![]() From the Middle Ages onwards, we find the idea of crafting the soul with imagination and symbolism appearing in poetry, painting and architecture.Īs the historian Frances Yates puts it, this idea is the key to so much of the greatest western culture. His genius, it was said, united the arts of philosophy, poetry and painting, because he painted the soul with poetic images, in a way that ethical philosophers would find useful as a means of character-building. Now, you recall that the ‘mind palace’ technique is first associated with a poet, Simonides. ![]() For a Renaissance magi like Giordano Bruno or Ramon Lull, meanwhile, the ‘mind palace’ is both a memory-technique and an occult method for connecting the soul to God (Frances Yates' The Art Of Memory is a useful resource for this). This technique and the metaphor of the mansion passes into Christian mysticism, where its most beautiful expression is St Teresa’s Interior Castle, in which the reader moves through seven mansions before meeting the Lord and uniting with Him in ecstasy. But we can develop an ‘active imagination’, learn how to dream consciously, as it were, using visualization. ![]() Sometimes that alchemy happens passively and involuntarily, as in dreams (I don’t know about you, but I often find myself wandering through a dream-city in my sleep). Ibn Arabi, following Averroes and Aristotle, sees the imagination as a spiritualizing faculty which converts the memory of sensory data into ideas and symbols. This method is passed down into the medieval tradition of Kabbalah - the Zohar, for example, is a visualized journey through the seven palaces of heaven and the seven palaces of hell.Ī similar method appears in Sufi visualizations, in the mystical treatises of Ibn Arabi and others, who picture heaven as a garden with seven courtyards. There’s a whole body of Jewish mystical literature from the first century AD (when the Jerusalem Temple was destroyed by the Roman Army), called hekhalot or mansions, in which the mystic imagines an inner temple, and journeys through seven mansions until they come to the throne-room, the deepest part of the soul. We need Jesus to repair our wonky mansions.Īround this time, Jewish mystics begin to use the metaphor of a journey through mansions as a form of occult visualization. But attempts at DIY are not sufficient, says Augustine. ![]() We need to repair the mansion and tidy it up to make it an abode fit for its maker once again. In his memory-journey, Augustine goes back generations to Adam’s original fall, when humans were expelled from the Edenic central courtyard of the mansion. It’s ruined, locked up, covered with cobwebs, filled with trash, crawling with vermin. We need to seek the Lord in our minds and memories, which is not easy, because He is transcendent to our human imagining.Īnd our soul-mansion is not in great shape, in Augustine’s imagination. But this could lead to pride - we are the lords of our self-made mansions, we are the masters of interior design! But St Augustine warns us not to be proud - we didn’t make the mansion, we’re a guest in our own souls. Man is the curator of his soul-mansion, which he fills with priceless images. This is a wonderful description of the mind-palace as used by Greek orators (Augustine was trained as an orator). I come to the fields and spacious palaces of my memory, where are the treasures of innumerable images, brought into it from things perceived by the senses.When I enter there, I require what I will to be brought forth, and something instantly comes others must be longer sought after, which are fetched, as it were, out of some inner receptacle others rush out in troops, and while one thing is desired and required, they start forth, as if to say, "Is it perchance I?" These I drive away with the hand of my heart, from the face of my remembrance until what I wish for is unveiled, and appears in sight, out of its secret place. In Book X of his Confessions, which I think is one of the most beautiful things in all western culture, he writes this - it makes me think of Morpheus and Neo in their white room: ‘Enlarge it, that you may enter it.’ He is connecting, of course, the Greek tradition of soul-as-mansion with the beautiful image of Jesus: ‘In my father’s house are many mansions’ (John 14:2).įor Augustine, the interior journey into memory is central to this expansion of the soul-mansion. ‘Narrow is the mansion of my soul, oh Lord’, he declares. St Augustine, who’d studied the mind-palace memory technique when he was an orator, develops the mystic metaphor of the soul as mansion in his Confessions.
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