I'm delighted to announce that my translation of Giordano Bruno's
On the Shadows of the Ideas is now available in paperback. This is Bruno's first major publication on the Art of Memory, or as he puts it: "an art of investigating, discovering, judging, ordering, and applying, set forth for the purpose of inner writing, and not for vulgar operations of memory." Aspiring mentats in training might want to give this a good solid look, and of course it's also a primary source for magical images -- Bruno was a mage as well as a mnemonist, and wove Renaissance astrological magic all through his work. Here's the blurb:
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LOST SECRETS OF THE ART OF MEMORY
One of the forgotten traditions of Western occultism, the Art of Memory was a set of disciplines dating from ancient times that enabled the scholars and mages of the Renaissance to upgrade their own brains, storing vast amounts of data in their own memories. In 1592, Giordano Bruno, the greatest master of the Art of Memory, published the secrets of his advanced version of the Art in an enigmatic Latin text. Now noted occult scholar John Michael Greer has translated the entire text of "On the Shadows of the Ideas", and provided it with an introduction, detailed notes, examples of Bruno's memory images, and a detailed guide to practical work with his system.
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Interested? You can get a copy
here. (Yes, this is through Amazon; the publisher, Azoth Press, mostly focuses on fine editions and uses Amazon's print-on-demand service for paperback copies once the fine editions have sold out.)
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