In our final installment of the Tarot & Tesseracts Creative Season, Margot breaks down some mind-bending magical theory. Grab a cup of tea…
Research Journal of Margot Takada
February 18
I was at Germaine’s last night for my Wednesday lessons, and of course I told him about the Freaky Light Web. He’s probably the only person I can tell. Maybe Ev, but I’m not quite ready to test that theory. We probably need to hang out a couple more times before I reveal just how strange the skeletons in my closet are.
Germaine, true to form, didn’t even blink as I described actual lines of light streaming out of my tarot cards. But he was surprised when I told him this only happened after doing Hinton’s higher-dimensional exercises. Since he was the one who turned me on to Hinton in the first place, I’m guessing he was a little put out that he hadn’t made the discovery himself.
At any rate, we decided to ditch my normal lessons so Germaine could tell me about mnemonic devices. And we’re not talking the grade school variety. You know the kind—Please Excuse My Dear Aunt Sally. I can’t even remember what that stood for. Something to do with math?
Anyhow, according to Germaine, a true mnemonic device is far more powerful than a memory tool, though it is related to memory.
Let me back up.
First things first: Giordano Bruno. Back in the Italian Renaissance, Bruno developed the concept of a memory palace to help him retain large amounts of information.
Let’s say you’re giving a long-ass lecture at Oxford, and you don’t want to read off a stack of notes. (Because if you’re Bruno, you’d rather spend your energy antagonizing the Oxford scholars in attendance, accusing them of being stodgy old farts, stuck in the intellectual past. Smooth move, Bruno.)
You might associate the first part of your speech to a statue in your memory palace’s entryway and the second part to a table in the dining room. Then, when it’s time to give the speech, you mentally walk through the rooms of your palace, retrieving information in sequence, sort of like an imaginary teleprompter.
One of the (many) things that got Bruno in trouble with the Church was his suggestion that the memory palace wasn’t entirely imaginary.
To be clear, it wasn’t a physical place in the way we think of chairs and tables as physical, but Bruno came to believe that you could actually travel to your memory palace. Further, he claimed that your personal memory palace was linked to other people’s memory palaces, and also the memory palace of the cosmos—maybe even god’s. (Gee, I can’t imagine why the Church had it out for him.) The trained initiate could piggyback from their personal memory palace to…well, just about anywhere, including the divine realms.
Here’s the part that really lights up my circuit boards: Bruno never fully explained how the memory palace could be non-material, yet still a place you could physically travel to. At least, not in any of his surviving works.
What I can’t help thinking about is a possible connection to my buddy Charles Howard Hinton. What if Bruno’s memory palace is a physical place, but it exists on a higher dimension than we’re accustomed to perceiving? It’s like having a fourth-dimensional tesseract sitting in your living room, but all you can see from your limited 3D point of view is a boring ol’ cube.
Maybe the memory palace is right there—we just can’t see it. Unless, that is, we train our minds using something like Hinton’s perceptual exercises.
This brings me to Germaine’s mnemonic device, and interestingly enough, it overlaps with that Twin Flames website I found. After the essay on synchronicity, there was another one on sympathetic magic.
Here’s a quote:
“If psyche and matter participate in a shared field, then material objects are not dead props. They are condensations of relationship. They occupy positions within that field—positions that encode time, physical coordinates, meaning, and other data.”
The essay suggests this is a possible mechanism for sympathetic magic. If you want to affect the field over at Point Z, you can use an object that energetically matches that point. Even though you’re stuck at Point A, this energetic link allows you to affect far-off Point Z.
What Germaine says is with the proper ritual technology (which he sure as hell better teach me) and a mnemonic device, you can do more than affect Point Z‚ you can travel to it. All without taking a single step in ordinary physical reality.
As soon as I learn how, journal, you’ll be the first to know. Assuming I make it back. (Just kidding. Sort of.)
If you’ve enjoyed nerding out with me and Margot, my forthcoming novel The Magician & the Labyrinth of Yesterdays is full of metaphysical mysteries—along with a haunted film set, tarot cards that refuse to behave, and a swoony, spicy romance.
I’m nearing the revision finish line, slowly but surely, and aiming for an early summer release.
To be the first to know, hop on my list. You’ll also get free chapters from the first book, The Fool & the Threads of Time, if you haven’t read it yet!
