disparate nodes in the early days of what we now call the Internet was, in fact, derived from Ramon Lull, the thirteenth-century designer of artificial memory systems.4 Giordano Bruno’s De umbris idearum (Shadows) is a perfect and oft-cited example of the memory system as a kind of virtual library of information; information, in Bruno’s case, of an extremely esoteric, hermetic nature. As a neo-Platonist, Bruno believed in the existence of a higher, ideal level of being beyond the elemental world of appearances, a divine unity to which men could aspire and, through magic, achieve. Bruno’s philosophy represented the Gnostic aspiration towards transcendence from the material world of becoming to the immaterial world of being. His system was a vast inventory, a compendium of all available knowledge, ranging from base elements to the supercelestial world beyond the stars, figured as a series of concentric wheels. Bruno assumed that the “astral forces which govern the outer world also operated within the mind, and could therefore be reproduced or captured there to operate a magicalmechanical memory” (Yates, 1996, 221). His memory system is, in Erik Davis’ words, the “trigger-signal that catalyzes anamnesis, the soul’s recollection of its celestial origins” (Davis, 1994, 47). Bruno’s belief in the system rested on the notion that through simulating the power of astral forces from within the mind, universal knowledge of the entire history of humankind would be attained. Bruno’s representation of the mind as a complex, highly organized space of taxonomic knowledge, driven by a combination of magic and mechanics, indicated the transitional view of the world he held. This world orientation was a combination of the medieval animistic (magical) cosmology and the mechanistic (mathematical) view of the universe that emerged out of the Renaissance (Yates, 1964, 450). For Bruno, his memory system was designed for nothing less than to reproduce that world-view within his psyche. For a hermeticist this is, indeed, the mystic philosopher’s stone, the transcendent achievement of divine unity. To the postmodern sensibility, Bruno’s system looks like intelligence augmentation, by any 4 On the ancestral importance of Lullism in the history of the computer, see Nigel Pennick, Magical Alphabets (York Beach: Samuel Weiser, Inc., 1992) and Erik Davis, “Techgnosis, Magic, Memory, and the Angels of Information,” in Mark Dery, ed., Flame Wars: The Discourse of Cyberculture (Durham: Duke University Press, 1994), p.33.
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