From Tony Buzan to angelic hierarchies

 When I was at school in the 1970s there was a program on the BBC for pupils called "Use Your Head" with Tony Buzan. It was about how to improve your memory and learning skills and went beyond the "write the same thing down 100 times" type of technique. Buzan gave more interesting and fun memory techniques. I bought the book:

I did use the techniques in the book and it did help me learn. And I got interested in memory techniques.

Decades later I bought a book by Frances Yates...

Frances Yates University College London 1924

 ..."The Art of Memory":

(Yates confessed that she was not interested in learning and using the memory techniques, which I found strange)

I cannot remember exactly why I bought the book, but it got me interested in Giordano Bruno.  

On the 17th of February 1600 Bruno was killed by the Catholic Church because of his beliefs.  Killed because of his beliefs.

He certainly had some (what we would consider now) strange beliefs, as well as some prescient ones. Wikipedia will tell you all about it

But this book led me to another book by Yates, "Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition":

Before getting to Bruno though, Yates talks about a huge dating error that scholars made during the Renaissance in Italy. How certain "Egyptian" "magical" texts were thought to have been written after the biblical Abraham and before the Greek philosophers. In fact they were composed, collected, invented, forged in about 300 AD.

Pico di Mirandola...

 

...was an early Renaissance magician. And I kept thinking "Why is Mirandola a familar name to me?" Then I remembered that I had a job many years ago in Concordia...

...and Mirandola was nearby...

 (The job was very interesting, AutoCAD and lighting calculations. But it was a long way away from my home. And before Internet so I used to send floppy disks by post to the client. O happy days before Facebook and Instagram)

And one of Pico's honorific titles was "something della Concordia", something about peace and a pun on the nearby town, I can't find the quote at the moment.

During the Renaissance there was a lot of interest in Egyptian, Hermetic, Caballistic magic, and the promoters had a hard time squaring it with Christian dogma, though they tried.

(About dogma. I heard an amazing conversation between a husband and wife. The husband expressed some doubt about a Catholic dogma, essentially saying: "Who can really know?" And the wife replied angrily; "It is a dogma! You have no choice, you must believe it!" How on earth can anyone be forced to believe something? This is the essential idiocy of dogmatic religions. Dare I say it? If you are a person with a poor brain and unable to think well then the church will solve this problem for you by telling you what to think.)

 Anyway. I read about the hierarchies of angels spirits and planets in the book, and that rang a bell which connected me to my favourite track in Lucrezia Borgia's Daughter:

The text of the song is:

Angeli, archangeli, throni et dominationes,
principatus et potestates, virtutes coelorum,
cherubim atque seraphim,
patriarche et prophete, sancti legis doctores,
apostoli, omnes Christi martyres,
sancti confessores, virgines domini, anachoritae:
Sanctique omnes, intercedite pro nobis.

Angels, archangels, thrones and dominions,
principalities and powers, celestial virtues,
cherubim and also seraphim,
patriarchs and prophets, holy doctors of the law,
apostles, all martyrs for Christ,
holy confessors, virgins of the Lord, and holy hermits:
And all ye saints, intercede for us.

 These hierarchies though are not completely Christian and seem come from interpretations of the universe as understood by Hermetic magic:

 

Robert Fludd's representation of angelic hierarchies.

 I'll enjoy that track even more now that I know there is as much Hermetic magic in it as Christianity.

And the point of all this is Owen? No point, I just found it an interesting chain of connections.