Guilio Camillo's Memory Theater

Guilio Camillo lived during the sixteenth century and was famous for his ideas on the memory theater and esoteric wisdom. His theater was a literal structure which a person could stand inside and debate like Cicero or remember everything from the beginning of time. Of course the poor man died before his secrets could be revealed to the kings who financed him or even his theater finished. Thankfully, the scholar Francis Yates has made him relevant again. Here is a small depiction of his fabled structure:



The stage in the center, peering at the theater in all its hierarchy, is the 'role' we play in everyday life. Yes, that role changes, often it seems, depending on who we are interacting with, but we are always 'us', that inscrutable unit in a strikingly desolate world hostile to our existence. We perform the child role, the friend role, the lover role, the spouse role, the parent role--in fact it changes with whomever we are interacting. Sean Kane goes as far as calling it a sort of dance. I will cover this more as I delve further into his Wisdom of the Mythtellers, less to say he describes how when we talk to someone, we are constantly moving with them, mimicking their actions, and generally performing nonverbal communication. If we were to speed up the process in something like a recorded video it would look very much like the dance Kane describes. Hindus have a word for this mock play: 'lila'. It is thus appropriate that Camillo's memory palace would be a theater with the roles reversed--the one on stage instead staring at the bleachers before him as opposed to the sitters in the stands watching him.

"The solitary 'spectator' of the Theatre," Yates says in The Art of Memory, "stands where the stage would be and looks toward the auditorium, gazing at the images on the seven times seven gates on the seven rising stands" (135). Of course, seven is a sacred number in the esoteric tradition. It is the number of observable planets in the sky (sun and moon included, notice 'planets' and 'planes'), as well as the number of days God needed to create the universe. Solomon, in Proverbs, was said to have constructed his wisdom from seven pillars, and also in the tradition there were seven Sephiroth "of the celestial and inferior worlds, in which are contained the Ideas of all things both in the celestial and the inferior worlds" (Yates 137). It is also the number of Watchers who fell to Earth in the Book of Enoch (Booth 103).

The exterior world is reflected in the interior, thus our bodies are astral bodies, home to the gods/planes.

After death, it is said, we will travel through the heavens, passing the 'planes' as our ego is gradually shredded after each encounter with one of the great gods. However, we are also given a gift by each as the spirit (the air) continues upward. We are first led by Hermes and then Lucifer because he is the necessary evil, the one who gives us desire for something more. This story, according to Mark Booth, is related to us in the tale of Sleeping Beauty, with the six fairies giving their gifts but the seventh the curse of sleep--the last god we encounter on the journey skyward is Saturn/Satan, who is the spirit of materialism. He is the one who makes us forget our journey. "Because of this intervention by Satan," says Booth, "humans gradually lose any consciousness, and eventually any memory, of their time among the heavenly hierarchies: 'Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting'" (193). The Egyptians, when they mummified their pharaohs, were thus not preserving a body because they believed it would reawaken, but because it would draw the spirit back downward after its astral adventure. These tales of consciousness shredding are retold in many myths as the hero's journey. The only progression which man can achieve is through the desire of the ego. This ego must then undergo a transformation, or what Dr. Sexson would call a sort of alchemy. We, of course, experience this in everyday life. It is through the destruction of our narrative, our ego, our left brain's goals, that we can develop into something greater than our typical material hell permits us. Initiation was a representation of this process. It gave the experiencer a perceived death. Only when we confront our demise and realize that it is indeed an illusion that we can live in spiritual splendor. Francis Yates, in The Art of Memory, talks about how magicians in Egypt were said to be able to draw down the astral gods and enliven statues with their spirits. To the ancients this very well could be a realty because their perception of self, the ego, was so much different from our own.



As history progressed and Saturn began to win his material war in the West, the spiritual was under constant attack. It was driven into esoteric ideas, to magic, to hypnosis, and tales of far away lands populated with creatures of the imagination. As the creeping blackness drove out the Mother, she was the one thrown to the edges of the map. In Camillo's Theater, the gods were perceived as ideas which could be interconnected with everything else. Each gate is also a history of consciousness, ala the Cabala and Hermes Trismegistus. As you move up the stairs and pass through each sphere, you are nearing the inferior world of materialism. Neoplatonists believed that the world in which we live was vulgar compared to the higher planes of ideas. There is no perfect tree, only the idea of a tree can be inviolate. Thus, if you became so attuned with the esoteric lore of ideas, you could actually commune with the gods and angels.

It is important that Camillo made Apollo his central deity. He is the god of rationality, the one who can shine his rays and vivify the rest. He is the overcoming of ignorance which can happen so easily when you roam the material plane. His organ is the compassionate 'heart'--it makes sense he would put Jupiter's favorite son at the 'heart' of his theater. It is said that some structures, such as the obelisk, dome, or modern day crop circles, can alter the people who step within them. It could be said that is also the case for Camillo's Theater, where you could orate like Cicero and know the secrets of the universe simply by standing inside. It was the perfect receptacle for the spirit of the gods. They could come back down to earth like they did so long ago. That was the purpose of the Theater in my opinion. It echoed the universe so perfectly that one could fully comprehend it. The imagination, of course, is important in this conception. Without it none of it is possible. If the perfect memory palace inside could be reflected outside, as would happen inside Camillo's theater, it would be similar to staring into a mirror like the Kabbalistic God did when he created the cosmos.

"The microcosm can fully understand and fully remember the macrocosm, can hold it within his divine mens or memory" Yates says on page 148. If one can move to the center of the Theater in his mind, he can access the rest at his ease. The images can be in perfect recall and put him in harmony with the universe, with the creative God. This is why the story of the lion encountering Camillo is so important--the solar deity enlivens the rest. It can give meaning to one thing and not take away from the others. The theater was a huge talisman to draw in Apollo, the solar deity, so he could be communicated with like the Delphic oracles did in Greece.

Camillo was said to have been spared by the loose lion. It licked him and saw in him a brother--the lion is the sun, like C.S. Lewis knew so well. He is the animal of Apollo. Camillo was thus the perfect rational, magical being who could rise above the rest. Camillo's Theater is Apollo's astral filing cabinet which a magician can access. Some see it as a precursor to the hypertextuality of the Modern world. There is no perfect book or story which can mean everything, so it must reference others--or all the others in Camillo's case.