RENAISSANCE MEMORY1: THE MEMORY THEATRE OF GIULIO CAMILLO



The story of Giulio Camillo, the 16 century . fast-talking monk who got the attention of Francis I long enough to have the French king underwrite his project to construct a 'theater' capable of giving the 'user' access to any thought whatsoever , a real case of phantom memory , is covered by Lou Beery Winneker in her admirable dissertation, which includes a translation of Camillo's book (probably the only 'theater' he intended to construct) with a commentary covering Camillo's interest in Kaballa. Whatever happened to the wooden structure that some claimed to have seen is a mystery. Could it have been the prize theft of the count Goethe visits in Sicily?
The important things to remember are that Camillo was a reader of Hebrew and a student of the Kaballa and its theory of the soul; Camillo was smart enough not to give away any secrets to the unprepared; Camillo was more than just aware of the story of Simonides and the invention of artificial memory, and as well meaning as she was, nearly everything Francis Yates wrote on this subject is misleading.

The problem is: what is the 'design' of Giulio Camillo's theater of memory and WHY?

Camillo's idea was to reverse the theater's division of auditorium and stage. The 'audience' of this theater is the sole occupant and mnemonic user, who gazes into the seats of the auditorium, where the gods and other beings of Greek mythology are arranged in a 7x7 matrix of rows and columns. 7 is a 'number of completion' in the sense that it is 6+1. Six is an aloquot number (1x2x3 = 1+2+3) and 1 is the 'wild card' that plays an important role in the first row.
The theater auditorium is generated from the 'primary elements' represented by the planetary gods on the bottom. As the rows build to the top, the universe is take through its successive stages of development, until the final top row represents the 'human results' of the process.

What is this banquet? What is its relationship to the user/mnemonicist? How is meditation 'enacted' inside the theater? Connections to the Kabbala, Gnosticism, and Catholic heresy complicates the situation.
The issue is not the reconstruction of a possible/actual historical artifact, but the re-thinking of the whole matter of the relationship of space, imagination, and memory. In this, theory and theater are reunited. A return to the chiastic magic of the Simonides story shows that matters no less important than life and death, visible and invisible, are involved. Camillo's 7x7 contribution is one piece of the puzzle.
One possibility is that the architectural theater actually 'existed', even if only in plan. The 7x7 grid mapped the 'night sky' view of the rings, read as planets. Like the real planets, the rings revolved at their own rate, possibly regulated by internal gears. The user would have had to descend into the theater to reach the stage, creating a katabasis that, at the terminus, combines high and low. This combinatorial machine would have related directly to the wheels within wheels that Llull, the late-Medieval mystic and inventor of an elaborate memory system taught at the University of Paris until the 1600s. Llullism was considered to be a magic practice and eventually forbidden by the Inquisition. In Camillo's design, Llull was reconfigured as Kaballa and prefugured as a combinatorial calculus anticipating Napier and Leibnitz.

Camillo uses the section line between auditorium and stage to create a gap that locates the place of the objet petit a — the small object of desire that, as jouissance, creates the memory that is not one's personal memory but a 'true speech' (vera narratio). Vico would articulate this same idea two hundred years later in terms of a 'scholarly universal' (Verene) to be discovered by the modern mentality looking back on a human history constructed of the layers of gods, heroes, and ordinary mankind.
The congruence of Vico's and Camillo's project and their 'simultaneous' placement of memory at the point of the (un-symbolizable) bodily experience of pleasure orients both projects by means of the bolagram.