A great deal of magic is knowing things by heart. The ritual stops if you have to look up the name for the east; the pathworking thins if the image of the path will not come; a tarot card means nothing until its picture, its number and its sign rise together without effort. This lesson is about how that kind of knowing is built, and how to build it without drudgery.
The forgetting curve
In 1885 Hermann Ebbinghaus taught himself lists of nonsense syllables and tested how many he could recall after minutes, hours and days. The result was the forgetting curve: a steep fall at first — most of what is learned once is gone within a day or two — flattening afterwards. Two things changed its shape. Each review raised the curve and slowed its fall, and reviews spaced out over days did more than the same number crammed into an hour. Everything useful about learning by heart follows from those two findings.
Leitner's boxes
In 1972 the German science writer Sebastian Leitner turned the spacing into a box with compartments. A new card sits in the first; answer it right and it moves to the second, to be seen less often; right again, to the third; get it wrong and it goes back to the first. Cards you know drift to the back and come round rarely; cards you miss keep returning until they stop being missed. The Study Cards work this way: rate yourself honestly — missed, hard, good, easy — and the tool brings each card back about when you would otherwise forget it. Ten cards a day, kept up, beat a hundred on Sunday.
The art of memory
Long before the psychologists, the orators had a method. The legend, told by Cicero, has the poet Simonides step out of a banquet hall just before the roof fell, and afterwards name each crushed guest by remembering where they had sat. From that came the art of memory: choose a place you know — a house, a street — and set along it, in order, images for the things to be remembered, striking ones, strange or beautiful or absurd, because the mind keeps what surprises it. The anonymous Rhetorica ad Herennium of the first century BCE gives the rules in detail; Aquinas commended the art to preachers; and in the Renaissance it became something closer to magic in Giulio Camillo's memory theatre and Giordano Bruno's wheels of images, the story Frances Yates told in The Art of Memory (1966). Ramon Llull's turning wheels of the divine attributes, three centuries before Bruno, are in the Study Cards too.
Memory for magicians
The art of memory suits the correspondences almost too well, because the correspondences are places and images. Some ways to use it:
- Make the Tree of Life a house of ten rooms, and furnish each with its colour, planet and name; walk it from Malkuth up before sleep.
- Put the seven planets on the days of the week as seven people you meet in turn, each carrying their metal and wearing their colour.
- Learn the Hebrew letters on a walk you take often, one letter per landmark, its shape drawn in the air at each.
- For each tarot trump, find the one detail in the picture that no other card has, and let that be the hook.
The trainers in the tools — Lay the table in Correspondences, Learn the cards in the Tarot, Know the futhark in the Runes, Know the figures in Geomancy — are the places where this is tested by doing, which is the other half of memory: what you use, you keep.
A plan that lasts
- One deck at a time, and a small one first.
- Ten minutes a day, at the same hour; the Focus Trainer can hold the time.
- Review before sleep; the night consolidates.
- Rate yourself honestly. A card marked easy that you half knew will be gone in a week.
- Once a deck is known, stop drilling it and start using it — in a reading, a ritual, a talk. Return to the cards only when something slips.
Exercise
Choose one deck in the Study Cards and learn it over three weeks at ten cards a day, rating honestly. On the first day, also build a memory place for the same material — a room or a walk — and set your images. At the end of three weeks, test yourself both ways, and write which held better and where the two helped each other.