CAMILLO’S MEMORY THEATRE

Camillo constructed, out of wood, a “memory theatre” in which anything at all could be put, and which
in fact he did put an enormous amount of information, much of it written out on paper to be inserted in
specific places in it. Yates does not mention anything about tarot, but much of this work is lost and
known only through descriptions and his followers. There are several circumstantial connections to the
tarot in the work of his students. One is to Alessandro Citolini’s Tipocosmia, a work of encyclopedic
nature; it contains a list of games including tarocchi. The work was considered by many to have been
taken from Camillo’s writings.

Another student of Camillo’s was Girolomo Ruscelli, who wrote a book on Impresi that shows Camillo’s
influence. In relation to the tarot, he is more famous for a book he wrote on folk remedies that his group
in Naples had tested and found to be effective, a book that went into least 100 editions and was
translated into the major languages of Europe. For that book he used the pseudonym of Alexis
Piemontese, which happens to be the name of the man that Etteilla later claimed to have learned about
the tarot from, a descendant of the other.

Baptista Porta, mentioned by Schuchard as part of the “magical crew”, was a successor to Ruscelli in
Naples, establishing his own academy there in 1558, which discussed things both magical and what
today we would call scientific. Yates calls him “the famous magician and early scientist” (p. 205). His
most influential book was Magia naturalist, on correspondences between the upper and lower worlds; it
influenced both Campanella and Francis Bacon. There is nothing unorthodox in his treatise on memory,
Yates says.

Camillo constructs his theatre as seven rows of seats with seven seats in each. Here is Yates’ paragraph
on the general idea: Camillo’s job is to provide vivid images for each of the seats. For the Seferoth he has
no images; instead, he gives us the planetary gods, with the names of the eight lower seferoth on the
appropriate seats, starting with Binah/Saturn. Venus gets two seferoth, Hod and Netsah; this is his
departure from Pico, who had used only the lower seven seferoth, giving Netsah the planet Saturn.
There are also seven archangels, whom he lists by name. He does not deal with the two highest
seferoth; even Moses did not get beyond Binah, Camillo says. On the stage is the Trinity, from which all
things flow.

For the second row he imagines a gate with the word “Banquet”, i.e. Banquet of the Gods, on it; here
are seven more gods, including Vulcan, Juno, Cybele, and something that looks like “Elephant”. After
that comes seven “Hermetic Caves”, adapting Plato’s image in the Republic. These are combinations of
the four elements, Yates says. Then comes the “mind and soul of man”. Then man’s body. Then a row
called “the Sandals” of Mercury, which he put on when carrying out the commands of the gods. These
are “the operations that man can perform naturally”. The seventh row is that of Prometheus, “all the
arts, both noble and vile”.

Each of the outer rows in some way relates to the seven seats in front of it. And on each seat is a box
with many other subcategories, which Camillo wrote down. Although he never finished, it is this writing
of the outermost rows that was said to have been taken by Citolini. The outer rows would seem to relate
to the “Children of the Planets” series of illustrations from the previous century.
Besides the “theatre” in Venice, Camillo also constructed a copy in Paris for Henry II, in return for money
given him by Francis I. This was no mere encyclopedia. It had a “secret”. In memorizing the contents of
God’s world, and going from particulars to the ever more general, one also ascended the spheres into
the divine realm and so partook of some of God’s own powers, because according to the Corpus
Hermeticum and other authorities the means of man was divine. Camillo writes:

Here the “secret” is in the last line: knowledge of “all things, present, past, and future”, i.e. divination, of
such a nature that a king would like to have. Of course it is only the one who engages in the labor that
gets the reward.

It is only by actually memorizing the particulars and their ascent to the general that we can benefit from
the secret.