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aissance Magus wanted to find an occult parenthood between the various items of the furniture of the world, he had to assume a very flexible notion of resemblance. |
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To show examples of flexible criteria of resemblance, let me quote, not the most radical occult and Hermetic theories, but rather some instances of a very reasonable semiotic technique, the one recommended by the authors of the arts of memory. Those authors were neither Kabbalists nor sorcerers summoning spirits. They simply wanted to build systems for remembering a series of ideas, objects, or names through another series of names, objects, or images of objects. Other authors (Rossi 1960; Yates 1966) have studied and described the complex constructions of loci, that is, of real architectural, sculptural, and pictorial structures that those theorists built in order to provide a systematic plane of expression for the contents to be memorized, signified, and recalled. It is clear, however, that these mnemotechnic apparatuses were something more than a practical device for remembering notions: it is not by chance or for decorative purposes that the systems of loci frequently assume the form of a Theater of the World or emulate cosmological models. They aim at representing an organic imago mundi, an image of a world which is the result of a divine textual strategy. Thus, to be semiotically efficient, they reproduce the presumed tangle of signatures on which the Universe as a significant Whole is based. As Ramus (1581) had remarked, memory, is the shadow of the order (of the dispositio), and order is the syntax of the universe. |
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But even though an ars memoriae was conceived as a mere practical device, it had in any case to find recognizable links between a given image and the thing to be evoked. In order to establish such a relationship it was advisable to follow the same criteria that held for the interpretation of cosmic analogies. In this sense these artes tell us something about various socially and culturally established semiotic rules. |
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It suffices to leaf through the Idea del Theatro of the most audacious among the authors of memory treatises, Giulio Camillo Delminio (1567), to see how freely the most varied rhetorical practices come to be grouped together beneath the rubric of similarity. Even in a rapid reading of several chapters, one finds the following: |
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similarity of morphological traits: the centaur for horse racing, the sphere for astrology; |
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similarity of action: two fighting serpents for the military arts; |
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metonymy for historical or mythological contiguity: Vulcan for the arts of fire; |
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