Myth as Mnemonics

Frances Yates, in her description of the anonymous writer of Ad Herennium, relates to us his memory palaces as such: "It is though, as a lawyer, he is forming a filing cabinet in memory of his cases. The image given is put as a label on the first place of the memory file on which the records about the accused of poisoning are kept. He wants to look up something about that case; he turns to the composite image in which a recorded, and behind that image on the following places he finds the rest of the case." Of course Yates is describing the author's strange image of recalling a case--a sickly man in bed, and next to him the defendant with a cup in his right hand, tablets in his left, and on his fourth finger, ram testicles. The way Yates describes it reminded me of a previous blog post I wrote which dealt with the danger in boxing things, that is the sorting of things so much it becomes meaningless to do so. I asked in that blog why humans feel a neverending urge to do this? It is easy to see from an evolutionary perspective why this is. it was a great advantage to our ancestors to split things up--it also agrees with what Cicero said about "sights" being the easiest things to remember, and Foer's comment that spacial memory is well developed in the human psyche. I think it would be a huge hassle and frustration on the human mind to perceive the planet without borders--if there were no counties, states, or nations, people might have a tougher time remembering where things are. Humans name everything. Our earliest memories seem to begin when speech emerges. By picking out objects and calling them things we can begin to make rational sense of the universe.

One could easily tie this in with Adam's naming of the animals in Eden. If anything that story is a history of consciousness, where the first man increasingly grew aware of the universe--first naming objects, then recognition of sex and nakedness, and then death and life. It's as if the world around him is materializing. The tree now exists because he has a name for it. So does the lion, the ox, woman, and even death. I suppose one could also take the entirety of myth as a mnemonic itself. Every story is didactic, powerful, and often recited during certain seasons or every three or five years. We can see this in Greece with the Greater Eleusinian mysteries. Often these tales remind the viewer of the planes of existence, of culture, of birth rites. Initiation enlightens the experiencer of the illusion of death, nature gods and goddesses remind of the cycles of the seasons and the folly of believing too much in the material universe, and Hero's journeys are an epic version of our lives told through metaphor. I could be wrong, but when I think of the ancients looking into the sky, I would like to believe they were seeing the memory of the universe, and this memory was echoed through everything, even their bodies. The organs in the body were tied to different celestial bodies and gods (Jung also believed the different archetypes were tied to the organs).



The thoughts in their minds were not their thoughts, but different deities/planets/organs waging war on each other, forming alliances, laughing. Olympus wasn't a real place, it existed in your mind. Jesus didn't actually rise up when he died, he went inward. Joseph Campbell says in "The Power of Myth,"

"If you read 'Jesus ascended to heaven' in terms of its metaphoric connotation, you see that he has gone inward--not into outer space but inward space, to the place from which all being comes, into the consciousness that is the source of all things, the kingdom of heaven within. The images are outward, but their reflection is inward. The point is that we should ascend with him by going inward. it is a metaphor of returning to the source, alpha and omega, of leaving the fixation of the body behind and going to the body's dynamic source."

In other words, these stories weren't to be taken as a historical texts but as images, as mnemonics, stories you could replay in your mind to remind you of certain things, usually pertaining to the meaning of life itself. This is why initiation during certain times of the year is so important. First it becomes a sacred act because that is how the 'universe' would remember them, but it also becomes a powerful memory for the individual. You now tie certain images to the setting you saw them, making the memories all the more powerful when you recall them later. It is interesting that so many myths deal with 'letting go of the material' because that is what causes the stress. It is also interesting that the 'memory palaces' we create is the same act God (or the gods) performed when He spoke the universe into existence--a grand act of imagination.

*The image was taken from "The Secret History of the World" by Mark Booth