The other night I found online two FREE translations of “Cantus Circaeus” - The Incantations of Circe. I was so excited to find it I read it three times in two day.
“Circe” is one Giordano Bruno’s memory treatises that he wrote after “De Umbris” - on the Shadows of the Ideas. This translation is so much easier to read than “De Umbris” and contains a little bit more about Bruno’s use of ‘figurativee’ memory palaces as well as his techniques for enhancing individual stations. It does not discuss Bruno’s invention of the PAO, though, so it’s not a replacement for “De Umbris”. But it’s probably a better place to start and is a lot less “metaphysical” in my opinion.
The first section (which is -not- memory instruction per se) is also pretty funny. Circe casts a spell to turn difference groups of people into the animal Bruno thinks they most represent. So if has a little in common with Dante’s Inferno in that sense.
I wrote more about it in a post over on Anthony Metivier’s MMM public forum (see “Giordano Bruno The Incantations of Circe”) if your interested.
A plain text doc with the English and Latin interlaced together can be found at
But a better, more readable copy, with the Latin and English side-by-side can be found on Academia. I don’t usually like having to create a profile to download a PDF - especially if you have to let them read your contacts, but Academia seems legit. YMMV. That link is:
One of my abiding interests is using graphical diagrams as memory aids. I was successful in using the Zodiac one from Bruno and also the modern Monopoly board as places and station. This work of Bruno’s gives some insights into his use of “semi-numerical figures” so it’s worth a read.
Yes that’s the one. Sorry about the bad paste. I’ve also just found Scott Gosnell’s translation of Bruno’s “Thirty Seals” and am enjoying that as well.
So, the diagram that’s on the forum header was one of my favorite glyphs for a long time, but I was never all that certain I knew what was being offered in that diagram. Reading “Circe” and “Thirty Seals” has given me, I think, greater confidence that that diagram is one of what Bruno refers to as a “semi mathematical figure”. For those of us using modern terms I think we’d say that he’s using the points on the polygons as stations in a hybrid technique that is in between simple pegs and the journey method, but not a full-on “memory palace”. The ordered alphabet allows tracing around the polygon in a journey, but having each vertex have a fixed letter (which for Bruno would be a Person) as a “subject”. So it’s not simply pegging on the letter, but the journey is not architectural or geographical.
And in thirty seals (and in some portions of “De Umbris) he puts structures within structures (as we do with outlining in Word ). My growing understanding is that Bruno’s overriding concern was with coming up with a “memory palace strategy” that could provide infinite stations since they would be ordered by Logic rather than real world geography and that all of these seals and diagrams and such were, as Scott Gosnell suggest some of the earliest development of what we in Computer Science call “data structures” and to some extent algorithms.
The rooster, gallus, is the animal of the French, the Gallic people, and since the Song of Circe [Cantus Circaeus] is dedicated to Bruno’s French patrons, the rooster is described as the most noble of animals, while the armorial animals of other nations are disparaged.
Kind of an introductory “diss” to everyone but the roosters.
There is a lot of crossover I’m finding between the “rules” Bruno lays down for “subjects” (aka, loci whose primary purpose is “TO HAVE”[1]) and data structures.
In fact, he blatantly describes (right there at the start of chapter 3 of 2nd Part of Theory) that SUBJECTS (you and I know them as locations or pegs) are ULTIMATELY containers (structures whose purpose is TO HAVE, caps not mine).
He laid down rules for container structures. He also explains SUB-structures of “subjects”—types of TO HAVE objects (ie containers) with properties that vary based on the purpose of the container object.
No doubt in my mind that he’s laying out rules for a scalable architecture for mnemonic data structures.
There’s a lot of crossover, I find, between Bruno’s reasoning and that of modern information sciences (the tools librarians and archivists and such must utilize daily).
See: the first lines in (Second Part Theory) Chapter 3 of Cantus Circaeus. “Cautions for stabilizing subjects for retaining forms, which was briefly noted, and lightly touched upon. And that which can pertain to the reasons of subjects, for which the ultimate predicament is TO HAVE.” [Gosnell’s translation] ↩︎
He used the Lullian architecture as a framework for the memorization of large amounts of information.
He has some very interesting methods that can help store large amounts of information.
What he was looking for was that with a few places a large amount of information could be stored and this was given by the Lullian structures and others that were said to be Llull’s and it was not known for sure.
I did the thing folks do and I looked up the wiki article and read it on Roman Llull (and Llullism).
In particular, I noted this:
Llull structured many of his works around trees. In some, like the Book of the Gentile and the Three Wise Men , the “leaves” of the trees stand for the combinatorial elements (principles) of the Art . In other works a series of trees shows how the Art generates all (“encyclopedic”) knowledge.
The Tree of Science (1295-6) comprises sixteen trees ranging from earthly and moral to divine and pedagogical.[38] Each tree is divided into seven parts (roots, trunk, branches, twigs, leaves, flowers, fruits). The roots always consist of the Lullian divine principles and from there the tree grows into the differentiated aspects of its respective category of reality.[39]
Literally Tree data structures… which the article precedes with this:
It has been pointed out that the Art 's combinatorial mechanics bear a resemblance to zairja, a device used by medieval Arab astrologers.[31][32] The Art’s reliance on divine attributes also has a certain similarity to the contemplation of the ninety-nine Names of God in the Muslim tradition.[33]
Llull’s familiarity with the Islamic intellectual tradition is evidenced by the fact that his first work (1271-2) was a compendium of Al-Ghazali’s logic.[34]
The cat was a math dweeb! He’s building logical data structures to organize and process information. A bunch of medieval and post-medieval programmers.
). My growing understanding is that Bruno’s overriding concern was with coming up with a “memory palace strategy” that could provide infinite stations since they would be ordered by Logic rather than real world geography and that all of these seals and diagrams and such were, as Scott Gosnell suggest some of the earliest development of what we in Computer Science call “data structures” and to some extent algorithms.