I’m trying to understand and then usefully apply Robert Fludd’s Round Art, as described in Paul Ferguson’s translation called Mnemonic Methods. I’ll document my developing understanding here. I welcome comments, of course.
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Fludd’s art is similar to Giordano Bruno’s, only that Fludd explains it more clearly, Bruno uses different concepts that were understood by the scholars of that time and today it is not so well known because it is so varied.
Fludd is more recommendable and his rounded art is very good.
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The first important point is that loci should not be empty: “…if we wish to avoid befuddlement and absurdity in this Art, we need to assign distinctive images to each Locus, as the presence of such images is the best way of distinguishing one locus from another.”
I believe that in the Round Art the loci are all theaters, with the exception of the zodiacal loci, which hold the Principal Ideas. These don’t seem to be described as theaters. Rather they are simply loci filled with zodiac and planet related scenes. I’m not convinced I’ve got this right, though!
I also can’t tell yet what the Principal Ideas could mean in a practical way. Let’s say I wanted to memorize the breadth of human emotions. Would I use the zodiac and planetary scenes or the theaters? How would this be decided?
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I’m wrong about the exception: the starry sphere loci also have theaters:
Each Theatre will have five Doors…you will have much greater success in this Art if, in the Zodiacal sphere, you imagine historical narratives that are suited to each location and action to each Sign and its locus.
By “historical narratives”, in this case, I believe he means mythic narratives. When it comes to “essential images” he seems satisfied with either mythic or actual historical narratives. In either case, the key is that you know the story in sequence. For the former, the story has 5 parts. These correspond to the 5 doors of the theatre and the 5 meadows. He gives an example of Medea’s story, and this links to Aries seeing as the story of Jason and Medea is about the Golden Fleece from a ram.
Ok, so we have a Theatre in the Zodiacal sphere, locus of Aries, with 5 colored doors and meadows, and a story about Medea plays out out there. This is in the “pure” zodiacal sphere and has no planetary influence.
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Gah! What’s up with the doors? Why does every Theatre have 5? Fludd never discussed entering the doors. However, elsewhere I read that Yates proposes Fludd’s Round and Square Arts are to be combined. He doesn’t indicate that directly in the book. His description of the Square art does start with a door, so perhaps that’s a clue!
Funny thing is, he kind of poo-poos the Square art…but I think I might be right.
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What ‘fludd’ does is the same as bruno explains in ‘de umbris’, add atomic locus that can hold images in places, no matter how small they may be, enlarge them to the size of a scene.
If you only have one door per room add one on each side and if needed add other things, an atomic loci can be even a pencil, table, chair, stones, etc. If you have a wall with nothing on it, add a TV, a picture, etc. Then you number the loci, I think bruno numbered up to 10 and if you need a locus to reach 10 he placed it, for example the doors of “fludd”, bruno shows this method in ‘de umbris’ and in ‘image composition’ he uses astrology to place his objects in a space, each corner has a center, left and right, in those spaces he adds objects.
Sorry for the vague explanations, I recommend reading his books, if you don’t understand something he says skip it or just extract ideas from what you understand.
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In Geosophia 1, Jake Stratton Kent describes the mystery cult initiation ceremony of Trophonius. (Page 150, Scarlet Imprint, Biblioteque Rouge). I’ve divided it into 5 scenes to match the 5 meadows: preparation, drinking the waters of Lethe and Mnemosyne, descent, death, rebirth.
I’ll place this scene in a theater of Saturn in Cancer, I think. There Saturn is a merchant saddened by a sudden loss. He will be the initiate.
Then I’ll use that scene to memorize the Orphic Hymn to Mnemosyne.
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I’ve read De Umbris. Sometimes I feel like I understand it, sometimes I feel like it makes no sense to me at all. I do understand what you mean, though. There are lots of similarities; they recommend using images as a sort of palace in an of themselves. It seems to me that Fludd focuses on scenes, on mental motion through a story, while Bruno merely has images. At least I don’t recall there being anything about stories in De Umbris.
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STRUCTURING OF PLACES
After examining Bruno’s promises and premises, it’s time to verify the functioning of the mnemonic systems of De umbris. However, before proceeding, at the beginning of the third part of De umbris, the apprentice is requested, as an indispensable premise of any mnemonic system worthy of that name, to make an additional effort consisting of forming an ordered system of subiecta, that is, of places that will accommodate the images, whether of things or words. In this regard, Bruno provides precise indications:
“Let us take, for example, a common subiectum and begin by dividing it into its main parts, which in turn must be further segmented to obtain ‘atomic’ places, that is, indivisible units; all these parts, both the main ones and the ‘atomic’ ones, must be perceived without hesitation as succeeding one another, according to a real or fictitious order; we should not have any doubts about the order of the rooms in which we have divided a building, nor about that of the places within each room; it matters little if we have added artificial subiecta or have distorted the order of real ones: what is important is that the eye of imagination can see them all and ordered as real places: ‘Hence proceed with the subdivision, so that these parts are perceived as adjacent to one another and orderly succeeding one another, in place of true or positive contiguity.’”
Suppose, for example, that you want to use your home as a system of places; then you will establish an order of the rooms, perhaps starting from the kitchen, then moving to the living room, the study, the bathroom, and finally the bedroom; it is obvious that this order can be entirely arbitrary, since it does not matter whether these rooms are actually arranged according to this sequence or whether they are communicating with each other: what is important is that you have no doubt about this sequence that you have organized. Then suppose that you divide each of the rooms into ten “atomic” subiecta, as Bruno would say, segmenting them into ten places: in the kitchen, for example, place number 1 could be the door, number 2 the table, number 3 the trash can, number 4 the refrigerator, number 5 the window, and so on up to place number 10. At this point, for convenience and quick organization, you could decide to assign the same number of units, changing the tens, to similar places found in other rooms. To understand: the kitchen, as we have seen, contains places from number 1 to number 10, the living room will contain those from number 11 to number 20, the study from number 21 to number 30, and so on. You could decide that the living room door is place number 1 of the living room itself and that of the study is place number 1 precisely of the study, so that all the “number 1” 1, 11, 21, 31 are doors; similarly, all the number 5s (5, 15, 25, 35, etc.) will be windows. Suppose that my bathroom has no window: it is at this point that the artificial creation of places can come into play, since, instead of assigning number 35 to a subiectum different from the usual window, what I do is simply place an imaginary window. In the same way, if I need to increase the number of places, I can increase with imagination the rooms of my house; the only precaution to always keep in mind is to mentally review very often the fictitious subiecta, as Bruno suggests: ‘What prevents, in fact, the imagination from making the old subiecta disappear from here and replacing them with others built by itself? However, these are not possessed with the same ease with which they are formed; indeed, they must be applied to with thought, so much so as to make them so familiar that they do not differ in anything from the real ones.’"
These “atomic” places must be enlarged, expanded, increased in size until they become of the order of magnitude of the “more specific” subiecta, that is, those formed by four or five elements. This additional transformation, apparently senseless at first glance, needs clarification, since it has misled many scholars. In our hypothetical home, place number 3 was represented by the trash can (I hope I will be forgiven for using such a noble subiectum); if memory images were always small simple forms, there would never be any space problem; unfortunately, in the advanced practice, we will also encounter adjuncts of the following complexity:
“A bee weaves a carpet, dressed in rags, with chains on its feet. In the background, a woman reaching out her hands, riding on a many-headed hydra.”
Which, as you can well imagine, can hardly happen inside a bin measuring 30 long, 40 wide, and 50 centimeters high. Therefore, the places must be made “to the size of the scene,” so that each of them can contain a small memory picture, a mini-story. Nothing prevents the use of a switch, a flowerpot, a paper cutter, or an ashtray as places: the important thing is that they can serve as a stage, as containers for the image, and therefore be enlarged to the size of a room, or at least to such an extent that actions like the one just examined can be carried out easily within them.
- By Fabio Ferrucci, L’ARTE DELLA MEMORIA: Il trattato “De umbris idearum” rivisto dal noto esperto di scienza della memoria
Fabio Ferrucci, did his homework with the work of “giordano bruno”, but “bruno” uses this art for the work of remembering and thinking (art of llull), in his other works he develops the art even more, bruno can be said to be someone who took the “art of memory” to a high level and invites the practitioner to experiment and be creative.
Fabio Ferrucci, thought that Bruno only used art to remember words, but no, Bruno used it for other things and his other works prove it, Bruno only uses the memorization of words using alphabetical images when he cannot create a mental representation using the other methods.
Other writings speak of something mystical, if you read yates you will be more confused about the art of bruno, hahaha. The figures that bruno uses have no function other than as an index, if you want to know how to use those figures you should read llull.
If you understand Bruno’s work and the concepts used, you will understand the other works… In some works like image composition he uses only 24 places to store a large number of images and words.
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This was a very helpful excerpt. I’m thinking about how in an immersive video game, you might select and object and then it blows up and out, filling the whole screen with a scene or details. The description above of the trash bin reminded me of that.
I haven’t read anything by Lull yet. I’ll have to take a look!
Fludd very vehemently rejects imagined palaces. I personally have seen relatively few theatres, so I’m not sure what to do about that!
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A brief look into the arrangement of rooms and loci for the square art. Thanks to Magnus again for the great excerpt, as this opened up a door for me (so to speak!)
Each room has six parts: 4 walls, a floor and a ceiling. Each part has 5 parts. Looking at the wall, imagine dividing it into three equal columns. Then divide the first and last column into two rows.
Each of those parts is a (three door!) theatre. I am imagining it like there’s a painting in each part which I can enter.
Fludd stresses the importance of navigation order: start at the bottommost right row, then proceed upwards, the across to the top left row, then down, and finally the middle column. 30 little theatres in each room!
My first reaction to that is: if the theaters are all the same, as they apparently all have the same structure/arrangement, how would I be sure not to mix them up?
And, isn’t it boring to go through 30 similar theaters? It seems a superficial things but if my brain thinks something is boring I really have trouble to concentrate…
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No, they can’t be the same, they must have a difference that you can perceive as a completely different place and that you can easily walk through. If the place is artificial you must go over it until you can walk through it easily, it is simple with memory methods, colors, shapes, various images, symbols, etc. These places can be fantastic and you can use images on the internet as inspiration something that we have and they did not have.
Ramon Campayo uses semantic places that he can visualize and create a story around them, a tree, a tower, a bench, amusement park, etc. These semantic places you can create varied stories by adding variation or focusing on the part that would have or suggest a bank, this is very quick to do if you know what a bank is, money, security, cards, etc. Elaborations can be many.
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I think that it’s why don’t like virtual memory palaces so much. It seems so much work to spend time there making the places distinct and to give them a lived-in feeling, compared to just BE somewhere and just putting the thing you want to learn in it.
I’ve tried virtual memory palaces by drawing them myself, which works a lot better, but still the amount of effort to create a whole background which is going to give a special “flavor” to each station is disproportionate I feel. (I mean, I like to draw so it’s not wasted, it just takes a lot of time, compared to all the elements you just get by being in a real location first.) In comparison, adding virtual elements on real places feels effortless.
Maybe it’s because I’m not used to it or because I crave less time before a screen I don’t know.
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I do not know, I am used to expand, but it is a practice that adds up, I do not know, each person is different and may like one method more than another, although every method has its initial friction.
I struggle with this as well. Fludd is very clear in his position: the theatres and rooms have to be real places you’ve seen! See “chapter 6 in which we discuss the great error…of those who use purely imaginary memory-palaces.” I can’t imagine he’s seen hundreds of distinct theatres, though, so he must be using one or just a few.
As far as I’ve understood, the distinction is not found in the theatre but in the context, the “kick off” image and the scene. By context I mean which Zodiac, which has its own “kick off” image: “the idea or imaginative form of this art can be either Principal or secondary…the Principal is active in every principal word or particle of a section of any speech or sentence, eg the image of the Ram (Aries) will appear in the first Locus of the first circle.” Further, he advises placing the “essential image” either in the middle of the theatre or above or on the door in the theatre (which, in my mind, opens to a room of the Square art).
To simplify all that, I believe he proposes,
- use only real places
- differentiate them by external signs and context
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Maybe a theater can look quite different depending on the play that is being acted? Not the building itself, but I imagine you can have a different atmosphere…
Virtual palaces (or at least semi virtual) are something I definitely want to explore more, but well… so many projects, so little time.
I thought about virtual palaces a little. I don’t personally have much exposure to theaters but there are many available online at this point (360 degree tour of The Globe Theater, and many others). I’ve looked at a few.
It’s probably just me and my perspective, but I feel like a theater is a theater when used in the round and square art, as I’m imagining it so far. I mean: it’s a stage. There are 3 or 5 doors. There are columns and “meadows.” The theater itself is kind of the backdrop.
What you wrote about the “play being acted” is spot on, though. that’s the “context” I was referring to. He advises that you know many different historical narratives, and it’s these that I think differentiate the theaters, though physically they may well be the same.
As I wrote, Fludd emphasizes the importance of memorizing historical or mythical narratives and using them as loci. I’m personally not well-versed in such stories. However, I’ve got AI to support me! Today I asked an LLM to generate a 5-scene play based on Odin stealing the Mead of Inspiration that will work well in a Fludd-Round-Art context. Check out the result:
Reviewing the Mythology
I’m taking a deep breath to reflect on the mythological story of the Mead of Wisdom, featuring Kvasir and Odin’s theft from Gunnloth. On my mental whiteboard, I’ve divided the story into 5 parts:
- The Creation of the Mead: The origin of the Mead of Wisdom and its creation by the Dwarves.
- Kvasir’s Wisdom: Kvasir’s role in spreading wisdom and his eventual death at the hands of the giants.
- Odin’s Cunning: Odin’s plan to steal the Mead from Gunnloth, disguising himself as a beggar woman.
- The Theft: Odin’s successful theft of the Mead, cleverly convincing Gunnloth to part with it.
- Consequences and Legacy: The aftermath of Odin’s actions, including the impact on Kvasir’s legacy and the power of the Mead.
Play Structure
Here is a 5-scene play that captures the sequence of the story:
SCENE 1: The Creation of the Mead
In this scene, we see the Dwarves creating the Mead of Wisdom. The atmosphere is one of laborious craftsmanship, with the Dwarves toiling away to perfect their art. The Mead’s creation serves as a symbol of the power of knowledge and wisdom.
SCENE 2: Kvasir’s Wisdom
Kvasir appears on stage, sharing his wisdom with the people of the land. His words are like honey, dripping with sweetness and insight. The scene showcases Kvasir’s role in spreading knowledge and his popularity among the people.
SCENE 3: Odin’s Cunning
Odin, disguised as a beggar woman, approaches Gunnloth’s hall, seeking to acquire the Mead. Gunnloth, unaware of Odin’s true identity, is initially hesitant but eventually convinced by Odin’s clever words. This scene highlights Odin’s cunning and strategic thinking.
SCENE 4: The Theft
Odin successfully steals the Mead from Gunnloth, using his deception to get away with the precious liquid. The atmosphere in this scene is tense and suspenseful, capturing the excitement of the theft.
SCENE 5: Consequences and Legacy
In the final scene, we see the aftermath of Odin’s actions. Kvasir’s legacy is discussed, and the power of the Mead is showcased. This scene serves as a commentary on the consequences of stealing knowledge and the impact it has on future generations.
First prepare the land to be used. Sort the terrain in alphabetical or numerical order. Use every angle of the terrain to sow your seeds (images). Use images from general to specific such as a musician, doctor, boxer, farmer, blacksmith, etc. The general character will be in the center of the place and his specific objects will be placed throughout the terrain, preferably an interior place (CUBE), the other characters can use each other’s tools and all the tools can perform the actions of the others.
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