The art of memory and Freemasonry

Allegory from Marius D'Assigny's The Art of Memory (1699). It illustrates the wider memory tradition, not a Masonic ceremony.

The art of memory was a tradition of organising recollection through imagined places and images. Its relevance to early Freemasonry rests on an explicit reference in the second of The Schaw Statutes, issued in 1599, and on historical interpretations of that reference. The document establishes an interest in memory; the form of teaching intended remains uncertain.^[1]

The wider tradition

Classical writers described ways of associating material to be remembered with an ordered series of places, often imagined within a building. The technique served oratory and education. Medieval and Renaissance writers adapted it to other purposes, including religious reflection and schemes for arranging knowledge.^[1]

There was no single Renaissance system. Some methods remained practical aids to recollection, while writers such as Giulio Camillo and Giordano Bruno connected memory with philosophical or Hermetic ideas. A reference to memory therefore does not, by itself, establish the use of an occult system.^[1]

The Scottish evidence

The second Schaw statutes refer to the “airt of memorie and science yrof” in provisions concerning the Lodge of Kilwinning. This brief phrase is an administrative reference to knowledge and competence, not a surviving manual explaining a memory system.^[2]

Stevenson places the provision within the culture of James VI's court. William Fowler, secretary to Queen Anne, recorded an interest in the art of memory and its teaching to the king. Alexander Dickson, a Scottish writer associated with Bruno's ideas, also moved in court circles. William Schaw worked closely with Fowler in royal service.^[1]

These connections supply a possible context, rather than a documented chain of instruction. Stevenson acknowledges that no direct contact between Schaw and Dickson can be traced, while arguing that such contact was likely. His suggestion of Hermetic influence is an interpretation of the circumstances, not something stated in the statutes.^[1]

Limits of the evidence

Andrew Prescott describes the statutes as offering hints of Schaw's interest in contemporary philosophical developments.^[3] Neither that reference nor similarities between buildings, images and memory establish that later lodges preserved a complete system devised by Bruno or another named author. Stevenson himself notes the absence of evidence that later lodge members understood their practices in those terms.^[4]

References

↑ ^1.0 ^1.1 ^1.2 ^1.3 ^1.4 David Stevenson, The Origins of Freemasonry: Scotland's Century, 1590–1710 (Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 87–95.
↑ Gary L. Heinmiller (compiler), Schaw Statutes of 1598 and 1599 (2012), p. 8, transcription of the second statutes.
↑ Andrew Prescott, A History of British Freemasonry 1425–2000, Centre for Research into Freemasonry and Fraternalism, Working Paper 1, section “1583–1717”.
↑ Stevenson, Origins of Freemasonry, p. 214.