The Art of Memory and the Deck as a Memory Palace

Why a deck is a system of images at all

A tarot deck is a system of images. That sounds obvious. It is not obvious. A system of images is a very specific thing, and it has a name in the history of ideas, and that name is the art of memory.

Tarot art of memory is the reading that explains why the deck works the way it does. Not what the cards mean. Not what the correspondences are. Why a deck, and not a list, and not a book of text, is the right form for the thing the deck is doing.

This is a question that most tarot books do not ask. They assume the deck is a deck, and they explain the cards. The art of memory asks one step back: why do the cards exist as images at all, and why are they arranged in a sequence, and why does the sequence matter?

What the art of memory is

The art of memory, in the Latin tradition, is the ars memoriae. It is a system for holding a large amount of information in the mind by placing images in locations. The system is attributed, in its classical form, to Simonides of Ceos, and it is described in Cicero's De Oratore and in Quintilian's Institutio Oratoria. The mechanism is simple: the mind remembers images far more easily than it remembers words, and it remembers images in a place far more easily than it remembers them in the abstract.

Frances Yates, in The Art of Memory (1966), traced this system from the Greek orators through the Middle Ages to the Renaissance. The key claim is that the art of memory was not a trick. It was a technology. It was the way that a pre-printed culture held large bodies of knowledge in trained minds, and it was the way that the Renaissance made the leap from the individual memory to the shared, public, image-based culture of the printed book.

The University of Chicago Press, which publishes Yates's work, describes the book as the first to relate the art of memory to the history of culture as a whole. That is the claim that matters here. The art of memory is not a footnote in the history of rhetoric. It is the structural precondition of the image culture that the tarot deck belongs to.

Giordano Bruno and the wheels

Giordano Bruno, the Dominican monk who was tried and burned for his beliefs in 1600, was the most radical practitioner of the art of memory in the Renaissance. The Wikipedia entry on the art of memory notes that Bruno used a variation of the art in which the trained memory was based in some fashion upon the zodiac.

Bruno's system, as reconstructed by Yates and by the Warburg Institute, was a set of nested wheels. The innermost wheel held the zodiacal signs. The next wheel held the elements. The outer wheels held the figures, the attributes, the actions, the circumstances. The system worked by combination: a position on one wheel combined with a position on another wheel produced an image, and the image carried the knowledge.

The Warburg Institute's reconstruction gives a concrete example. In Bruno's De Umbris Idearum, the first mnemonic work published in Paris in 1582, the wheels carry letters, and the letters combine to form syllables. The combination of a letter from one wheel with a letter from another produces an image. The image is the memory. The image is the knowledge. The image is the unit of storage in the system.

This is structurally identical to a tarot deck. The deck is a set of nested categories, the trumps and the suits, the court cards and the pip cards. A position in the deck, a card in a position, is a combination. The card carries the knowledge. The deck is the wheel.

Giulio Camillo and the theatre

Before Bruno, Giulio Camillo built the memory theatre, a three-dimensional structure of images arranged in a room. The theatre had five walls, and on each wall were images arranged in a grid, and the grid was the system. The practitioner did not walk through the theatre. The theatre was the mind, and the images were the contents of the mind, arranged in a structure that the mind could navigate.

Yates, in The Art of Memory, devotes two chapters to Camillo's theatre. The key claim is that Camillo's theatre was not a building. It was a model of the mind. The theatre was the mind made visible, and the images on the walls were the contents of the mind made visible.

The tarot deck is a memory theatre that has been flattened into a plane. The deck is the theatre, and the cards are the images on the walls. The reading is the navigation of the theatre, the movement through the images, the retrieval of the knowledge.

The deck as a memory palace

The standard memory palace is a building. The practitioner walks through the building, and at each location there is an image, and the image carries a piece of information. The deck is a memory palace that is not a building. It is a sequence. The practitioner walks through the sequence, and at each position there is an image, and the image carries a piece of information.

The difference is that the building is static and the sequence is dynamic. The building is a place you go to. The sequence is a place you move through. The deck, as a sequence, is a memory palace in motion. It is the memory palace that has been unrolled into a line, and the line is the order of the cards.

This is why the order of the cards matters. In a memory palace, the order of the locations is the order of the information. If you change the order, you change the information. In a deck, the order of the cards is the order of the knowledge. If you change the order, you change the knowledge.

Why this is not a historical claim

The honest limitation is that no tarot maker in the fifteenth or sixteenth century was building a memory palace. The Visconti-Sforza deck was a card game. The Marseille pattern was a card game. The Golden Dawn was a ritual system. None of them were practicing the art of memory in the way that Simonides or Bruno did.

The connection is a structural one, not a historical one. The deck is a system of images in a sequence, and the art of memory is a system of images in a location. The two systems are structurally isomorphic. They are different instantiations of the same underlying technology: the storage of knowledge in the mind by means of ordered images.

Why the sequence matters more than the image

A single image is a memory. A sequence of images is a story. The art of memory, in its full form, is not a system of images. It is a system of images in a sequence. The sequence is the order of the locations, and the order of the locations is the order of the retrieval.

This is why the order of the tarot deck is not arbitrary. The Fool before the Magus, the Magus before the High Priestess, the High Priestess before the Empress, the Empress before the Lovers. The order is the order of the memory. The deck is the memory palace, and the order of the cards is the order of the walk through the palace.

When a reader changes the order, they are not shuffling a list. They are walking through the palace in a different order, and the different order produces a different memory. The reading is the memory. The reading is the walk. The reading is the order.

This is the tarot art of memory reading in its fullest form. It is not a reading about what the cards mean. It is a reading about why the cards are in that order, and why the order is the meaning.

What the tarot art of memory reading gives a reader

The practical payoff is a way to think about a reading that goes beyond the meaning of the individual cards. A reading is a walk through the deck. The positions are the locations. The cards are the images. And the meaning of the reading is not the sum of the meanings of the cards, but the order of the images in the locations.

This is the reading that the art of memory gives you. It is the reading that says: the deck is not a list of things that mean things. The deck is a machine for holding things in the mind, and the reading is the machine running.

The sources for this are the same as the sources for the art of memory itself. Frances Yates, The Art of Memory (1966), University of Chicago Press. The Warburg Institute's reconstruction of Bruno's wheels (warburg.sas.ac.uk). The Wikipedia entry on the art of memory (en.wikipedia.org).

For the deck as a correspondence system, see the companion article on the Golden Dawn correspondences. Golden Dawn Tarot Correspondences Explained For the Fool and the zero position, see the tzimtzum article. Tzimtzum and the Fool: A Card for the Withdrawal of Light

The deck is not a list. The deck is a machine. The art of memory is the name of the machine. Read the deck as a machine, and the reading works.