Imagination · “Feel It Real”
The Round Art
Build a vivid inner architecture — a ‘theatre’ of ordered places — and store what you want to remember as striking images set within it, so knowledge can be filed and retrieved by walking the imagined space.
Build a distinct, ordered inner building — Fludd’s “theatre” of imagined places. For each thing to remember, make one vivid, moving image and set it clearly in its place. To recall, walk the places in their fixed order. Rehearse the walk. (The method of loci is genuinely well-supported for memory; Fludd’s claim that the theatre attunes the soul to the order of the heavens is the Hermetic tradition’s.)
What it is
In the Utriusque Cosmi Historia (1617-21) Fludd devotes a treatise to the ars memoriae — the classical art of memory — and sets out what he calls a “round art” (ars rotunda), as against the merely “square” art of ordinary rooms.
The durable, well-evidenced practice underneath is the method of loci: you store what you want to remember as vivid images placed in an ordered series of imagined places, then retrieve them by walking the sequence in the mind.
Fludd’s distinctive contributions are (a) a strong preference for wholly imagined architecture — a built “theatre” or amphitheatre of the mind rather than a copy of a real house — and (b) the Hermetic frame that the trained inner space, properly ordered, comes to mirror the order of the heavens, so that remembering and attuning the soul are one work.
Read honestly, the working tool is the loci method; the cosmic mirroring is the tradition’s metaphysics, recovered for modern readers above all by the historian Frances Yates.
The Method
Faithful to Fludd’s account of the round art and the classical loci it builds on:
- Build the theatre. Construct, in imagination, a definite building or series of places — Fludd favours a roofed theatre / amphitheatre with distinct stations rather than a remembered real room. Make it your own ordered space, not a borrowed one.
- Make each place distinct. Give every station its own clear character, size, and light so the places never blur into one another. Confusable loci is the cardinal failure of the art.
- Fix the order. Number or route the places so you can move through them in one fixed, repeatable path. Order is what makes the store retrievable rather than merely full.
- Form a striking image for each thing. For every item to be remembered, make one vivid, active, unusual picture. As in the whole tradition, dull and static images vanish; strange, moving, emotionally charged ones hold.
- Set each image in its place. Position the image clearly within its station, set off against the background so its detail is not lost.
- Walk the theatre to recall. To retrieve, move through the places in their fixed order; each place yields up its image, and the image yields its content.
- Rehearse the walk. Return regularly to the inner building; the architecture and its images strengthen with practice and decay without it. (Sourcing note: the round/imagined “theatre” preference and the ars-memoriae treatise are Fludd’s; the distinct-places, fixed-order, striking-image, and daily-walk steps are the faithful practical reading of the classical loci method he is teaching.)
Source & Lineage
From the memory treatise within the macrocosm volume of Utriusque Cosmi Historia (Oppenheim, de Bry, 1617-21), where Fludd distinguishes the ars rotunda from the ars quadrata. He inherits the classical art of memory (Simonides, the Ad Herennium, the medieval mnemonic tradition) and the Renaissance Hermetic version developed by Camillo’s memory theatre and by Giordano Bruno.
Frances Yates’s The Art of Memory (1966) reconstructs Fludd’s round art and its disputed link to a real theatre.
Common refinements
Bland images. Ordinary, static pictures do not hold. Make them strange, vivid, moving.
- Confusable places. If stations look alike they bleed together — give each its own clear character.
- No fixed order. Without a repeatable route you can store but not reliably retrieve.
- No rehearsal. The theatre fades; walk it regularly.
- Mistaking the metaphysics for the method. You need not accept Fludd’s cosmic-mirror claim to use the loci — the memory effect stands on its own.