliantly gifted and original man [Simonides Melicus]. He was said to have been the first to demand payment for poems ; the canny side of Simonides comes into the story of his invention of the art of memory which hinges on a contract for an ode. Another novelty is attributed to Simonides by Plutarch who seems to think that he was the first to equate the methods of poetry with those of painting , the theory later succinctly summed up by Horace in his famous phrase ut pictura poesis. 'Simonides', says Plutarch, 'called painting silent poetry and poetry painting that speaks; for the actions which painters depict as they are being performed, words describe after they are done.'
It is significant that the comparison of poetry with painting is fathered on Simonides, for this has a common denominator with the invention of the art of memory. According to Cicero, the latter invention rested on Simonides' discovery of the superiority of the sense of sight over the other senses. The theory of the equation of poetry and painting also rests on the supremacy of the visual sense ; the poet and the painter both think in visual images which the one expresses in poetry the other in pictures. The elusive relations with other arts which run all through the history of the art of memory are thus already present in the legendary source, in the stories about Simonides who saw poetry, painting and mnemonics in terms of intense visualisation. ...
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Aristotle's theory of memory and reminiscence is based on the theory of knowledge which he expounds in his De anima. The perceptions brought in by the five senses are first treated or worked upon by the faculty of imagination, and it is the images so formed which become the material of the intellectual faculty. Imagination is the intermediary between perception and thought. Thus while all knowledge is ultimately derived from sense impressions it is not on these in the raw that thought works but after they have been treated by, or absorbed into, the imaginative faculty. It is the image-making part of the soul which makes the work of the higher processes of thought possible. Hence 'the soul never thinks without a mental picture'; 'the thinking faculty thinks of its forms in mental pictures'; 'no one could ever learn or understand anything, if he had not the faculty of perception; even when he thinks speculatively, he must have some mental picture with which to think.'
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The Phaedrus is a treatise on rhetoric in which rhetoric is regarded, not as an art of persuasion to be used for personal or political advantage, but as an art of speaking the truth and of persuading hearers to the truth . The power to do this depends on a knowledge of the soul and the soul's true knowledge consists in the recollection of the Ideas. Memory is not a 'section' of this treatise, as one part of the art of rhetoric; memory in the Platonic sense is the groundwork of the whole.
It is clear that, from Plato's point of view, the artificial memory as used by a sophist would be anathema, a desecration of memory . It is indeed possible that some of Plato's satire on the sophists, for instance their senseless use of etymologies, might be explicable from the sophist memory treatise, with its use of such etymologies for memory for words. A Platonic memory would have to be organised, not in the trivial manner of such mnemotechnics, but in relation to the realities.
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Now Albertus turns to the precepts for 'the images which are to be put in the said places. Tullius says that there are two kinds of images, one for things, the other for words. Memory for things seeks to remind of notions only by images; memory for words seeks to remember every word by means of an image. What Tullius advises would seem to be an impediment rather than a help to memory; first, because one would need as many images as there are notions and words and this multitude would confuse memory; secondly because metaphors represent a thing less accurately than the description of the actual thing itself (metaphorica minus representant rem quam propria). But Tullius would have us translate the propria into metaphorica for the purpose of remembering, saying, for example, that to remember a law-suit in which a man is accused of having poisoned another man for an inheritance, there being many witnesses to his guilt, one should place in memory, images of a sick man in bed, the accused man standing by it holding a cup and a document, and a doctor holding the testicles of a ram. (Albertus has interpreted medicus, the fourth finger, as a doctor and so introduced a third person into the scene.) But might it not have been easier to remember all this through the actual facts (propria) rather than through these metaphors (metaphorica)?
We salute Albertus Magnus across the ages for having had worries about the classical art of memory so like our own. But his solution entirely reverses this criticism on the grounds (1) that images are an aid to memory; (2) that many propria can be remembered through a few images; (3) that although the propria give more exact information about the thing itself, yet the metaphorica 'move the soul more and therefore better help the memory'.
He next struggles with the memory-for-words images of Domitius being beaten up by the Reges, and of Aesop and Cimber dressing up for their parts in the play of Iphigeneia. His task was even harder than ours because he was using a corrupt text of Ad Herennium. He seems to have had in mind two highly confused images of someone being beaten by the sons of Mars, and of
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Aesop and Cimber and the wandering Iphigenia. He tries as best he can to make these fit the line to be remembered, but remarks pathetically, 'These metaphorical words are obscure and not easy to remember.' Nevertheless—such was his faith in Tullius—he decides in the solution that metaphorica like these are to be used as memory images, for the wonderful moves the memory more than the ordinary. And this was why the first philosophers expressed themselves in poetry, because, as the Philosopher says (referring to Aristotle in the Metaphysics), the fable, which is composed of wonders, moves the more.
What we are reading is very extraordinary indeed. For scholasticism in its devotion to the rational, the abstract, as the true pursuit of the rational soul, banned metaphor and poetry as belonging to the lower imaginative level . Grammar and Rhetoric which dealt with such matters had to retreat before the rule of Dame Dialectic. And those fables about the ancient gods with which poetry concerned itself were highly reprehensible morally. To move, to excite the imagination and the emotions with metaphorica seems a suggestion utterly contrary to the scholastic puritanism with its attention severely fixed on the next world, on Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven. Yet, though we are to practise the artificial memory as a part of Prudence, its rules for images are letting in the metaphor and the fabulous for their moving power.
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Early biographers of Thomas Aquinas say that he had a phenomenal memory. As a boy at school in Naples he committed to memory all that the master said, and later he trained his memory under Albertus Magnus at Cologne. 'His collection of utterances of the Fathers on the Four Gospels prepared for Pope Urban was composed of what he had seen, not copied, in various monasteries: and his memory was said to be of such capacity and retentive power that it always retained everything that he read. Cicero would have called such a memory 'almost divine.'
Like Albertus, Aquinas treats of the artificial memory under the virtue of Prudence in the Summa Theologiae. Like Albertus, too, he also wrote a commentary on Aristotle's De memoria et reminiscentia in which there are allusions to the art of Tullius. It will be best to look first at the allusions in the commentary since these help to explain the precepts for memory in the Summa.
Aquinas introduces what he has to say about Aristotle on memory and reminiscence with a reminder of the First Rhetoric on memory as a part of Prudence. For he opens the commentary with the remark that the philosopher's statement in his Ethics that reason which is peculiar to man is the same as the virtue of Prudence, is to be compared with the statement of Tullius that the parts of Prudence are memoria, intelligentia, providentia. We are on familiar ground and wait expectantly for what is sure to come. It is led up to by analysis of the image from sense impression as the ground of knowledge, the material on which intellect works. 'Man cannot understand without images (phantasmata); the image is a similitude of a corporeal thing, but understanding is of universals which are to be abstracted from particulars.' This formulates the fundamental position of the theory of knowledge of both Aristotle and Aquinas. It is constantly repeated on the early
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pages of the commentary: 'Nihil porest homo intelligere sine phantasmate.' What then is memory? It is in the sensitive part of the soul which takes the images of sense impressions; it therefore belongs to the same part of the soul as imagination, but is also per accidens in the intellectual part since the abstracting intellect works in it on the phantasmata.
It is manifest from the preceding to what part of the soul memory belongs, that is to say to the same (part) as phantasy. And those things are per se memorable of which there is a phantasy, that is to say, the sensibilia. But the intelligibilia are per accidens memorable, for these cannot be apprehended by man without a phantasm. And thus it is that we remember less easily those things which are of subtle and spiritual import; and we remember more easily those things which are gross and sensible. And if we wish to remember intelligible notions more easily, we should link them with some kind of phantasms, as Tullius teaches in his Rhetoric.It has come, the inevitable reference to Tullius on the artificial memory in the Second Rhetoric. And these phrases, curiously overlooked by modern Thomists but very famous and forever quoted in the old memory tradition, give the Thomist justification for the use of images in the artificial memory. It is as a concession to human weakness, to the nature of the soul, which will take easily and remember the images of gross and sensible things but which cannot remember 'subtle and spiritual things' without an image. Therefore we should do as Tullius advises and link such 'things' with images if we wish to remember them....
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It has sometimes been a matter for surprised comment that the age of scholasticism, with its insistence on the abstract, its low grading of poetry and metaphor, should also be an age which saw an extraordinary efflorescence of imagery, and of new imagery, in religious art. Searching for an explanation of this apparent anomaly in the works of Thomas Aquinas, the passage in which he justifies the use of metaphor and imagery in the Scriptures has been quoted. Aquinas has been asking the question why the Scriptures use imagery since 'to proceed by various similitudes and representations belongs to poetry which is the lowest of all the doctrines.' He is thinking of the inclusion of poetry with Grammar, the lowest of the liberal arts, and enquiring why the Scriptures use this low branch of knowledge. The reply is that the Scriptures speak of spiritual things under the similitude of corporeal things 'because it is natural to man to reach the intelligibilia through the sensibilia because all our knowledge has its beginning in sense.'
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This is a similar argument to that which justifies the use of images in the artificial memory. It is extremely curious that those in search of scholastic justification of the use of imagery in religious art should have missed the elaborate analyses of why we may use images in memory given by Albertus and Thomas.
Something has been left out all along the line and it is Memory. Memory which not only had immense practical importance for the men of ancient times, but also a religious and ethical importance. Augustine, the great Christian rhetor, had made Memory one of the three powers of the soul, and Tullius—that Christian soul before Christianity—had made it one of the three parts of Prudence. And Tullius had given advice as to how to make 'things' memorable. I make so bold as to suggest that Christian didactic art which needs to set forth its teaching in a memorable way, which must show forth impressively the 'things' which make for virtuous and unvirtuous conduct, may owe more than we know to classical rules which have never been thought of in this context, to those striking imagines agentes which we have seen trooping out of the rhetoric text book into a scholastic treatise on ethics.
The high Gothic cathedral, so E. Panofsky has suggested, resembles a scholastic summa in being arranged according to 'a system of homologous parts and parts of parts'. The extraordinary thought now arises that if Thomas Aquinas memorised his own Summa through 'corporeal similitudes' disposed on places following the order of its parts, the abstract Summa might be corporealised in memory into something like a Gothic cathedral full of images on its ordered places. We must refrain from too much supposition, yet it remains an undoubted fact that the Summa contained, in an unnoticed part of it, justification and encouragement for the use of imagery, and the creation of new imagery, in its recommendation of the artificial memory.
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... According to the general principles of artificial memory we should put everything that we want to fix in memory into an image. Applied to the letters of the alphabet, this would mean that they are better remembered if put into images. The notion as worked out in the visual alphabets is of infantile simplicity, like teaching a child to remember C through the picture of a Cat. Rossellius, apparently in perfect seriousness, suggests that we should remember the word AER through the images of an Ass an Elephant, and a Rhinoceros!
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Camillo, like Ficino, is a Christian Hermetist, who endeavours to correlate Hermetic teachings with Christianity. Hermes Trismegistus in these circles was a sacred figure, who was believed to have prophesised the coming of Christianity through his allusions to a 'Son of God'. The sanctity of Hermes as a Gentile prophet helped to make easy the path of a Magus who wished to remain a Christian. We have already seen that the sun as the most powerful of the astral gods and the chief transmitter of spiritus is, in his highest manifestation an image of the Trinity, for Camillo as for Ficino. Camillo is, however, rather unusual in identifying the spiritus proceeding from the Sun, not with the Holy Spirit, as was usually done, but with the 'spirit of Christ.' Quoting from Corpus Hermeticum, V, 'That god is both apparent and inapparent', Camillo identifies the divine spirit latent in the creation, which is
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the theme of this treatise, with the Spirit of Christ. He quotes St. Paul on 'Spiritus Christi, Spiritus vivificans' adding that about this Mercurius made a book, Quod Deus latens simul, ac patens sit' (that is Corpus Hermeticum, V). That Camillo was able to think of the spiritus mundi as the spirit of Christ enabled him to impart Christian overtones to his ardent adoption of Ficino's spiritus magic with which his Theatre is redolent.
How would the Ficinian magic be supposed to work within a memory system using places and images in the classical manner? The secret of this is, I believe, that the memory images were regarded as, so to speak, inner talismans.
The talisman is an object imprinted with an image which has been supposed to have been rendered magical, or to have magical efficacy, through having been made in accordance with certain magical rules. The images of talismans are usually, though not always, images of the stars, for example, an image of Venus as the goddess of the planet Venus, or an image of Apollo as the god of the planet Sol. The handbook of talismanic magic called the Picatrix, which was well known in the Renaissance, describes the processes through which talismanic images were supposed to be made magical by becoming infused with the astral spiritus. The Hermetic book which was the theoretical basis of talismanic magic was the Asclepius in which the magical religion of the Egyptians is described. According to the author of the Asclepius the Egyptians knew how to infuse the statues of their gods with cosmic and magical powers; by prayers, incantations, aid other processes they gave life to these statues; in other words, the Egyptians knew how to 'make gods'. The processes by which the Egyptians are said in the Asclepius to make their statues into gods are similar to the processes by which a talisman is made.
Ficino made some use of talismans in his magic, as described in his De vita coelitus comparanda, where he quotes descriptions of talismanic images, probably derived, some of them, from Picatrix. It has been shown that the passages in Ficino's book on talismans are derived with some modifications, from the passages in the Asclepius on how the Egyptians infused magical and divine powers into the statues of their gods. Ficino was using this magic with
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caution, and somewhat disguising its basis in the magical passages in the Asclepius. Nevertheless there can be no doubt that this was his source, and that he was encouraged to take up talismanic magic through his respect and reverence for the divine teacher, Mercurius Trismegistus.
Like all his magic, Ficino's use of talismans was a highly subjective and imaginative one. His magical practices, whether poetic and musical incantations, or the use of magicised images, were really directed towards a conditioning of the imagination to receive celestial influences. His talismanic images, evolved into beautiful Renaissance forms, were intended to be held within, in the imagination of their user. He describes how an image drawn from astralised mythology could be imprinted inwardly on the mind with such force that when a person, with this imprint in his imagination came out into the world of external appearances, these became unified through the power of the inner image, drawn from the higher world.
Such inner, or imaginative, use of talismanic imagery, would surely find a most suitable vehicle for its use in the occultised version of the art of memory. If the basic memory images used in such a memory system had, or were supposed to have, talismanic power, power to draw down the celestial influences and spiritus within the memory, such a memory would become that of the 'divine' man in intimate association with the divine powers of the cosmos. And such a memory would also have, or be supposed to have, the power of unifying the contents of memory by basing it upon these images drawn from the celestial world. The images of Camillo's Theatre seem to be supposed to have in them something of this power, enabling the 'spectator' to read off at one glance, through 'inspecting the images' the whole contents of the universe. The 'secret', or one of the secrets, of the Theatre is, I believe, that the basic planetary images are supposed to be talismans, or to have talismanic virtue, and that the astral power from them is supposed to run through the subsidiary images—a Jupiter power, for example, running through all the images in the Jupiter series, or a Sun power through the Sun series. In this way, the cosmically based memory would be supposed, not only to draw power from the cosmos into the memory, but to unify memory. All the details
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of the world of sense, reflected in memory, would be unified organically within the memory, because subsumed and unified under the higher celestial images, the images of their 'causes'.
If this was the theory of underlying the images of Camillo's occult memory system, it would have been based on the magical passages in the Asclepius. The 'god making' passages in that work are not quoted or referred to in L'Idea del Theatro, but in a speech about his Theatre, which he probably delivered in some Venetian academy, Camillo does refer to the magic statues of the Asclepius, and gives a very subtle interpretation of their magic.
I have read, I believe in Mercurius Trismegistus, that in Egypt there were such excellent makers of statues that when they had brought some statue to the perfect proportions it was found to be animated with an angelic spirit: for such perfection could not be without a soul. Similar to such statues, I find a composition of words, the office of which is to hold all the words in a proportion grateful to the ear . . . Which words as soon as they are put into their proportion are found when pronounced to be as it were animated by a harmony.Camillo has interpreted the magic of the Egyptian statues in an artistic sense; a perfectly proportioned statue becomes animated with a spirit, becomes a magic statue.This seems to me to be a pearl of great price with which Giulio Camillo has presented us, an interpretation of the magic statues of the Asclepius in terms of the magical effect of perfect proportions. Such a development could have been suggested by the statement in the Asclepius that the Egyptian magicians maintained the celestial spirit in their magic statues with celestial rites, reflecting the harmony of heaven. Renaissance theory of proportion was based on the 'universal harmony', the harmonious proportions of the world, the macrocosm, reflected in the body of man, the microcosm. To make a statue in accordance with the rules of proportion could thus be a way of introducing into it the celestial harmony, thereby imparting to it a magical animation.
Applied to the inner talismanic images of an occult memory system, this would mean that the magical power of such images would consist in their perfect proportions. Camillo's memory
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system would reflect the perfectly proportioned images of Renaissance art, and in this their magic would consist. One becomes seized with an intense desire to have that opportunity of inspecting the images in the Theatre which was rather wasted on the friend of Erasmus.
These subtleties did not save Camillo from the charge of having dabbled in dangerous magic. One Pietro Passi, who published a book on natural magic at Venice in 1614, warns against the statues of the Asclepius, 'of which Cornelius Agrippa has dared to affirm in his book on Occult Philosophy that they were animated by celestial influences.'
And Giulio Camillo, otherwise a judicious and polite writer, is not far off from this error in the Discorso in materia del suo Theatro, where, in speaking of the Egyptian statues, he says that the celestial influences descend into statues which are constructed with rare proportions. In which both he and others are in error . . .Camillo thus did not escape the accusation of being a magician which any dabbling in the magical passages of the Asclepius always brought with it. And Passi's accusation shows that the 'secret' of the Theatre was indeed supposed to be a magical secret.The Theatre presents a remarkable transformation of the art of memory. The rules of the art are clearly discernible in it. Here is a building divided into memory places on which are memory images. Renaissance in its form, for the memory building is no longer a Gothic church or cathedral, the system is also Renaissance in its theory. The emotionally striking images of classical memory, transformed by the devout Middle Ages into corporeal similitudes, are transformed again into magically powerful images. The religious intensity associated with medieval memory has turned in a new and bold direction. The mind and memory of man is now 'divine', having powers of grasping the highest reality through a magically activated imagination. The Hermetic art of memory has
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...it would appear that the older memory tradition mingled with the new type of occult memory, that the thunders of a friar's sermon on rewards and punishments, or the warnings of the Divine Comedy, might still be heard echoing somehow together with, or below the surface of, the new style of oratory with its new style arrangement of memory, and that our discovery of Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise in Camillo's Theatre belongs into a general atmosphere in which old style memory merges with the new. The Renaissance occult philosopher had a great gift for ignoring differences and seeing only resemblances. Ficino was able happily to combine the Summa of Thomas Aquinas with his own brand of Platonic theology, and it would be quite in keeping with the general confusion if he and his followers failed to notice any essential difference between Thomas Aquinas's recommendation of 'corporeal similitudes' in memory and the astralised images of occult memory.
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We have tried in these chapters to reconstruct a vanished wooden theatre, the fame of which was great, not only in Italy but also in France, whither it was exported. Why does this vanished wooden theatre seem to connect so mysteriously with many aspects of the Renaissance? It is, I would suggest, because it represents a new Renaissance plan of the psyche, a change which has happened within memory, whence outward changes derived their impetus. Medieval man was allowed to use his low faculty of imagination to form corporeal similitudes to help his memory; it was a concession to his weakness. Renaissance Hermetic man believes that he has divine powers; he can form a magic memory through which he grasps the world, reflecting the divine macrocosm in the microcosm of his divine mens . The magic of celestial proportion flows from his world memory into the magical words of his oratory and poetry, into the perfect proportions of his art and architecture. Something has happened within the psyche, releasing new powers, and the new plan of artificial memory may help us to understand the nature of that inner event.
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These most singular phenomena, the memory systems of Camillo and of Bruno—both of which were 'secrets' brought to Kings of France—belong into the Renaissance. No student of the Renaissance can ignore the glimpses into the Renaissance mind which they reveal. They belong into that particular strand of the Renaissance which is the occult tradition. They exhibit a profound conviction that man, the image of the greater world, can grasp, hold, and understand the greater world through the power of his imagination. We come back here to that basic difference between Middle Ages and Renaissance, the change in the attitude to the imagination. From a lower power which may be used in memory as a concession to weak man who may use corporeal similitudes because only so he can retain his spiritual intentions towards the intelligible world, it has become man's highest power, by means of which he can grasp the intelligible world beyond appearances through laying hold of significant images. The difference is profound, and, one would have thought, presents an insuperable obstacle to any sort of continuity between the art of memory as understood in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance transformation of the art. Yet Camillo includes remembering Heaven and Hell in his Theatre. Bruno in the opening dialogue of Shadows defends the art of Tullius, Thomas, and Albertus from the attacks of modern 'pedants'. The Middle Ages had transformed the classical art into a solemn and religious art; and Renaissance occult memory artists like Camillo and Bruno see themselves as in continuity with the medieval past.
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The first seal is 'The Field'. This field is the memory, or the phantasy, the ample folds of which are to be worked upon by the art of places and images. Brief though obscure summaries of the rules are given here, with insistence that images must have power to move through their striking and unusual character. There is also a reference to 'Solyman the Thalmudist' who had a memory system in twelve divisions marked with the names of the patriarchs.
The second Seal is 'The Heaven' (Pl. 142). So that 'the order and the series of the images of heaven may be engraved' a sphere divided in a certain manner will give places and sites. The description of this figure is supplemented by a diagram which is based on the twelve houses of a horoscope. Bruno is using the houses of a horoscope as memory places, or memory rooms, in which the 'images of heaven' will be engraved.
The Seal of 'The Chain' emphasises that memory must proceed from the preceding to what follows as parts of a chain are involved with the preceding and following links. This sounds like association of ideas, as in the Aristotelianising of the memory rules. But in the explanation of this Seal we are told that the chain is really the zodiac, the signs of which run on, the one into the other, and he refers to what he has said about this in Shadows, quoting the same Latin poem on the order of the signs which he had quoted there.
It is at this point that we begin to wonder, in a confused way, whether the Seals, or some of them, are really about the memory system in Shadows.
The next three Seals are Lullist. The 'Tree' and the 'Wood' are connected with Lull's Arbor scientiae, which is mentioned by name, as a wood all the trees of which, representing all knowledge, are rooted in basic principles common to all. The 'Ladder' gives what is actually the third figure of Lull's Ars brevis showing
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combinations of letters combined on the Lullian wheels. Again we wonder whether these Seals are giving the principle of using Lullian combinatory systems with the astrologised and magicised classical art of memory, as in Shadows.
And these wonderings are turned into a certainty in 'Zeuxis the Painter' (Seal 12) who represents the principle of using images in the art of memory. Here we are told that 'the images of Teucer the Babylonian supply me with the indications of three hundred thousand propositions'. And if any more proof is needed of the connection of Seals with Shadows there is this further remark in 'Zeuxis the Painter':
Now for the improving of natural memory and the teaching of artificial memory, we know a double picture; the one when we form from strange descriptions images and note for retaining in memory of which I give examples in the art attached to De umbris idearum; the other by feigning as need requires edifices . . . and images of sensible things which will remind us of non-sensible things to be remembered.The 'double picture' of the two kinds of memory consists, I believe, (1) of the memory based on the astral images such as he gave lists of in Shadows and is discussing in Seals (2) of the normal classical memory using places in 'edifices'. But in Bruno's systems the techniques even of normal classical memory are never being used normally, but are always galvanised into magical activity through being affiliated to astral systems.
The Seals, though several of them allude to the system in Shadows, are not confined to any one system. On the contrary Bruno states that he is trying every possible way; perhaps something for which he is not looking may emerge out of this, as alchemists who do not succeed in making gold sometimes hit on other important discoveries. In the later Seals he is trying variations of astrological arrangements, devices of a Lullist nature (or what he supposes to be Lullist), infiltrations of Cabalist magic in the unending search for a really operative organisation of the psyche. And the search always brings in the tricks of the memory trade, the old techniques of which can be recognised in Seal after Seal, though now presented as occult mysteries. My attitude towards the reader of this book has always been the humane one of trying to spare him
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the more awful ordeals of memory and I shall therefore not enumerate the whole Thirty of the Seals but present only a few selections.
Seal 9 'The Table' describes that interesting form of the 'visual alphabet' which consists of remembering letters by images of people whose names begin with those letters. Peter of Ravenna, it will be remembered produced the prize example of this method by making Eusebius and Thomas change places to help him to remember ET and TE. Bruno mentions Peter of Ravenna with admiration in this Seal. Seal 11, 'The Standard', stands for leading images as standard-bearers for whole groups of things; thus Plato, Aristotle, Diogenes, a Pyhrronian, an Epicurean, would serve to indicate not merely those individuals but many notions having affinity with them. This is the ancient tradition through which images of notable practitioners of the arts and sciences were regarded as memory images. Seal 14, 'Daedalus', gives a list of memory objects to be attached to, or placed on, main images to be used for organising a cluster of meanings around a main image. Bruno's memory objects belong into the ancient tradition for such lists. Seal 15, 'The Numerator' describes how to form images for numbers with objects whose shapes resemble the numbers. This was a notion frequently illustrated in the old memory treatises in which sets of objects-for-numbers are presented together with the 'visual alphabets', or illustrations of sets of objects resembling letters. Seal 18, 'The Century' arranges groups of a hundred friends in a hundred places, a valuable example of the classical precept of making memory images like people we know. Seal 19, 'Squaring the Circle' is based on the inevitable horoscope diagram. Bruno solves this ancient problem by using a 'semi-mathematical', that is magical figure as a memory place system. Seal 21, 'The Potter's Wheel' is again the horoscope diagram with a bar marked with the initials of the seven planets revolving within it; this is a very difficult system. Seal 23, 'The Doctor' uses different kinds of shops, butcher, baker, barber, and so on, as memory places, as in the method illustrated by one of the cuts (Pl. 5a) in Romberch's book. But Bruno's shops are not as
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straightforward as that. 'The Field and Garden of Circe' (Seal 26) is an extremely magical system, evidently only to be achieved after successful invocation to the seven planets. Here the elemental compounds—hot-moist, hot-dry, cold-moist, cold-dry—mutate and move through places in seven houses to form the changing forms of elemental nature within the psyche. In the 'Peregrinator' (Seal 25), memory images peregrinate through memory rooms, each image drawing from the material memorised in the rooms what it needs. In 'The Cabalistic Enclosure' (Seal 28) the orders of society both ecclesiastical and temporal, from Popes to Deacons and from Kings to Peasants are represented by memory images, ranged in the order of their rank. This was a well-known memory order, often mentioned in the memory treatises as an easily memorised order of figures. But in Bruno's system, the orders perform Cabalistic permutations and combinations among themselves. The last two Seals ('Combiner', 29, and 'Interpreter', 30) are respectively Lullist combinations and Cabalist manipulations of the Hebrew alphabet.
What is this man trying to do? He is working with two sets of ideas, memory and astrology. The memory tradition taught that everything is better remembered through an image, that these images should be striking and emotionally powerful, that they should be linked to one another associatively. Bruno tries to work memory systems based on these principles by linking them to the astrological system, using magically potent images, 'semi-mathematical' or magical places, and the associative orders of astrology. With this he mixes Lullist combinations and Cabalist magic!
The notion of combining memory principles with astral principles is present in Camillo's Theatre. Bruno wants to work this idea out in much more scientific detail. We saw this effort in action in the system in Shadows, to which the Seals often allude, but in Seals Bruno is trying method after method, system after system in pursuit of his aim. The mind machine analogy again suggests itself. Bruno believes that if he can make a system which gets inside the astrological system, which reflects the permutations and combinations of the changing relations of the planets to the zodiac and their influences on the horoscopal houses, he will be tapping the mechanisms of nature herself to organise the psyche. However, as
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we saw in the last chapter, the view of Bruno's memory systems as magical ancestors of the mind machine is only partially valuable and must not be pressed too far. If we drop the word 'magical' and think of the efforts of an occult memory artist as directed towards drawing out of the psyche combinations of 'archetypal' images we come within range of some major trends of modern psychological thought. However, as with the mind machine analogy, I would not stress a Jungian analogy which might confuse more than it illuminates.
I would prefer to keep within the period and try to think of the period aspects of Bruno's memory attempts. One of these aspects connects with Bruno's anti-Aristotelian philosophy of nature. Speaking of the 'standard bearing' images in the memory as related to the astral groupings of nature, he says:
All things of nature and in nature, like soldiers in an army, follow leaders assigned to them . . . This Anaxagoras knew very well but Father Aristotle could not attain to it . . . with his impossible and fictitious logical segregations of the truth of things.This reveals a root of Bruno's anti-Aristotelianism; the astral groupings in nature contradict Aristotle and a man with an astrally based memory cannot think on Aristotelian lines in his natural philosophy. Through the magic of his archetypal memory images he sees the groupings of nature as bound together with magical and associative links.Or if we think of the Renaissance interpretation of the magic of images we find ourselves within another aspect of Bruno's attitude to memory. We saw that the magic of magic images could be interpreted in the Renaissance as an artistic magic; the image became endued with aesthetic power through being endowed with perfect proportions. We would expect to find that in a highly gifted nature, such as that of Giordano Bruno, the intensive inner training of the imagination in memory might take notable inner forms. And in the discussion of 'Zeuxis the Painter' and of 'Phidias the Sculptor' in the Seals bearing those titles, Bruno reveals himself as a memory artist of the Renaissance.
Zeuxis, the painter, painting the inner images of memory, introduces a comparison of painting with poetry. To painters and poets says Bruno, there is distributed an equal power. The painter
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excels in imaginative power (phantastica virtus); the poet excels in cogitative power to which he is impelled by an enthusiasm, deriving from a divine afflatus to give expression. Thus the source of the poet's power is close to that of the painter.
Whence philosophers are in some ways painters and poets; poets are painters and philosophers; painters are philosophers and poets. Whence true poets, true painters, and true philosophers seek one another out and admire one another.For there is no philosopher who does not mould and paint; whence that saying is not to be feared 'to understand is to speculate with images', and the understanding 'either is the fantasy or does not exist without it'.
To come upon the equation of poetry with painting in the context of the images of the art of memory reminds one, that according to Plutarch, it was Simonides, the inventor of the art of memory, who was the first to make this comparison. Bruno is however here recalling the ut pictura poesis, the dictum of Horace on which the Renaissance based its theories of poetry and painting. To this he relates the Aristotelian dictum 'to think is to speculate with images' which had been used in the scholastic conflation of Aristotle with 'Tullius' on the classical memory and is often repeated in the memory treatises. And thus, through Zeuxis the Painter who is the painter of images in memory, who stands for the classical rule 'use images', he arrives at the vision of the Poet, the Painter, and the Philosopher as all fundamentally the same, all painters of images in the fantasy, like Zeuxis who paints the memory images, expressed by the one as poetry, by the other as painting, by the third as thought.
'Phidias the Sculptor' stands for the sculptor of the memory, moulding memory statues within.
Phidias is the former . . . like Phidias the statuary, either moulding in wax, or constructing by addition of a number of small stones, or sculpturing the rough and formless stone as though by subtraction.The last phrase reminds one of Michelangelo, chiselling at the formless block of marble to release the form which he has seen within it. So also (Bruno would seem to say) does Phidias the sculptor of the fantasy release the forms from the inform chaos of memory.
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There is something, to my mind, profound in the 'Phidias' Seal, as though in this inner moulding of significant memory statues, this drawing out of tremendous forms by subtraction of the inessential, Giordano Bruno, the memory artist, were introducing us to the core of the creative act, the inner act which precedes the outer expression.
We have rather lost sight of our Elizabethan reader whom we left some pages back wondering whether he could tackle the Thirty Seals. How did he get on? Did he reach 'Zeuxis' and 'Phidias'? If so he would have come upon an exposition of the Renaissance theory of poetry and painting such as had not before been published in England, and he would have found it in the context of the images of occult memory.
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[259] ...A question naturally arises. Were the thirty Seals with all their impenetrably intricate mnemonic advice a kind of barrier set up to protect the Seal of Seals, to prevent all but the initiated from reaching the core of the book? Did Bruno really believe in the art of memory in these impossible forms in which he expounded it? Or was it a cloak, a device for producing an incomprehensible cloud of words under cover of which he propagated his mystery religion?
Such a thought comes almost as a relief, suggesting as it does an at any rate partially rational explanation of the Seals. According to this theory, the Seals would be meant to be fundamentally incomprehensible presentations of every type of memory technique, occultised, and given this title of sigilli with its magical connotations, to provide an impenetrable curtain of mystery intervening between an uninitiated reader and the Seal of Seals. Many readers attempting to study the book from the beginning would throw it aside before they reached the end. Is that what they were meant to do?
Though it is, I think, probable that the motive of concealment does play a part in the arrangement of Bruno's memory books, this is certainly not the only explanation of them. Bruno was undoubtedly genuinely trying to do something which he thought was possible, trying to find the arrangements of significant images which would work as a way of inner unification. The Art 'by which we may become joined to the soul of the world' is one of the guides in his religion. It is not a cloak under which to conceal that religion; it is an essential part of it, one of its main techniques.
Moreover, as we have seen, Bruno's memory efforts are not isolated phenomena. They belong into a definite tradition, the
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Renaissance occult tradition to which the art of memory in occult forms had been affiliated. With Bruno, the exercises in Hermetic mnemonics have become the spiritual exercises of a religion. And there is a certain grandeur in these efforts which represent, at bottom, a religious striving. The religion of Love and Magic is based on the Power of the Imagination, and on an Art of Imagery through which the Magus attempts to grasp, and to hold within, the universe in all its ever changing forms, through images passing the one into the other in intricate associative orders, reflecting the ever changing movements of the heavens, charged with emotional affects, unifying, forever attempting to unify, to reflect the great monas of the world in its image, the mind of man. There is surely something which commands respect in an attempt so vast in its scope.
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The Antidicsonus is followed by the Libellus in quo dilucide explicatur impia Dicsoni artificiosa memoria in which Perkins goes through the 'Ad Herennian' rules, which Dicson had quoted, opposing to them in detail the Ramist logical disposition. At one point in this somewhat dreary process Perkins becomes very interesting, and indeed unintentionally funny. This is where he is speaking of Dicson's 'animation' of the memory images. Dicson had of course been talking in his obscure Brunian fashion of the classical rule that images must be striking, active, unusual, and able to stir the memory emotionally. Perkins thinks that the use of such images is not only vastly inferior intellectually to logical disposition but is also morally reprehensible, for such images must arouse the passions. And here he mentions Peter of Ravenna who in his book on artificial memory has suggested the use of libidinous images to the young. This must refer to Peter's remarks on how he used his girl friend, Juniper of Pistoia, as an image sure to stimulate his memory since she was so dear to him when young. Perkins holds up Puritan hands of horror at such a suggestion which actually aims at arousing bad affects to stimulate memory. Such an art is clearly not for pious men, but has been made up by impious and confused people who disregard every divine law.
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We may here be on the track of a reason why Ramism was so popular with the Puritans. The dialectical method was emotionally aseptic. Memorising lines of Ovid through logical disposition would help to sterilise the disturbing affects aroused by the Ovidian images.
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Proof of the identity of 'G.P.' is found in the fact that in his Prophetica, a work published under his own name in 1592, William Perkins makes an attack on the classical art of memory on lines similar to those developed by 'G.P.' The Prophetica has been defined by Howell as the first work by an Englishman which applies the Ramist method to preaching, and Howell also notes that Perkins here ordains that the Ramist method is to be used for memorising sermons, not the artificial memory with places and images. The passage against artificial memory is as follows:
The artificial memory which consists in places and images will teach how to retain notions in memory easily and without labour. But it is not to be approved (for the following reasons). I. The animation of the images which is the key of memory is impious: because it calls up absurd thoughts, insolent, prodigious and the like which stimulate and light up depraved carnal affections. 2. It burdens the mind and memory because it imposes a triple task on memory instead of one; first (the remembering of) the places; then of the images; then of the thing to be spoken of.We can recognise in these words of Perkins, the Puritan preacher, the 'G.P.' who wrote against the impious artificial memory of Dicson and who deplored the libidinous images recommended by Peter of Ravenna. The whirligig of time has transformed the medieval Tullius, who used to workso hard at forming memorable images of virtues and vices to deter the prudent man from Hell and lead him to Heaven, into a lewd and immoral person deliberately arousing carnal passions with his corporeal similitudes.
Among Perkins's other religious works there is A Warning against the Idolatrie of the Last Times, a warning delivered with earnest insistence because 'the remainders of poperie yet sticke in the minds of many.' People are keeping and hiding in their
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houses idols, that is images that have been abused to idolatrie' and there is the greatest need to see that such idols are given up and all remnants of the former idolatry destroyed wherever this has not yet been done. In addition to urging active iconoclasm, Perkins also warns against the theory underlying religious images. 'The Gentiles said that images erected were elements or letters to knowe God by: so say the Papists, that Images are Laiemens bookes. The wisest among the Gentiles used images and other ceremonies to procure the presence of angels and celestiall powers that by them they might attaine to the knowledge of God. The like doe the Papists with images of Angels and Saints.' But this is forbidden, for 'we may not binde the presence of God, the operation of his spirit, and his hearing of us to any thing, to which God hath not bound himselfe. Now God hath not bound himself by any word to be present at images.'
Moreover the prohibition against images applies within as well as without. 'So soone as the minde frames unto it selfe any forme of God (as when he is popishly conceiued to be like an old man sitting in heauen in a throne with a sceptre in his hand) an idol is set up in the minde . . .' This prohibition is to be applied to any use of the imagination. 'A thing faigned in the mind by imagination is an idol.'
We have to picture the controversy between Perkins and Dicson against the background of ruined buildings, smashed and defaced images—a background which loomed ever present in Elizabethan England. We must recreate the old mental habits, the art of memory as practised from time immemorial using the old buildings and the old images reflected within. The 'Ramist man' must smash the images both within and without, must substitute for the old idolatrous art the new image-less way of remembering through abstract dialectical order.
And if the old medieval memory was wrong, what of Renaissance occult memory? Occult memory moves in a direction diametrically opposed to Ramist memory, stressing beyond all measure that use of the imagination which the other prohibited, stressing it into a magical power. Both sides think of their own method as the right and religious one, and of their opponents as foolish and wicked. It is with a swelling religious passion that
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Dicson's Thamus inveighs against the disputatious Socrates, who reduces wise men to the level of boys, who does not study the way of the sky, does not seek God in his vestiges and 'umbrae'. As Bruno said when summing up the opposite religious attitude which he found in England:
They render thanks to God for having vouchsafed to them the light that leads to eternal life with no less fervour and conviction than we feel in rejoicing that our hearts are not blind and dark as theirs are.Thus in England a battle was joined within memory. There was war in the psyche, and the issues at stake were vast. These issues were not the simple ones of new versus old. Both sides were modern. Ramism was modern. And Brunian and Dicsonian memory were suffused with the Renaissance Hermetic influences. Their arts had more links with the past through the use of images than had the Ramist method. Nevertheless theirs was not the medieval art of memory; it was the art in a Renaissance transformation....
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Bruno's last book on memory was the last work which he published, just before he returned to Italy, to the prisons of the Inquisition and eventual death at the stake. The invitation sent to him from Venice by the man who wished to learn his memory secrets precipitated this return. In this book, therefore, Bruno is propounding his memory secrets for the last time. The book is called De imaginum signorum et idearum compositione and will henceforth be referred to as Images. It was published at Frankfort in 1591, but was probably mainly written in Switzerland, perhaps at the castle near Zurich of Johann Heinrich Hainzell, an occultist and alchemist with whom Bruno stayed for a time and to whom the book is dedicated.
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In association with the art of memory in this first part of Images Bruno presents an architectural memory system of terrible complexity. By an 'architectural' system I mean that this is a system using sequences of memory rooms in each of which memory images are to be placed. The architectural form is, of course, the most normal form of the classical art of memory but Bruno is using it in a highly abnormal way in which the distribution of the memory rooms is involved with magical geometry and the system is worked from above by celestial mechanics. There are twenty-four 'atria' or rooms each divided into nine memory places with images on them. These 'atria' with their nine divisions are illustrated in diagrammatical form on pages of the text. There are also fifteen 'fields' in the system, each divided into nine places; and thirty 'cubicles', which bring the system within range of the 'thirty' obsession.
One has to get hold of the general idea that everything in this lower world is supposed to be memorised through the images in these atria, fields, and cubicles. Everything in the physical world is to be here, all plants, stones, metals, animals, birds, and so on (Bruno
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makes use for his encyclopedic classifications of the alphabetical lists to be found in the memory text books). Also every art, science, invention known to man, and all human activities. Bruno states that the atria and fields which he teaches how to erect will include all things which can be said, known, or imagined.
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...we have seen that Bruno's secret had been a more or less open secret in the earlier Renaissance when Camillo's Theatre was such a widely publicised phenomenon. The secret was the combination of the Hermetic beliefs with the techniques of the art of memory. In the early sixteenth century this could be seen as belonging naturally into a Renaissance tradition, that of the 'Neoplatonism' of Ficino and Pico as it spread from Florence to Venice. It was an example of the extraordinary impact of the Hermetic books on the Renaissance, turning men's minds towards the fabrica mundi, the divine architecture of the world, as an object of religious veneration and a source of religious experience. In the later sixteenth century, the more troubled age in which Bruno passed his life, the pressures of the times, both political and religious, may have been driving the 'secret' more and more underground, but to see in Bruno only the propagator of a secret society (which he may have been) would be to lose his full significance.
For his secret, the Hermetic secret, was a secret of the whole Renaissance. As he travels from country to country with his 'Egyptian' message Bruno is transmitting the Renaissance in a very late but a peculiarly intense form. This man has to the full the Renaissance creative power. He creates inwardly the vast forms of his cosmic imagination, and when he externalises these forms in literary creation, works of genius spring to life, the dialogues which he wrote in England. Had he externalised in art the statues which he moulds in memory, or the magificent fresco of the images of the constellations which he paints in the Spaccio della bestia trionfante, a great artist would have appeared. But it was Bruno's mission to paint and mould within, to teach that the artist, the poet, and the philosopher are all one, for the Mother of the Muses is Memory. Nothing comes out but what has first been formed within, and it is therefore within that the significant work is done.
We can see that the tremendous force of image-forming which he teaches in the arts of memory is relevant to Renaissance imaginative creative force. But what of the frightful detail with which he expounds those arts, the revolving wheels of the Shadows system
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charged, not in general but in detail, with the contents of the worlds of nature and of man, or the even more appalling accumulations of memory rooms in the system in Images? Are these systems erected solely as vehicles for passing on the codes or rituals of a secret society? Or, if Bruno really believed in them, surely they are the work of a madman?
There is undoubtedly, I think, a pathological element in the compulsion for system-forming which is one of Bruno's leading characteristics. But what an intense striving after method there is in this madness! Bruno's memory magic is not the lazy magic of the Ars notoria, the practitioner of which just stares at a magical nota whilst reciting magical prayers. With untiring industry he adds wheels to wheels, piles memory rooms on memory rooms. With endless toil he forms the innumerable images which are to stock the systems; endless are the systematic possibilities and they must all be tried. There is in all this what can only be described as a scientific element, a presage on the occult plane of the preoccupation with method of the next century.
For if Memory was the Mother of the Muses, she was also to be the Mother of Method. Ramism, Lullism, the art of memory—all those confused constructions compounded of all the memory methods which crowd the later sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries—are symptoms of a search for method. Seen in the context of this growing search or urge, it is not so much the madness of Bruno's systems as their uncompromising determination to find a method which seems significant.
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[309]In the Cena de le ceneri or 'Ash Wednesday Supper', published in England in 1584, is reflected Bruno's visit to Oxford and his clash with the Oxford doctors over his Ficinian or magical version of Copernican heliocentricity. The dialogues have a topographical setting which takes the form of a journey through the streets of London. The journey appears to begin from the French embassy, which was situated in Butcher Row, a street running into the Strand at about the point where the Law Courts now stand, and to be directed towards the house of Fulke Greville who is said to have invited Bruno to expound his views on heliocentricity. From the description of the journey, its objective seems to be situated near Whitehall. Bruno and his friends are supposed to be making their way from the embassy to the house where the mysterious 'Ash Wednesday Supper', which gives its title to the book, was to take place.
John Florio and Matthew Gwinne call for Bruno at the embassy, later than he expected them, and they all start off after sunset through the dark streets. When they reach the main street (having come down Butcher Row into the Strand) they decide to turn off it towards the Thames and to continue the journey by boat. After shouting 'Oars' for a long time they succeed in hailing two elderly boatmen in an ancient, leaking boat. There are difficulties over the fare but eventually the boat starts with its passengers and proceeds extremely slowly. Bruno and Florio enliven the journey by singing verses from Ariosto's Orlando furioso. 'Oh feminil ingegno' chants the Nolan, followed by a rendering by Florio of 'Dove senze me, dolce mia vita' which he sang 'as though thinking of his loves', The boatmen now insisted on their landing though they were nowhere near their destination. The party found themselves in a dark and dirty lane enclosed by high walls. There was nothing for it but to struggle on, which they did, cursing the while. At last they reached again 'la grande ed ordinaria strada' (the
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Strand) only to find that they were close to the point from which they had originally started down towards the river. The boating interlude had got them nowhere. There was now some thought of giving up the whole expedition, but the philosopher remembered his mission. The task with which he is faced, though hard, is not impossible. 'Men of rare spirit who have in them something of the heroic and the divine, will climb the hill of difficulty and wring from harsh circumstances the palm of immortality. And though you may never reach the winning post nor gain the prize, cease not to run the race.' They therefore decided to persevere and began to make their way along the Strand towards Charing Cross. They now encountered rough crowds, and at 'the pyramid near the mansion where three streets meet' (Charing Cross) the Nolan received a blow to which he ironically replied 'Tanchi, maester' the only English words he knew.
At last they arrive. Curious incidents occur but they are eventually seated. At the head of the table was an unnamed knight (probably Philip Sidney); Greville was on Florio's right and Bruno was on his left. Next to Bruno was Torquato, one of the doctors with whom he was to dispute; the other, Nundinio, sat facing him.
The journey is far from clear; the account of it is interrupted whilst Bruno expounds his new philosophy, his Hermetic ascent through the spheres to a liberated vision of a vast cosmos, and his interpretation of Copernican heliocentricity in a manner very different from that of Copernicus himself, who, being 'only a mathematician', did not realise the significance of his discovery. At the 'Supper' Bruno debates with the two 'pedant' doctors as to whether or not the Sun is at the centre; there are mutual misunderstandings; the 'pedants' become vindicative and the philosopher is extremely rude. The last word is with the philosopher who maintains against Aristotle, and with Hermes Trismegistus, that the earth moves because it is alive.
Bruno afterwards told the Inquisitors that this 'Supper' really took place at the French embassy. Was the journey through the streets and waterways of London then entirely imaginary? I would put it in this way. The journey is something in the nature of an occult memory system through which Bruno remembers the
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themes of the debate at the 'Supper'. 'To the last of the Roman places you may add the first of the Parisian places', he says in one of his memory books. In the Cena de le ceneri, he is using 'London places', the Strand, Charing Cross, the Thames, the French embassy, a house in Whitehall, on which to remember the themes of a debate about the Sun at a Supper, themes which certainly have occult significances relating in some way to the return of magical religion heralded by the Copernican Sun.
Just before Bruno begins his account of the 'Supper' and the events leading up to it, he calls on Memory to aid him:
And thou, Mnemnosyne mine, who art hidden beneath the thirty seals and immured within the dark prison of the shadows of ideas, let me hear thy voice sounding in my ear.And then begin the expositions of Bruno's 'new philosophy' combined with the confused account of the journey to the 'Supper' and of the debate there with the 'pedants' about the Sun. The invocation to the Mnemosyne of Seals and Shadows at the beginning of the whole story seems to prove my point. Whoever wishes to know what kind of rhetoric proceeded from the occult memory, let him read the Cena de le ceneri.
Some days ago there came two nessengers to the Nolan from a gentleman of the court. They informed him that this gentleman was very desirous of having some conversation with him in order to hear his defence of the Copernican theory and of other paradoxes included in his new philosophy.And this magical rhetoric has exerted an extraordinary influence. Much of the legend of Bruno, the martyr for modern science and the Copernican theory, Bruno bursting out of medieval Aristotelian trammels into the nineteenth century, rests on the rhetorical passages in the Cena on the Copernican Sun and on the Hermetic ascent through the spheres.
The Cena de le ceneri affords an example of the development of a literary work out of the procedures of the art of memory. For the Cena is, of course, not a memory system; it is a set of dialogues with lively and well characterised interlocutors, the philosopher, the pedants, and others, and in which these people take part in a story, the journey to the Supper and what happened when they arrived. There is satire in the work; and comic incidents. There is,
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above all, drama. Bruno wrote a comedy, the Candelaio or 'Torch Bearer' when in Paris, and he had distinct dramatic gifts which he felt stirring within him when in England. We can thus see in the Cena how the art of memory could as it were develop into literature; how the streets of memory places could become populated with characters, could become the backcloth for a drama. The influence of the art of memory on literature is a practically untouched subject. The Cena affords an example of a work of imaginative literature the connection of which with the art of memory is undoubted.
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Both Bacon and Descartes knew of the art of Lull to which they both refer in very derogatory terms. Discussing false methods in the Advancement, Bacon says:
There hath been also laboured and put into practice a method, which is not a lawful method, but a method of imposture; which is, to deliver knowledges in such a manner, as men may speedily come to make a show of learning who have it not . Such was the travail of Raymundus Lullus in making that art which bears his name . . .[375]
And Descartes in the Discours de la methode is equally severe on the Lullian art which serves but to enable one 'to speak without judgment of those things of which one is ignorant'.
Thuus neither the discoverer of the inductive method, which was not to lead to scientifically valuable results, nor the discoverer of the method of analytical geometry, which was to revolutionise the world as the first systematic application of mathematics to the investigation of nature, have anything good to say of the method of Ramon Lull. Why indeed should they? What possible connection can there be between the medieval art, so frantically revived and 'emergence of modern science' and that 'occultised' in the Renaissance, with its combinatory systems based on Divine Names or attributes. Nevertheless the Art of Ramon Lull had this in common with the aims of Bacon and Descartes. It promised to provide a universal art or method which, because based on reality, could be applied for the solution of all problems. Moreover it was a kind of geometrical logic, with its squares and triangles and its revolving combinatory wheels; and it used a notation of letters to express the concepts with which it was dealing.
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