Death and Ethnicity: A Psychocultural Study Book

One thing that is impossible to fully grasp about the past is the fact that hundreds of years ago people had significantly different mental worlds to our own. Popular histories tend to entirely sidestep this in favour of drawing parallels and contrasts with current habits of life, while more academic history often struggles with the unwieldiness of explaining it. 'The Art of Memory' confronts the issue head on by telling the story of memory techniques used in classical, Medieval, and Renaissance times. The art of memory essentially consists of teaching systematic ways to improve the performance of recall. What makes this art so hard to grasp now is that memory was the main reference at the time. Before the printing press, books were scarcely available and contacting other people very time-consuming. As has been recognised since classical times, the performance of human memory is partially innate (some people have better memories 'naturally') and partially a matter of use and training. To veer into anecdata, the memorisation of phone numbers has become a lost art since the advent of mobile phones. If there is no active need to remember strings of eleven numbers, you're unlikely to do so. Likewise, if you don't need to remember entire areas of academic knowledge because you can refer to books, why would you? Academic learning in the 21st century is still about memorisation, yes, but also a substantial amount of recalling key names, locations, and signposts. You need to know where to find the details, rather than remembering them all.

By contrast, the classical art of memory involved the use of places (usually buildings) and 'corporeal similitudes' (imagined human figures) as shortcuts to the memorisation of knowledge in great detail. The basic idea was to slowly walk around an actual building, transpose it fully into your imagination, and populate this mental construct with a carefully sequenced series of images that were stimulating enough to remember and associate with specific pieces of information. Each image in the sequence could represent a concept or, incredibly, a single word. The latter approach is admittedly acknowledged to be much more difficult. What really amazes the (post?)modern reader, though, is to contemplate the scale of these memory places. They were apparently used by practitioners of the art to memorise speeches, books, legal cases, and the like. This blew my mind in particular because I have a very visual memory. I've instinctively used this basic technique of remembering items in a room when doing a memory experiment for someone's research, and it works. However, all my life I've relied on books, and latterly the internet, to elaborate on and confirm what's in my memory. Having a meticulously arranged library inside your brain seems like it would change your entire mode of thought, in ways I can only speculate on. At times when reading this book I wondered if I waste my visual memory by daydreaming beautiful mansions without making any effort to store information in them. Again, though, is there any need to? There are so many external forms of memory storage these days, both more and less fragile than our brains.

Yates does not broach any of these issues, though, as the book was published in 1966 and concludes with Leibniz in the seventeenth century. It divides the art of memory into three broad eras, the classical, middle ages, and Renaissance. As I'm not at all familiar with the latter two periods, I found them more challenging and the concepts quite complex. Those chapters were richly rewarding, though, and Yates' writing style is consistently clear and thoughtful. The Medieval and Renaissance manifestations of the memory arts were intertwined with religion and magic in ways subtle and obvious. The differences between the two are neatly summarised as follows:

We come back here to that basic difference between the Middle Ages and Renaissance, the change in 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 can he retain his spiritual intentions to the corporeal 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.

Perhaps the most striking chapters in the book concern Giordino Bruno's extremely complex occult-suffused memory systems, which bring this mystical Renaissance tendency to apotheosis. Bruno is described by Yates as 'the Magus of Memory' and was eventually burnt at the stake by the Inquisition. In his many books, memory systems are a form of magic. They include concentric wheels with 150 divisions, the full meaning of which Yates believes 'we shall never understand in detail'. Think about the effort involved in memorising such a thing - not merely as a static view of 150 images, but such that the wheels could spin and allow myriad new combinations. Moreover, the images were not literal, they represented what Bruno believed to be the fundamental elements that reality was made of. About halfway through 'The Art of Memory', I put it aside for a few days to read a fantasy novel called A Darker Shade of Magic. The contrast definitely enhanced my enjoyment of the latter half of this book. Consider, if you will, holding in your memory a complete visual representation of the world's constitutive parts, which you can rearrange and manipulate at will. Is that not magic? It certainly has a strong air of the fantastical. As Yates puts it:

Did [Bruno] intend that there would be formed in the memory using these ever-changing combinations of astral images some kind of alchemy of the imagination, a philosopher's stone in the psyche through which every possible arrangement and combination of objects in the lower world - plants, animals, stones - would be perceived and remembered? And that, in accordance with the forming and reforming of the inventor's images on the central wheel, the whole history of man would be remembered from above, as it were, all his discoveries, thoughts, philosophies, productions? Such a memory would be the memory of a divine man. [...]

Magic assumes laws and forces running through the universe which the operator can use, once he knows how to capture them. [...] The Renaissance conception of an animistic universe, operated by magic, prepared the way for the conception of a mechanistic universe, operated by mathematics.

This fascinating comparison brought to mind how Bruno's systematisation of knowledge into interconnected categories prefigured the Enlightenment division of academic study into disciplines. These systems also seemed to invoke Borges - he was basically a Magus, so surely he must have been aware of them.

The final chapters then turn to the association between the art of memory and theatres, notably Shakespeare's Globe. This is especially piquant to read if you've visited the rebuilt Globe, which is a beautiful and evocative place. Yates asks how books on memory can help with the reconstruction of the Globe and reviews the evidence of how it looked. As I recall, the layout in the rebuilt version is very close to that arrived at. Here the book intersects with architecture, but it is fundamentally interdisciplinary, as the conclusion emphasises. Theology, pedagogy, and literature are all critical, while psychology underpins it throughout. That is part of what makes the study so elusive yet fascinating, as we can only speculate about how these memory palaces were actually experienced by their builders.

I decided to read 'The Art of Memory' after finding an article about it online somewhere and, ironically, can't remember where. The combination of detailed explanations and well-chosen illustrations makes for a deeply thought-provoking book, well worth lingering over.