contents - AMORC

The spatial arrangement of visual images in an architectural setting, in this case between
the separate pillars, allowed an accurate recall of all those images at a later time.
laboriously scraped clean after short-term uses
so that something else could be written on the
same sheet.
Still, limits on material resources tend to
bring out the more resourceful qualities of human
nature. With few ways to replace or supplement
memory, the educated looked instead for ways to
amplify it, to learn how to use its strengths and
work around its weaknesses. In the process, they
made use of one of the most remarkable facets
of medieval and Renaissance culture: the Art of
Memory.
34
The Origins of the Art
The ancient Greek poet Simonides of Keos (556-
468 BCE), according to legend, invented the Art
of Memory when he was hired to recite
verses at a banquet. In the usual fashion
of the time, he started off with a few lines
in honour of the gods, in this case Castor
and Pollux, before settling down to the
serious business of praising his host. The
host, piqued at this diversion of flattery, gave
Simonides half the amount agreed upon and
told him he could get the rest from the deities
he had praised.
Shortly thereafter, a servant came up to
Simonides and told him that two young men on
horseback had come to the door, asking for him.
The poet went outside but no one was there.
As he stood looking around in puzzlement the
roof of the banquet hall collapsed behind him,
crushing the arrogant host and all his dinner
guests. Castor and Pollux, traditionally pictured
The Rosicrucian Beacon -- September 2006
as two young horsemen, had indeed
paid their half of the fee.
Such stories were
commonplace in ancient Greek
literature, but this one has an
unexpected moral. When the bodies
of the dead were recovered, the story
continues, they were so mangled
that not even the victims’ families
could work out who was who.
Simonides found, however, that he
could picture the banquet hall in his
mind’s eye and remember the order
in which the guests had been sitting.
This allowed him to identify the
dead, and as he pondered his ability
for memorisation, it gave him the
key to the Art of Memory.
That key is the use of visual
images in an ordered, spatial arrangement. Human
memory recalls concrete images far more easily
than abstract ideas, and it remembers an ordered
chain of associations more accurately than a
random assortment. Just as Simonides could
remember the guests at the ill-fated banquet by
picturing them in the setting of the banquet hall,
masters of the Art of Memory in the centuries
that followed turned the information they
wished to remember into striking visual images
and arranged them against fixed architectural
backgrounds in order to memorise them quickly
and effectively.
These methods, which became part of
the standard training for orators and scholars
He could picture the banquet hall in his
mind’s eye and remember the order in
which the guests had been sitting.
in ancient Greece and Rome, spread widely
and reached dizzying levels of efficiency. It’s
recorded of one famous practitioner, the Roman
orator Hortensius, that he sat through a daylong
auction and then recounted from memory
the item, purchaser and price for every sale of
the day.
Textbooks of rhetoric generally included
a discussion of the Art of Memory and it was
by way of several of these books that the Art
survived the collapse of the Roman Empire.
During the Middle Ages, these techniques